And in a novel I got to go deeper in describing characters’ feelings. It was nothing different I just want to make people laugh at things they are surprised to laugh at. What did you hope to do with a novel that you couldn’t do with film? So that whole lie turned into a kind of a conveyor belt of scenes that inspired me. So I had Ricki Lake have roaches in her hair in Hairspray. She quit the show, and a rumor started that she died from having roaches in her hair that came and bit her, and she had to come back on the air to prove it wasn’t true. She was about four foot eight, and her hairdo was, like, three feet high. There was a girl named Pixie who I really liked. When I was a child, I remember hearing two rumors that everyone believed: that Annette Funicello the Mousketeers had been beheaded in a car accident, and it was totally not true, and one about a girl that was on The Buddy Deane Show, which is the dance show I based Hairspray on. That’s probably the meanest thing she does in the book, is to tell children that their idol, something terrible happened to them. I don’t know what Freud would say about lying.Īt one point, she tells a kid the Jonas Brothers died.

If you lie to somebody creatively, it causes anarchy, and maybe that means she’s the only person in control. She believes in random acts of meanness every day.

She finds that lying makes her prettier and smarter and gives her power. Liarmouth’s protagonist, Marsha Sprinkle, gets off on lying. “I think readers enjoy spending time with someone so monstrous every once in a while.” “I had a wonderful time thinking her up,” he tells Rolling Stone. Now, the mustachioed misfit is taking on the concept of truth itself with his first novel, Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance, about a compulsive liar named Marsha Sprinkle. They said, ‘How did you avoid getting canceled?'”įor nearly 60 years, Waters has violated the boundaries of good taste with satirical films like Hairspray and Pink Flamingos (recently rereleased by the Criterion Collection in honor of its 50th anniversary), and incisive books that take a closer look at America’s grimy underbelly. “I was explaining all this, and the audience starts laughing harder and harder. “I thought, ‘I did smoke, I’m 76 - I guess it is a fair question,'” he says on a call from his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. But at a recent audience Q&A when someone asked him, “How did you avoid getting cancer?” he was flummoxed. Filmmaker John Waters, the proud “Pope of Trash,” is no stranger to weird questions.

The john waters collection