Role Models

 

“Waters is a greater national treasure than 90 percent of the people who are given Kennedy Center Honors each December. Unlike those gray eminences of the show-business establishment, Waters doesn't kowtow to the received wisdom, he flips it the bird . . . [Waters] has the ability to show humanity at its most ridiculous and make that funny rather than repellent. To quote his linear ancestor W.C. Fields: It’s a gift.”—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

“If Waters began his career by seeking to infuriate, he now has mellowed to a place of gleeful tweaking. ‘Role Models’ is charming and chatty . . .  it also reveals the making of a unique American artist through his influences. When he calls for people to make him a cult leader of filth—having left trash behind for becoming too acceptable—it’s hard for any outsider not to want to follow along.”—Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times

“What is exhilarating about Waters is that he’s not kidding, that he’s the reporter, comedian and poet-in-chief of a fantasy cult which thinks ‘there’s only one way to die—spontaneous combustion. The unexplained phenomenon of being so guilty and happy, so obsessed, so driven and so fanatical that you just burst into flames for no apparent reason on the street.’ He remains one of our most necessary fellow Americans.”—Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News

“Apart from its consistently engaging voice, both casual and eloquent . . . what makes Role Models more than just the latest expression of a great American oddball is its appearance at a time when nearly every segment of society (hipsters, meet Tea Partiers) feels justified in dehumanizing anyone they deem as the other. Waters never does that, even to the truly abhorrent. This man who never sought respectability may have become the most affectionate and radical humanist in American letters.”—Charles Taylor, Barnes & Noble Review

“How did somebody from a quiet Baltimore neighborhood grow up to become the outlandish, brilliant, and insane John Waters? Two words: Johnny Mathis.”—Augusten Burroughs, author of Running with Scissors

“A delirious descent into Waters World, Role Models is a true-life confessional from one of America’s greatest ironists. John Waters is a man always ready and willing to say the unsayable. He is the dark mirror of contemporary culture. From haute couture to low culture, from literary outsiders to lapsed actors, he delivers razor-sharp pen portraits of the women and men who have perverted and inspired him by turns. And yet Waters’s warped imagination is always humane, his judgments insightful. Role Models is as much a philosophical manifesto as it is an utterly hilarious and shamelessly entertaining read.”—Philip Hoare, author of The Whale

“John Waters has a great gift for appreciation—whether for toothless lesbian strippers in Baltimore or the most rarefied painters and writers of our day. He is a dandy who has done away with everyone else’s hierarchies and created a new world that conforms only to his own taste for trash and the sublime. He is frank, funny, and (strangely enough) both sensible and outrageous.”—Edmund White, author of City Boy