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No one knows more about everything�especially everything rude, clever, and offensively compelling�than John Waters. The man in the pencil-thin mustache, auteur of the transgressive movie classics Pink Flamingos, Polyester, the original Hairspray, Cry-Baby, and A Dirty Shame, is one of the world�s great sophisticates, and in Mr. Know-It-All he serves it up raw: how to fail upward in Hollywood; how to develop musical taste from Nervous Norvus to Maria Callas; how to build a home so ugly and trendy that no one but you would dare live in it; more important, how to tell someone you love them without emotional risk; and yes, how to cheat death itself. Through it all, Waters swears by one undeniable truth: �Whatever you might have heard, there is absolutely no downside to being famous. None at all.� Studded with cameos of Waters�s stars, from Divine and Mink Stole to Johnny Depp, Kathleen Turner, Patricia Hearst, and Tracey Ullman, and illustrated with unseen photos from Waters�s personal collection, Mr. Know-It-All is Waters�s most hypnotically readable, upsetting, revelatory book�another instant Waters classic. �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.� �Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post �Carsick becomes a portrait not just of America�s desolate freeway nodes�though they�re brilliantly evoked�but of American fame itself.� �Lawrence Osborne, The New York Times Book Review