Role Models - Tapa dura

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 Leviathan, or 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

Disarmingly unfiltered confessions that capture Waters' singular blend of weirdness and guileless honesty. --San Francisco Chronicle

From the incomparable John Waters, renowned cult film director, artist and writer, Role Models is a paean to the power of subversive inspiration that will delight, amuse, enrich and happily horrify readers everywhere. A self-portrait told through intimate and literary profiles of his favourite personalities which range from the famous to the unknown John Waters invites readers to appreciate some of the figures who helped him form his own brand of neurotic happiness. Among many others, Role Models features Waters musings on Johnny Mathis, Comme Des Garcons founder Rei Kawakubo, actress Patty McCormack, writers Tennessee Williams, Lionel Shriver and Ivy Compton-Burnett, insane martyr Saint Catherine of Siena, English novelist Denton Welch, ex-Manson follower Leslie van Houten, lesbian stripper Zorro, artist Cy Twombly and outsider pornographers Bobby Garcia and David Hurles. From the sublime to the extreme, Role Models is a personal invitation into one of the most unique, perverse and hilarious artistic minds of our time.