“I’m just trying to be everybody’s booster shot”: John Waters on “Liarmouth,” London, and more
Even though Liarmouth is his first novel, John Waters doesn’t think that the experience of writing it is any more difficult than writing movies, even though he’s been doing the latter for over fifty years. “You just have to go in that room and make it up,” he says.
But he insists that moving from the screen to the page offers something unique: “you can go into the inner feeling of a character way more than you can in a movie, as opposed to in a movie where you have to either show it or say it.
In a novel, you can talk about why everybody asks the way they do, which is what interests me the most about any characterization.” The connection between page and screen is clear in Liarmouth, and when we spoke, Waters even said that he could imagine Liarmouth becoming a movie.
From jump, Liarmouth is vintage Waters, telling the story of Marsha Sprinkle: a repressed, compulsive liar who steals luggage from airport arrivals, collaborating with Daryl, the gateway driver who’s obsessed with her, taking as payment the promise that, once a year, the two of them will get to fuck.
