John Waters’ essential reading list: “Here’s a page-turner”
Known for his boundary-pushing works of art, like the cult classic Pink Flamingos and the satirical take on racial segregation, Hairspray, John Waters is one of cinema’s most beloved figures – even if the mere mention of one of his films is enough to make a certain subsection of people shudder.
Waters’ films are everything that conservative America hates – boldly spotlighting drag queens and sexual experimentalism, cinematic terrorists and antisocial behaviour. His fanbase, however, are those who have always felt as though they exist on the margins of society – those who identify with being an outsider – and those with a penchant for transgressive cinema. Waters might have faced censorship and harsh criticism during his career, but he’ll always have his dedicated fans, many of which appear to have been plucked straight from one of his films.
If Waters ever decided to run a book club, there’s a strong chance that his cult followers would read anything he suggested. In his book Role Models, Waters even posed the concept of a ‘Hate Book Club’ to discuss the most strange and unsavoury novels on offer. The tome also presents readers with a list of five essential books he recommends, which range from stories featuring child killers to chilling hidden secrets.
The first book on his reading list is In Youth Is Pleasure by Denton Welch, the artist and writer who William S Burroughs once claimed to be his ultimate inspiration. Unsurprising, then, he has also found a fan in Waters, who believes that “there is no better novel in the world” than the aforementioned Welch title, released in 1945. “Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger,” the filmmaker writes. The novel explores a 15-year-old boy’s coming-of-age during a summer in which he holidays with his widowed father and brothers.
“Have the secret yearnings of childhood sexuality and the wild excitement of the first stirrings of perversity ever been so eloquently described as in this novel?” While Waters admits that “Denton Welch isn’t for everybody,” he can’t help but love the drama and perhaps relatability of the story, which has certainly inspired his own interest in the taboo.
Perhaps the best-known book on Waters’ list is We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, which was adapted into a film by Lynne Ramsay in 2011. “Here’s a page-turner from the Devil’s Reading List about a child all parents pray they never have,” Waters explains. He admits that the book “could bring any parent sobbing to his (or her) knees, “ although he believes it is still “very easy to like.”
We Need To Talk About Kevin explores a mother’s struggle to come to terms with her son’s criminality, having murdered seven of his classmates. It’s a complex novel, but one that Waters calls “a new kind of love story for the criminally insane.”
The rest of Waters’ recommendations are by female authors, starting with The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead. Released in 1940, Waters claims that “no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing.” Describing it as a book about “rage in adults,” the filmmaker declares his love of the bleak novel, which explores difficult family dynamics, including a rather violent marriage.
“Two Serious Ladies made a serious reader out of me, and if you give it a chance, it will do the same for you,” Waters writes of Jane Bowles’ novel, which he outlines as a “parallel tale of a pair of ferociously eccentric women who search for crackpot adventures and some sort of cockeyed inner peace.” Waters is a huge fan of the book, even once stating that it is “the best novel ever written.”
Finally, the various works of Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose books were classed by Susan Sontag as “camp,” make the list. We shouldn’t be shocked that Waters is a fan, picking out Darkness and Day as the best starting point. The novel explores the reunion of a man and his goddaughter and her husband, although some uncomfortable truths soon emerge. Waters warns readers that you might find yourself “bored” at times, “but as soon as you realise you aren’t concentrating, not paying enough attention, BANG! A great line will hit you right between the eyes and give you the intellectual shivers.”
John Waters’ essential reading list:
- In Youth Is Pleasure – Denton Welch
- We Need To Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver
- The Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead
- Two Serious Ladies – Jane Bowles
- Darkness and Day – Ivy Compton-Burnett
