“We belong to a kind of club, a lunatic periphery proud to band together. There is a very joyous path to misfortune out there and, if you allow me to be your guru, I will teach you how to triumph in insanity until you take control of your low self-esteem ”, writes Waters, and invites us to follow his instructions in this kind of manual queer for the good life. As he had already demonstrated in My Role Models and Carsick, the Trash Pontiff has a great ability to make the unpleasant coexist with the sophisticated, and the deviant find his own form of realization. There are entire chapters here dedicated to how to develop a taste in music, how to build a brutally ugly modern house, how to confess love without involving affective responsibilities, and how to behave on airplanes or in spa towns, accompanied by a handful of writings on crucial issues. of his career: the passage from Baltimore to Hollywood, dealing with the stars of his films and the big movie studios, and the back room of filming and premieres.

But the teachings of this book do not draw only on past experiences. To educate us on the effects of LSD in the elderly, Waters undergoes his first psychedelic trip after decades without use. He also throws himself into the future, aided by his exuberant imagination and his mania for perfectionism, to design every aspect of his own funeral: from the purchase of a plot in a cemetery where he can share eternity with his friends to the details of his funeral attire. With the wisdom of the one who lived to tell it, Advice from a Know-it-All can be read as a living testament, the definitive legacy of a filmmaker determined to incorporate the proudly unsuccessful into a vision of the world that is at once anarchic and intoxicating.