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Cookie Mueller occupies that odd niche in U.S. popular culture in which cult fame is enhanced by mainstream obscurity. Lauded in the New York gay underground art scene for her subversive fiction, idiosyncratic art reviews, and life-as-performance personality, Mueller, who died of AIDS in 1989, did everything from appear in John Waters's Multiple Maniacs as Divine's daughter to writing a weekly surrealistic, drug-induced advice column in the East Village Other. Still, hardly anyone knows who she is. Ask Dr. Mueller collects most of her prose and showcases her vision and style, which are as original as they are smart, and her all-out assault on propriety and decency is both witty and refreshing. Even in death, Mueller manages to shock and entertain us, and, with the publication of this book, may finally find the fame she deserves.
From Library Journal
Mueller (1949-89) was a writer, underground actress, and world vagabond. Having come of age in the late Sixties, she did drugs, cruised the New York City art scene, and bummed rides. This compilation of Mueller's semiautobiographical essays, columns, and fiction begins with nine previously unpublished pieces and includes stories from an earlier collection, Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black (Autonomedia, 1990). There are also excerpts from a humorous, unorthodox medical-advice column that Mueller fabricated for readers of the East Village Eye and reprints of an anecdotal column she wrote as an art commentator for Details magazine. Her unabashed reflections reveal her to be a talented social critic made wise by her subcultural life. Her stories are amusing, unpretentious, and sometimes lewd, providing insight into a risky, bygone lifestyle that the more adventurous baby-boomers will recall with nostalgia. Recommended for all general collections.?Carol A. McAllister, Coll. of William & Mary Lib., Williamsburg, Va.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
