Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published April 1997]
Cookie Mueller: Ask Dr Mueller
Chris Mitchell
This is one book you can judge by the cover. It shows
a home snapped portrait of Cookie Mueller laughing,
her head thrown back and her hand out against the
wall for support. Ask Dr Mueller is 300 pages of that
laughter, gathered together from over 25 years worth
of her writing about a life that was wild, weird but, so
it would seem, frequently wonderful. Cookie is best
known for her appearances alongside Divine in the
films of maverick director John Waters. However, as
Waters writes in his introduction, she had many sides:
“a writer, a mother, an outlaw, a fashion designer, a
go-go dancer, a witch-doctor, an art-hag and above all,
a goddess.” Forever on the move, Cookie’s writings
show her restless enthusiasm for everything from art
criticism to travelling to being an agony aunt.
Throughout her life, she stumbled into the most
bizarre situations; everything from burning down
a friend’s house by accident, being abducted on
Highway 31 and fucking chickens for the sake of
art. (If that doesn’t make you want to read the book,
nothing will). Yet while she certainly led what most
would consider a hellraising lifestyle, there’s no
BUY Cookie Mueller books online from and
self-obsessed myth making in Cookie’s writings.
She discusses taking truckloads of drugs in 1960s
Haight-Ashbury with the same humorous detachment
that she catalogues a day of domestic disasters.
The overwhelming impression is that Cookie lived
life to the full and everything within it interested her.
Most of all, she could equally convey those mad and
mundane moments’ importance on the page, turning
the deeply personal from mere autobiography into
a kind of art. If a writer’s job is to look at what we
all take for granted and bring back something of its
magic, then Cookie deserved a huge payrise.
Her death from AIDS in 1989, seven weeks after her
husband died of the same cause, brought an abrupt halt
to the stream of stories, reflections, advice and ideas
collected here. Most books which feature collections
of writers’ published and unpublished work are usually
just picking over the dead bones of what’s left, like the
posthumous Bruce Chatwin industry. Ask Dr Mueller,
however, goes in the opposite direction – it brings together
between two covers a hilarious and fascinating
collage of one woman’s journey through life.
354
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