Ask Dr. Mueller: The Writings of Cookie Mueller (High Risk Books)

Ask Dr. Mueller captures the glamour and grittiness of Cookie Mueller's life and times. Here are previously unpublished stories - wacky as they are enlightening - along with favorites from Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black and other publications. Also, the best of Cookie's art columns from Details magazine, and the funniest of her advice columns from the East Village Eye, on everything from homeopathic medicine to how to cut your cocaine with a healthy substance. This collection is as much autobiography as it is a map of downtown New York in the early '80s - that moment before Bright Lights, Big City, before the art world exploded, before New York changed into a yuppie metropolis, while it still had a glimmer of bohemian life.

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.