Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black - Cookie Mueller

 

I believe that my lovely wife got infatuated with Cookie Mueller after see the Nan Goldin film a couple of weeks ago and so she picked up a couple of books on and by her. This one is a collection of her writings and while Cookie had (she passed away in 1989) a wildly crazy life, she was also quite intelligent and an excellent writer - highly descriptive and informative while still being extremely compelling.

Coming of age in the 1960's, Mueller travels the country, including a stint in the San Francisco Haight area where, in a day or so, she encounters Jimi Hendrix, the Manson Family, Anton Lavey, does multiple drugs, gets kidnapped and raped and much more! Her lifestyle choices were not always the safest, including hitch-hiking with other like-minded and wildly dressed women in questionable areas, which led to another kidnapping! 

Of course, her time with John Waters is one reason why she is reasonably well known and, also of course, her tales of those movies are as wacky as the films themselves, including her mother's reaction to her and her son appearing in one and her getting fucked by a decapitated chicken and Divine eating dogshit in another.

From there, she tells of her ever-evolving life and travels, and then adds some fiction and some columns that she wrote for various magazines. Her personal stories are the most fascinating parts of the book, by far - some of the fiction is entertaining, albeit a bit esoteric, and the advice column, while actually giving some sound advice, isn't all that interesting to me other than as a time capsule piece - other than the fact that some of her homeopathic solutions are still used to this day.

Again, the writing itself is always fun, entertaining and well done, but the advice columns weren't that intriguing to me, personally, in this day'n'age. But, the book is well worth it for her personal stories. Recommended!