EDGEWISE - A PICTURE OF COOKIE MUELLER
CHLOÉ GRIFFIN
Griffin flows together the voices of almost 90 people--including John Waters, Mink Stole, Lynne Tillman, and Max Mueller--into a book-length river of recollection aimed at capturing Cookie, who died in 1989, a major force in the downtown art scene; a phenomenon, as Gary Indiana puts it in Edgewise, "like a woman in flames [...] something like I'd never seen before in my life."--Earnest Jarrett "The Brooklyn Rail "
To the people who knew her personally, whose voices tell her story in artist Chloe Griffin kaleidoscopio new oral-history tome, Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller (B_Books), she played even more myriad and fascinating roles. For the first time, through Griffin's book, we see Cookie as her friends and lovers saw her: as inspiration, protector, dancer, instigator, drug dealer, wild card, criminal, life of the party, goddess, mental patient, hostess, confidante, artist, mother, savior.
Griffin tells Cookie's story by deftly weaving together interviews and insterspersing them with excerpts from Cookie's books and diaries so that her own voice gets into the mix. Though the chorus of remembrances can contradict each other or become repetitive, that's part of the point; there's no one truth to Cookie's life.--Emily Gould "Interview "
In the pages of EDGEWISE, a labour of love of some eighty years, Griffin collected the memories of the people who knew Cookie best, compiling a sensitive and thrilling oral history that captures her life from her childhood in suburban Maryland, through the wild times with John Walters, Divine, Sue Lowe, Mink Stole, the others in Baltimore, to the times in Provincetown, where she lived with her son, Maz, and her lover of many years, Sharon Niesp.--Pati Hertling "BOMB Magazine "
