'Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black' by Cookie Mueller
'Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black' by Cookie Mueller
A story collection that makes Julia Fox's memoir look like an episode of Sesame Street.—Review #236
The title of this book bothers me. Why is ‘through’ lowercase?! It’s so jarring and unsettling. I mean, look at it.
Here’s the book’s cover:
I checked the internet, and apparently it depends on which copy-editing style guide you’re following whether you’d lowercase ‘through’ in a book’s title. Chicago style is up, because the word is longer than five letters. AP style is down, because it’s a preposition. My preference (and Donna’s) would have been ‘Through,’ to look neat and clean. But ‘Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black’—a collection of personal essays, fictional short stories, health columns and art criticism by Cookie Mueller—is hardly neat and clean. It’s a beautifully written and fascinating book, but I nearly had an anxiety attack reading it. Perhaps that lowercase ‘through’ is actually an artistic choice, a nod to the often-disquieting and not-for-every-reader stories inside (consider yourself warned). If that’s the case, then I’d have to admit the maddening-to-me title style is:
I’m taking a break from short-book summer this week because I need to tackle my TBR pile to make room for new books. Mueller’s collection had been on it for years; so long, I forgot how I learned about it (probably Twitter) and where I bought it. Maybe it was at Three Lives? It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that here’s another gem I’m kicking myself for not reading sooner. I suppose my delay was due to having had only a vague notion of who Mueller was. I dimly recalled that she was an actress in a few John Waters films, including ‘Pink Flamingos’ and ‘Female Trouble,’ neither of which I’ve seen. I think this GIF is from ‘Female Trouble,’ and I’m pretty sure that’s her on the right:
Her collection is grouped roughly chronologically and by type. It begins with several sections of personal essays about growing up in Baltimore, moving to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to hang with hippies, linking up with Waters in Baltimore and also in Provincetown, Mass., moving to New York and joining the art scene, and finding love in Italy. There also is a section of short fiction, and another that includes excerpts from her health columns for the East Village Eye and her art columns for Details magazine, among other work. It all shows that Mueller was a tremendous writer across several genres who had a knack for using brevity and brio to tell a hell of a story that will make you go:
A few months ago, I reviewed ‘Down the Drain’ by Julia Fox calling it ‘the most intense and wild memoir ever.’ I was wrong. Mueller’s life was way more intense and wild; her devil-may-care attitude and relentless optimism alchemized into a brand of joie de vivre that squares might call a death wish. Many times, in my mind, I heard myself saying, ‘Cookie, please don’t.’ Like, Cookie, please don’t go into the woods with two dudes to summon a demon; Cookie, please don’t hitchhike from Baltimore to Orlando because you heard someone there had cocaine; Cookie, please don’t get into the car with those sketchy meathead rapists; Cookie, please don’t accidentally burn down your friends’ house; Cookie, please don’t say things like ‘I don’t use drugs … only narcotics’; Cookie, please don’t get on the back of that stranger’s motorcycle in Naples. She recounts surviving multiple sexual assaults, being kidnapped, almost becoming a human sacrifice, and the agonizing birth of her son, among many other harrowing experiences. I kept thinking of that scene in ‘Ghost’ where Whoopi Goldberg says:
But if she listened to me, there wouldn’t be any stories to tell, and all of them are riveting. I also enjoyed her fiction. I hung on every word of a story about a man obsessed with a celebrity that’s told through letters and phone calls. Meanwhile, another story about a guy with a freaky fetish almost made me hurl on the subway, but I couldn’t turn away. I’m not going to tell you any more because thinking about it makes me:
I also enjoyed seeing elements of one story reappear in another of a different genre. For example, a plot point about a phallic-focused art restoration job in a work of fiction also shows up in an art column. And her homemade saline-injection remedy she used to save a man from a heroin overdose at his own birthday party was repeated in her ‘Ask Dr. Mueller’ column for the East Village Eye, where she responded to reader questions. Much of her advice seemed dubious, especially her guidance about AIDS, the disease that would kill her at 40 in 1989, that involved taking vitamins and distrusting medical authorities. But this was also advice that recalled the intense fear and confusion about AIDS then. I didn’t love all of her art criticism, but her haunting story about Jean-Michel Basquiat stood out. She recalls seeing him at his own party, looking sullen before he left early, and riffs on the burdens of genius and being an art star. Eventually:
Even though it gave me anxiety, I loved ‘Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black.’ I couldn’t put it down. It’s more than 400 pages long, but Mueller’s writing is crisp and fast—she describes her style as being for those with a short attention span—and I flew through it. I glimpsed a speed of life I could never maintain and a world foreign to mine. In fact, the only points of overlap I can think of seem to be that she gave birth to her son, Max, in the same Cape Cod hospital where I got my left middle finger stitched up after trying to open a pack of cold cuts like a ninja, and that I believe I almost hit John Waters with my car on Second Avenue and Houston Street in Manhattan. He looked right at me; it freaked me out—it would have been my fault. But it’s definitely my fault for not reading this amazing collection sooner. If you’re looking for a book to shake you up, you should definitely check it out.
An opening excerpt:
I had two lovers and I wasn’t ashamed. The first was Jack. He was seventeen and I was fifteen. The skin of his face was so taut over protruding bones that I feared for his head, the same sympathetic fear one has for the safety of an egg.
He wore his black hair all greased up with pieces spiraling down into his languid eyes. Jack owned only black clothes, and he wore his cigarettes in the rolled-up sleeves of his black T-shirts, showing off his solid pecs, which were big for a skinny person.
Once I visited him in the hospital; he had infectious hepatitis and sclerosis of the liver, resulting from his four-year bout with alcoholism.
He didn’t look too good in there, all yellow in a murky blue private room.
His visitors had to wear hospital gowns and surgical gloves, also masks over their noses and mouths, which really frustrated him because everyone looked so morose, and sinister without smiles.
My nose and lips were the first nose and lips he had seen in two weeks … after his mother left I whipped off not only my mask and gown, but my pants, and hopped into the hospital bed with him. I wasn’t afraid. I’d been as intimate as I could be right up until the time he got sick, but I kept my rubber gloves on anyway.
My rating:
‘Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black’ by Cookie Mueller was published by Semiotext(e) in 2022. 430 pages. $16.69 at Bookshop.org.
What’s next:
Next week, we’ll host a discussion thread. The following week’s newsletter will feature the book you chose in last week’s poll:
Before you go:
ICYMI: Review #235
Read this: This summer has been so hot and disgusting that I almost forgot I love scarves. Isabel Slone’s Freak Palace newsletter about beautiful Hermès neckwear made me yearn for brisk autumn breezes.
Read this, too: Check out Rosalynn Tyo’s newsletter about things people leave in books. I love when I’m browsing second-hand bookstores and I find a book with an inscription, or a book plate or interesting marginalia, but I really love when some piece of ephemera falls out. It’s a treat to find that in my own books as well. Recently, a football card I collected in middle school fell out of a book I hadn’t looked at in forever. Another book, which is part of my Walter Lippmann collection that I’m thinking of selling, had a bookmark from Avenue Victor Hugo Books. I had forgotten all about that place, which used to be on Newbury Street in Boston, but now exists only online. The bookmark brought back good memories.
If you enjoyed this review:
Thanks for reading, and thanks especially to Donna for editing this newsletter!
Until next time,
Mike
YES! THIS BOOK RULES!!!
Oh interesting!! I’ll have to save it for after down the drain otherwise Fox’s shock factor might not be the same hahah