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"