Does life feel too predictable? Why not let some wildness in | Eva Wiseman

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Reboot your sense of adventure with Cookie Mueller’s stories about her extraordinary life

, a newly reissued collection of her stories, she recalls the day her mother read the script that contained this chicken scene: she was midway through shooting the filmby John Waters and he was due by to pick her up any minute. “‘ART?!?!?!” her mother screamed, trying to stop her leaving the house. “ART!?!?! THIS ISN’T ART!!” Waters later described her as “a writer, a mother, an outlaw, an actress, a fashion designer, a go-go dancer, a witch-doctor, an art-hag and above all a goddess.

I’m reading her stories now for the third time; the first time, some years ago, ignited a gentle obsession. The second upset me. In her, she wrote that those dying of Aids, as she would later that year, 1989, were, “people who hated and scorned pettiness, intolerance, bigotry, mediocrity, ugliness and spiritual myopia; the blindness that makes life hollow and insipid was unacceptable. They tried to make us see.

Maybe it’s the effect of all these years at home in a pandemic, all this time looking out of the window on to streets empty but for an Ocado van, all this time alone, maybe it’s personal – the yearnings of a woman entering middle age wearing Uggs in the suburbs – but today the idea of adventure, of an adventurous life, seems particularly important and seductive.

Through the 1970s, Mueller took her baby on her adventures – though they weren’t necessarily adventures to her, they were just a way of moving through life – to beaches, Berlin, someone’s house in the countryside that she accidentally burned down. I held my breath during the mothery parts, which on this reading, with two children under my tight belt, felt breathtakingly transgressive.

It’s a good time to read about freedom. Part of me itches to live the way Mueller did, colliding with expectations of how a woman should be, always hitching rides, high, to the next good place. But more of me is just grateful that she documented it for us, us mothers and others who have got caught in safety nets and chosen paths of least resistance, recording her too-fast life with its dangers and hilarity and the night she was accidentally locked in a Chinese restaurant.

 

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