Ask Dr. Mueller.

Nan Goldin's much reprinted portrait of Cookie Mueller in her coffin is moving precisely because it represents not just a personal loss, but the unthinkable stilling of a bundle of crazed iconic energy. Mueller, who died of AIDS in 1989, had many careers - actress, journalist, fiction writer, topless dancer, art critic, model - but she was first and foremost one of John Waters' most resonant ex-Superstars. A supporting player in his great psycho-hippie films Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, Mueller played with the wacked, snarly, demoralized image that he constructed for her throughout her professional life. Her famous health advice column "Ask Dr. Mueller," which ran in the downtown New York newsweekly East Village Eye in the early '80s, functioned entirely because of the incongruous and heady premise that someone with her resume could be an expert on medical matters. Mueller's writing in the column and elsewhere had an edgy unkemptness that radiated the mellow afterburn of a once explosive personality. But if Mueller's prose was essentially and self-consciously a souvenir of her legend, enjoyment of it wasn't dependent on direct knowledge of her underground film career. It was easy to savor the prose, with its tricky grace and perfect eye for wayward detail, even if you kind of wondered how someone so curiously gifted ever became famous in the first place.

Ask Dr. Mueller, which constitutes a kind of "selected writings," has a dollop of her advice columns, a smattering of the loose-jointed art criticism she wrote for Details in the late '80s, and a number of memoirlike pieces detailing her experiences on and around Waters' movie sets. All of them are lovely, wicked, and yet strangely feckless things. Had she lived longer Mueller could easily have had a David Sedaris- or Pamela Des Barres-like career as a quirky, beloved chronicler of American culture. She was always possessed by the task at hand, and wildly impatient with the rigors of objectivity. Even when her stories were rambling, stoned-seeming, rather familiar recountings of personal misadventures of the "then I got loaded, then I got lost, then I ran into so-and-so" variety, she had a remarkable ability to ingratiate herself with the reader. Her biographical sketches of Divine, Edith Massey, and Waters are so economical that they read like laid-back poems. At her worst, the pieces are just laziness prettily billowed by a cool wit. At her best, which is most of the time, she gives gonzo journalism a tender surface that feels like a reinvention. The only constant is her voice, at once carefree and weirdly tight-lipped, idealistic to the core, but with a dense subcurrent of irony that transmits intelligence without ever outweighing the laconic sweetness of her tone.

The strongest parts of this mostly terrific book are Mueller's nonautobiographical writings, especially the short stories "Brenda Losing," "The One Percent," and the brilliant near-novella "Fan Mail, Frank Letters, and Crank Calls," which combines the formal inventiveness of postpunk meta-fictionalists like Darius James and Harold Jaffe with the kooky charm of an MTV videojock. Mueller could have been a hell of an experimental novelist if she'd felt the urge and/or had the time. Still, unlike that of most writers who die young, Mueller's collection is neither a mishmash of promising odds and ends, nor a tragic document masquerading as a literary tome. It may be all over the place, as befits the talents of someone with a big, messy life, but Ask Dr. Mueller is nothing but pure, slight bliss.

Dennis Cooper is the author of Guide (Grove).