Abstract
<jats:p>Chapter 2 intimately reanimates Cookie Mueller's archived, unpublished, and published pieces: lists, letters, documents, chapbooks, notebook pages, autobiographical stories in journals and collections, and an unfinished novel. Through staying with these piecemeal materialities, the chapter argues—via Jack Halberstam on queer failure—that the scrappy, unfinished leftovers of Mueller's work and archive offer their own queer possibilities, political imaginations, and temporal resources, revising narratives of the sick, pathologized body and its care networks, and disordering the capitalist wellness of chronological time. Attending to the scattered, genre-defying parts of her “novel-in-pieces” critically (and creatively) surfaces the reparative, adolescent energies of Mueller's retrospective “close writing” in turn. Drawing on adolescent-attentive queer feminist scholarship, the chapter argues that Mueller restored the transgressive marks left in her perverse adolescence—incorporating the adolescent's never-full desire for freedom, for bad taste, for pleasure, for the paradoxical bittersweet—as a political means of sustenance and survival.</jats:p>