Live Nude Girl

My Life as an Object

Kathleen Rooney

Narrated by Eva Hamilton

Available from Audible

Book published by The University of Arkansas Press

Live Nude Girl is a lively meditation on the profession of nude modeling—that “spine-tingling combination of power and vulnerability, submission and dominance”—as it has been practiced in history and as it is practiced today. Kathleen Rooney draws on her own experiences working as an artist’s model, as well as on the stories of famous, notorious, and mysterious artists and models through the ages. Combining personal perspective, historical anecdote, and witty prose, Rooney reveals that both the appeal of posing nude for artists and the appeal of drawing the naked figure lie in our deeply human responses to beauty, sex, love, and death.

Kathleen Rooney is the author of Reading with Oprah:The Book Club that Changed America,now in its second edition, as well as the poetry collections Oneiromance (An Epithalamion), Something Really Wonderful, and That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness, the latter two written collaboratively with Elisa Gabbert. Her essay “Live Nude Girl” was selected for Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers.

REVIEWS:

“Kathleen Rooney boldly and bravely dissects what it means to disrobe in the name of art—and money. For anyone who wants to know why a woman would prefer to be nude rather than naked (and what the difference is), read Live Nude Girl and find out.”

—Rachel Kramer Bussel, editor of Best Sex Writing 2009

“Though the title of Kathleen Rooney’s Live Nude Girl seems to promise an external approach to the subject, modeling nude for art classes, the book itself is surprisingly introspective, learned, and thoughtful. While revealing what a nude model does, how she does it and why, what she feels and thinks while doing it, Rooney explores what her profession means to her personally and what it means and has meant to others. The writing is enticing, engaging, inviting, and the anecdotes it tells are irresistible.”

—The Gettysburg Review

“If Live Nude Girl caught your eye, promised, beckoned—good. Follow the enticement and you’ll encounter the thrill of a rigorous and questioning mind in motion.”

—Lia Purpura, author of On Looking