Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object

Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object is a lively meditation on the profession of art modeling as it has been practiced in history and as it is practiced today. Kathleen Rooney draws on her own experiences working as an artists' model, as well as the famous, notorious, and mysterious artists and models through the ages. Through a combination of personal perspective, historical anecdote, and witty prose, Live Nude Girl 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.

"Author, award-winning poet and professional artists' model Rooney (Reading with Oprah, Something Really Wonderful) uses everything from Roland Barthes quotations to sitcom episode synopses off the internet (specifically, fortunecity.com on Growing Pains) to explore the myths and realities of nude modeling. Despite the fact that it largely consists of sitting still for hours on end, Rooney keeps work stories compelling: 'with the sculptors continually approaching... to rotate you slightly... it's like you're on the world's slowest and most boring Teacup Ride.' Posing for an advanced sculpting class working on life-sized renderings, Rooney merges her experience with a look at China's ancient Terra Cotta Army; elsewhere she tackles semantics, quoting art historian Kenneth Clark on the difference between 'naked' and 'nude.' Happily, Rooney is perfectly willing to satisfy readers' curiosity upfront in order to move in more philosophical directions, going from awkward first impressions ('the first thing they ask is, "Like, naked?"') to questions of safety and empowerment ('I feel safer from sexual predation naked in the art studio than I do... clothed on the street'). This esoteric, organic meditation on life as an art object is itself a model of personal writing, perfect for those on either side of the easel." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"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

"Though the title of Kathleen Rooney's Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object seems to promise an external approach to the subject, modeling nude for art classes, the book itself is surprisingly introspective, learned, and thoughtful... The writing is enticing, engaging, inviting, and the anecdotes it tells are irresistible. Peter Stitt, editor of The Gettysburg Review

Rooney, a poet and author, also has spent many years as a professional nude model. She has posed for classes, amateur artists, individual painters, sculptors and photographers. In this series of essays, some published elsewhere, she gives her insights into the work. She notes that, unlike other jobs, she rarely has to deal with sexual harassment. Muscle spasms, chills and boredom are more common problems. As she tells anecdotes of her life as a model, interspersed with examples from literature, film and art history, Rooney reminds the reader that, as the model in Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George said, "There's a person here...." When the person is nude and on display, this is often ignored. Rooney brings the humanity back into the object of the model. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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.