Interview
Kathleen
Rooney on NPR's
Talk of the Nation.
|
Live
Nude Girl
My Life as an Object
Kathleen Rooney
An art model’s take on taking it off
“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.”
—Peter Stitt, editor of 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
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.
February
6 x 9, 198 pages, index
$22.50 cloth
ISBN 978-1-55728-891-2 | 1-55728-891-7
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