Description

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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 artist's 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.

About the Author

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Kathleen Rooney is the author of Reading with Oprah: The Book Club that Changed America, 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.

Praise For…

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"Ms. Rooney seems as compelling a talent in her future off the pedestal as on." -Huffington Post "A compelling memoir that blends observation, personal revelation and scholarly inquiry." -Los Angeles Times "A spirited and thought-provoking exploration of the human figure, Live nude Girl Beckons the oft-clothed to share the thrill of taking it all off." -Utne Reader

"A compelling memoir that blends observation, personal revelation and scholarly inquiry." -Los Angeles Times "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" "A spirited and thought-provoking exploration of the human figure, Live Nude Girl beckons the oft-clothed to share the thrill of taking it off." -Utne Reader "[This is] a memoir of Rooney's career as an art model that wrestles with the headier issues of the naked form as inspiration, objectification for the sake of art, and the role of a muse throughout history. . . . We'll be watching as Ms. Rooney seems as compelling a talent in her future off the pedestal as on." -Huffington Post "Rooney is a poet as well as a model and, for her, time spent naked, being photographed or painted, is an opportunity for the stillness and repose that is the starting place for her own meditations on art and on womanhood." -Times Literary Supplement "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 "Kathleen Rooney boldly and bravely dissects what it means to disrobe in the name of art—and money." -Rachel Kramer Bussel, editor of Best Sex Writing 2009 "The writing is enticing, engaging, inviting, and the anecdotes are irresistible." -Peter Stitt, editor of The Gettysburg Review