Aside from the thrill (and chill) of getting naked, there's not much to nude modeling. You show up, strip, hold very still for a long period, then get dressed, get paid and leave.
And yet for Kathleen Rooney, this experience has become the basis of "Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object," a compelling memoir that blends observation, personal revelation and scholarly inquiry.
A poet, professor and author of four other books, Rooney supplemented her income for six years as a nude model in the Boston area.
She's a smart woman inhabiting a comely body, and she wastes no time taking it off at the top of her book: "The first thirty seconds of nudity are always the most jarring, charged for me and for those who are looking at me. The disrobing is a gentle shock, a surprise, a kind of eyewash, and the instant is electrified, more vivid than those that preceded it and those that will come after."
Rooney also nails the flip side, the topsy-turvy feeling of being dressed with a nude in your midst. "My nudity might seem unreal," she writes, "as if it can't really be happening. So too might my nudity feel hyper-real, as if this person is the most three-dimensional object in space, vulnerable in her nakedness, but powerful in her command of the entire room's studious and uninterrupted attention."
As we watch her pose, Rooney examines nude modeling from every angle: historical, sociological and biographical. She explores the territory between female beauty and intelligence, art and pornography, object and observer -- even the border between life and death -- with insight and passion.
Rooney balances the life of "Phryne" -- a modeling sensation of ancient Greece -- with Madonna's nude photos for Lee Friedlander. She explains Greek versus Judeo-Christian approaches to nudity and highlights the difficulty people have distinguishing art modeling from prostitution. "There it is again," she notes, "this conflation of selling images of your body with actually selling your body itself."
All of this is backed up with a smorgasbord of references, from Pliny to Naomi Wolf. But thankfully, Rooney doesn't shy away from the personal.
She argues for modeling's legitimacy over lunch with her Catholic mother, trying to explain "that, despite the popular past association of art models with depravity, in the twentieth century, it actually became kind of glamorous." (Her mother's response? "It doesn't sound glamorous, Kathy, it sounds dirty.")
