Live Nude Girl Bares All

Although instructors allow models frequent breaks during the average three-hour posing sessions, the job can be boring. While the vast majority of artists are professional, occasionally Rooney came across a creep. She remembers one private session with a photographer who took photos of small glass figurines on her butt and breasts. In the book she writes, “He was not a serious fine arts photographer interested in cultivating a collaborative artist-model relationship; he was an upper-middle-class amateur with money to burn, interested in burning it by taking as many nude photographs of as many young women as possible.”

The places where high and low culture met have always been of interest to Rooney. In Live Nude Girl, the theme shows up as the place where the titillation of nudity meets high art. Her first nonfiction book, Reading With Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America (2005), explored the clash between fine literature and the populist Oprah, while her poetry collaboration with Elisa Gabbert, That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (2008), combines the influence of Theodore Storm, a high-culture German poet, with the LOLs and BRBs of Internet speak. An accomplished poet, Rooney won the Ruth Lily Fellowship from Poetry magazine in 2003, and her poetry has appeared in dozens of journals, including Agni and Harvard Review. Her first solo collection, Oneiromance (an epithalamion), appeared in 2008.

Along with Abigail Beckel, in 2006 Rooney founded Rose Metal Press, a company dedicated to publishing hybrid genres. Beckel prompted Rooney to write about her experience modeling, suggesting she enter an essay on modeling in the Twentysomething Essays from Twentysomething Writers contest. Rooney labored over the essay, which made it into the anthology and led to Live Nude Girl. In an email, she wrote, “But having "finished" the essay, I felt I wasn't truly finished with the subject. I became fixated on how models are so often depicted and represented, but so rarely depict themselves, at least through writing. Not that I somehow speak for models or am necessarily particularly representative, but it seemed like an intriguing subject and a perspective that should be out in the world.”

In Live Nude Girl, Rooney is at her best when she describes the mechanics of modeling and her fraught relationship with her own body in often surprisingly poetic language. In the book’s opening chapter, she writes, “My skinny is what I have always been. My skinny is how I always want to be. My skinny is me. But sometimes I distrust it. My breasts are too small; my nipples too pink. My butt is too big for my frame, curved and fleshy. My ribs are like a xylophone, and the knobs of my spine stick up like ponderous cairns in the landscape of my back. My hips are jutty wings.”

Rooney also delves into the history of modeling, from the ancient Greek tradition of using prostitutes onwards and describes famous models from the early Phryne, who posed for the Greek sculptor Praxiteles, to Simonetta Vespucci, Botticelli’s muse.

Although what she does is “erotic, but ritualized,” Rooney said that it is very different from pornography; the aim of art is an aesthetic experience while the aim of pornography is arousal. Posing empowers Rooney insofar as it works against the traditional conception of women’s bodies as sinful.