In my view, Kathleen Rooney’s book is thoughtfully introspective. In revealing what a nude model does, why she does it, and 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 she had met along the way.

I found the writing, especially the opening chapters, enticing, engaging, and inviting. Rooney explains how she accidentally came to become a sought-after nude model in the first place. It turns out it was by accident, because she was out of work and needed the money while attending college in the Washington DC area. "The first thirty seconds of nudity are always the most jarring,” she reveals. "The disrobing is a gentle shock to the senses, a slow-motion surprise.” Then she describes it as feeling the most natural thing in the world, shameless. Knowing that the room full of eyes looking at her aren’t really looking at her but rather the curves and shapes that are before them. Her favorite sessions, she reveals, are those where she can express a little fantasy, such as posing as a Greek goddess (she identifies with Phryne, an Athenian courtesan of seductive repute). She describes the sense of control she feels while secretly playing a “stare-down game” with students during long poses to pass the time (“they always look away first.”)

She later moves to Boston where she begins teaching at a local college while at the same time working as a nude model for the Art Department there. She adds sculpture and water color classes to her experience, musing on the idea of her image being immortalized in stone and paint while she still had her figure.

But Rooney also expresses her nervousness about posing nude for photography students, even though the money is triple what she was getting for the art classes. “The camera is a…disembodied zombie eye with no feeling of its own,” she writes. “It is unforgiving, unsympathetic...It is hard to look good in photographs.” She cautions potential models to have the photographer list the plan for the day in advance, so you know where the boundaries are in advance, and so the session does not devolve into soft porn at the end of the shoot.

She also describes the business end of posing: Always get the money in cash at the end of the session, never fall for the “Time for Prints” ploy where one poses for free in exchange for copies of the photos “eventually, if ever.”) She also cautions that the photo release needs to state how the photos will eventually be used. (“You don’t want your nude photos showing up on the Internet in case you are up for a nice job someday.”)

The author allows us to get inside her journey of self-discovery in other ways, especially how it feels to be a female nude model when alone at a male photographer’s studio. In later chapters, Rooney humorously recounts the various people that she has met while posing, and of the difficulty revealing her job to her devoutly Roman Catholic mother, and other less than supportive friends. Nude models are still considered one step removed from prostitutes in this © Copyright 2008 Southern California Naturist Association, Calabasas, California. All Rights Reserved 2 of 2 society, she writes, “a job you do when you become desperate for money.” That stigma proves hard to overcome. Despite describing the job specifics for a half hour, her mom still replies: “It sounds dirty to me.” Any nudist who has revealed their enjoyment of nudism to an outsider surely can relate to Rooney’s frustration.

While Life Nude Girl is a lively meditation on the profession of nude modeling, it is not an “easy read” you can just pick up and enjoy by the pool. It may be a slim 200 pages in length, but it is dense, fully indexed and with bibliography reference notes. Each chapter can stand as an essay on its own, and in retrospect, I recommend reading the book in that manner so that you can better mull over the ideas Rooney presents. It's a thinking person's book, and you may want to read it again to pick up those nuanced points missed during the first time around. SCNA has several members who ha