Writer Kathleen Rooney supplements her income with gigs as a nude model. She started when she was a graduate student, and has been modeling for artists for six years. "It's a weird way to earn money," she writes, but it's not how she makes her living. She calls it more than a hobby — a "compulsion."
It took Rooney many years to tell her mother about her job. She writes that her parents now find it "embarrassing, best left untalked about."
Rooney has a variety of clients, from classes full of Intro to Drawing students, to lone artists who ask her to pose for their works. One constant? Her then-boyfriend-now-husband's blue flannel bathrobe, which she wears, then drops for the session.
In her book, Live Nude Girl, Rooney raises the philosophical and personal concerns of posing for art, and makes a distinction between nudity and nakedness.
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