Bare Necessities. The Completely Unfiltered Guide to Living Naked in Your Own Damn House! - Kristin Williams

This is not a book about nudist resorts. It is not about nude beaches or hot springs or any destination that requires a membership card, a travel insurance policy, or a working knowledge of another country's nudity laws. This is a book about your house. The one you already own or rent or occupy. The one with the sofa and the windows and the neighbor Gerald who stands in his driveway every morning at seven forty-five with a thermos and an unhurried wave and who absolutely did not sign up to see you naked through your bay window, which is why this book exists.

Kristin walks you through all of it. The naked home audit that will permanently change how you look at your own space. The complete and unsparing truth about furniture and fabrics, including a case against wicker that is so thorough and so passionate it borders on a personal vendetta, because it is. The physics of window visibility and why you are probably less exposed during the day than your anxiety is telling you, and why nighttime is an entirely different and more urgent conversation. The backyard. The fence. The neighbor with the elevated deck and the sightline you didn't know about until your best friend showed up and ruined your afternoon with correct information. The hosting situation, which involves temperature management and towel logistics and cheese boards and at least one person in every group who proposes a dare with absolutely no intention of following through on it.

Along the way there are stories, because there are always stories when Kristin is involved and when Tanya is involved and when Susan Hasseltree is in the room eating all the good cheese and suggesting things she will not do herself. There is Janessa, arriving at her first clothing-optional gathering and asking in a low urgent voice whether there is a procedure, a protocol, an official moment when the clothes come off, because she needs to know if she should be preparing. There is Donna, an eleven-pound Persian cat who has never worn clothes and who has never experienced a single moment of conflict about this, moving through the house with the complete unselfconsciousness of a creature that has never been given a single reason to feel anything other than entirely at home in her own body, which it turns out is instructive if you let it be.

Kristin is thirty-nine years old and she is funny in the way that only someone who has been doing something long enough to have accumulated a genuinely embarrassing number of cautionary tales can be funny: specifically, generously, and entirely at her own expense. She will make you laugh. She will give you information you will actually use. She will not make you feel judged for starting where you are starting, for going slowly, for keeping your socks on longer than you planned, for feeling strange about walking naked from your bedroom to your kitchen on a Tuesday morning when nothing is at stake and nobody is watching and the only thing in the room with an opinion is a Persian cat who does not have one.

She will tell you the strangeness passes. She will tell you what is waiting on the other side of it. She will tell you that your house is already set up for this and that you don't need to buy anything or join anything or announce anything to anyone. She will tell you to close the cabinet doors because a bruise that lasts eleven days and is shaped like the state of Idaho is entirely preventable and she is living proof of what happens when you don't.