Diablo Cody

So, okay, the other autobiography I read this year (so far) is Candy Girl, by Hollywood "It Girl" du jour, Diablo Cody. Why? Well, I liked Juno (yes, I will still admit, and the soundtrack, too, goddammit) and I was intrigued by her rags to riches, er, I mean, stripper to screenwriter tale. (NB: All of this, presumably, was told on her blog [called, I kid you not, The Pussy Ranch], so the story of blogger-cum-novelist naturally interests me, too.)

I found her book to be an eye-opener. show more Thematically, it's not for the faint of heart. Grandmothers and little kids might want to avert their eyes. She goes from bored secretarial lackluster to total immersion in Minneapolis' sex industry within a few chapters. Dancing and stripping on amateur night lead to more of the same as a full time profession, toning her abs and refining her "look." But she doesn't stop there. She morphs into a phone sex operator when the late night pressures amass and then into one of those girls "performing" behind the glass in the back rooms of a sex shop.

Is there a moral to this story? No, not really. It's just an interesting segment of her life and a story worth telling. (Actually, she says, "any story involving a panty auction is required to be told.") Apparently this excursion was her attempt to scoff at the boring middle class lifestyle she grew up in. No, it was more than that. Allow me to quote her from one of the final pages:

Most girls get into stripping because they’ve discovered a fast crowd, are mired in financial woe or have lived with dysfunction for so long that they're naturally drawn to the fucked-up family dynamic in strip clubs. For me, it was the polar opposite. I had spent my entire life choking on normalcy, decency and Jif sandwiches with the crusts amputated. For me, stripping was an unusual kind of escape. I had nothing to escape from but privilege, but I claimed asylum anyway. At twenty-four, it was my last chance to reject something and become nothing. I wanted to terrify myself. Mission accomplished.

Reading about a typical male fantasy from the clinical female point of view was quite interesting. From that perspective, there is nothing erotic at all about all of that forced eroticism. Bruised knees and sore feet become the focal point, not the exposed flesh or various gyrations. Stripping becomes a business, a lifestyle, a routine. Men become pigs – something I suspect women have known for some time.

The highlight of this book, which is also the lowlight, is the writing, which is every bit as crafty and clever (at first) and then tiring (after a while) and border-line pretentious as it was in her virgin screenplay attempt. It starts out impressive and eventually wears on you. Young Diablo doesn't know when to tone it down, nor when to use it for effect, which sort of requires that it doesn't overstay its welcome.

But I want to add to that last sentence the word: "yet." I think she has more in her, and a few years of maturity will go a long way towards stabilizing her voice. If nothing else, it brought her down off the pole and bawling like a baby up on stage at the Academy Awards. Clearly this girl embraces change. I just hope the literary world hasn't lost her for good for the money and fame that Hollywood has to offer. I think it would be a shame. show less

From the “interesting women” reading list, this one is often rather sad. On a whim, Diablo Cody started stripping just to see what it was like; soon the extra money ceased to be “extra” and became essential. The economics of strip clubs – at least the ones she worked at – are interesting; the dancers were heavily pressured to solicit drinks, lap dances, “bed dances” (like a lap dance, but horizontal), and other “special” services; in many cases, the dancers have to pay to show more work and get money back for each “special”. As a result, it was entirely possible to work a grueling shift and end up owing the club money for the night. Cody comments on the resulting strange inversion of the normal gender relations – attractive young women in scanty to nonexistent clothing begging old fat bald guys for the favor of their company. OTOH, when things went well, they could go very well indeed – Cody describes an evening when she literally got more money than she could carry from a customer who kept buying $90 bed dances.


Club managers, who Cody calls “The Mustaches”, do not display fatherly regard for their dancers; not surprising under the circumstances. Cody mostly writes about herself and her supportive boyfriend, without a lot of comments on other dancers (except their physical attributes); one painful exception is where she narrates a young single mom’s comment “You think you’ll always love your baby’s daddy, because he’s your baby’s daddy; but you don’t”. Not Shakespeare, but still profound.


Her day job was as a copywriter for a Minneapolis ad agency; strangely, her “real” employer didn’t seem to notice when she repeatedly showed up for work exhausted after a dance shift that lasted till 04:30 and when she dyed her hair bubble-gum pink; in fact, she got a promotion to a managerial position. She must have been a decent copywriter; some of her writing in Candy Girl is LOL funny – too bad I can’t repeat any of it here. With “****” censorship, all you’d see is definite articles and conjunctions.

Cody went on to become a successful screenwriter; she must have got lots of interesting material from her short stint as a stripper (in addition to permanently distorted feet from dancing in 6” heels, black and blue thighs from pole work, but, on the plus side, “abs of adamantium”).

Quick read, sometimes very funny, hide from the kids. show less

Why did I ever wait so long to read this!? This book was laugh out loud funny, intriguing and eye opening beyond compare. Diablo's quick wit and hilarious insights on the sex industry and her year in it is not to be missed! Diablo moved to Minneapolis and decided to reinvent herself and walk on the wild side with the permission and understanding of her boyfriend she decided to try her hand at stripping. She went from novice to pro in no time at all and bounced around to several different show more clubs. After that got tiring she decided to be a "doll" one of the girls that stood in a box at a sex store tempting men to spend some alone time with her, with only a window separating them. Ranging from hilarious to disgusting her year on the wild side is a must read for anyone even remotely interested in the sex trade. Diablo worked at gentlemen's clubs, a sex store, and a sex hotline and her views on the trade are eye opening.

For fans of erotica, dirty books, or memoirs. show less

This book is a weird trip. It does not unfold as do others of its ilk, a fact acknowledged by the author in a little afterword (which redeemed the whole thing for me). Cody fooled me. So, let me explain.

This is a nice, white, middle class girl's trip into the dark side, only she doesn't quite know why she does it and neither do we (at least, until that final 6-8 pages). We get, in equal portions, funny, raw, wry, cruel, sickening, too-hip, trying-too-hard, and painfully-honest. She's not show more trying to make a political point. She's not on a feminist soap box. She's not handing out excuses or explanations, or accusations or blame. She's just telling us "Hey, I did this. This is what I saw. This is what I did. Boo-ya."

And it works. At times I didn't think it was going to work. Really, I almost stopped reading a time or two because (read my status notes!), trained as I am by other memoirs in which a Nice Girl/Guy does Something Transgressive and Has A Crisis, I was waiting for the big boom, the disaster, the Horrible Thing. Didn't happen. What I thought was a build up toward a climax wasn't anything but time going by. My bad. Cody maybe didn't know where she was going until she got there, but it was...cool. Once we both got there, I was good with it.

You could, if you wanted, take this book apart and use it in a number of ways, but you'd be pushing. Cody isn't going there. You'd have to pause at some points and put some words in her mouth or translate her unambiguous text through some version of Babelfish. There are no big lessons here, no realizations about culture, no sociopolitical conclusions. It is, to borrow a hackneyed phrase, what it is. And I like it a lot more because of that. show less