Candy Girl

Decreed by David Letterman (tongue in cheek) on CBS TV’s The Late Show to be the pick of “Dave’s Book Club 2006,” Candy Girl is the story of a young writer who dared to bare it all as a stripper. At the age of twenty-four, Diablo Cody decided there had to be more to life than typing copy at an ad agency. She soon managed to find inspiration from a most unlikely source— amateur night at the seedy Skyway Lounge. While she doesn’t take home the prize that night, Diablo discovers to her surprise the act of stripping is an absolute thrill.

This is Diablo’s captivating fish-out-of-water story of her yearlong walk on the wild side, from quiet gentlemen’s clubs to multilevel sex palaces and glassed-in peep shows. In witty prose she gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at this industry through a writer’s keen eye, chronicling her descent into the skin trade and the effect it had on her self-image and her relationship with her now husband.

Good, frothy fun. . . . For those of us who have stared, transfixed, from a distance, wondering how the air is up there, Candy Girl is a bracing lungful. (Los Angeles Times)

Diablo Cody is to stripping what Chuck Klosterman is to pop culture and Sarah Vowell is to American history. . . . Candy Girl is fiendishly funny, muscle-car fast, and frighteningly—and I do mean frighteningly—accurate. (Lily Burana, author of Strip City: A Stripper’s Farewell Journey Across America)

[Cody is] a quick, erudite, and funny writer. . . . One hell of a good story. (Time Out Chicago)

Flat-out funny and refreshingly devoid of moral conclusions. (Star Tribune, Minneapolis)Diablo Cody is a freelance journalist and is currently the associate arts editor for City Pages, Minneapolis’ alternative weekly. Her now defunct website, “The Pussy Ranch,” scored over one million page views in its seventeen-month run, garnering acclaim from The Village Voice, among others. Her first screenplay, "Juno," is being produced by Mandate Pictures, and she has two other screenplays in development with Warner Brothers.