Diablo Cody

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Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper

Diablo Cody is the pseudonym of Brook Busey-Hunt, a Minneapolis-based writer and blogger best known for her yearlong foray in the stripping and peep show circuits of Minneapolis, candidly chronicled on her Pussy Ranch blog[1] and in her 2006 memoir Candy Girl: A Year in The Life of an Unlikely Stripper. Cody has also written the forthcoming movie Juno and is in pre-production for development of a sitcom.

1 Early career
2 Skin trade
3 Journalism
4 Memoir
5 Screenplay
6 Trivia
7 References

[edit] Early career

Cody graduated college with a media studies degree, but her first jobs were doing secretarial work at a Chicago bankruptcy law firm and later proofing copy for advertisements that played on Twin-City radio stations. Both positions provided copious fodder and perspective for later writings.

Her commencement in the online world began with a parody of a weblog called Red Secretary, detailing the (fictional) exploits of a secretary living in Belarus. The events were thinly-veiled allegories for events that happened in Cody's real life, but told from the perspective of a disgruntled, English-idiom-challenged Eastern Bloc girl. Her first bona fide blog appeared under the nickname Darling Girl after Cody moved to Minneapolis from Chicago to “live-in sin” with Jon Hunt, a musician she had met over the internet. They eventually married.

The Darling Girl weblog would be forerunner to the more risqué Pussy Ranch. In Darling Girl, Cody detailed her daily experiences and interactions, colored with personal reflections such as her changing taste for soda brands and pickles and growing zen for Minneapolis lifestyle.

[edit] Skin trade

On a whim, as Cody would later describe it, she signed up for amateur night at one of the raunchiest Minneapolis strip club. Although she did not win, Cody so enjoyed the novelty of the experience that she contemplated becoming a professional stripper. Eventually she quit her day job. Her time in the strip club world was not limited only to stripping. Later she would indulge readers with her exploits in private shows and simulated intercourse. Eventually she became disillusioned with stripping and switched to phone sex. Her short stay there stemmed from the way women were treated as a whole in the sex industry. Cody soon made retreat to more traditional employment in journalism, and a budding writing career stimulated by her skin trade days.

[edit] Journalism

Cody began writing for City Pages, an alternate Twin-City weekly. At the publication, she writes about television and culture. Cody drew literary fans and received accolades for puff-free accounts and columns, with special emphasis on critiques of society and popular culture. In one instance, she humorously referred to her time at the Village Voice-owned newspaper as "yellow journalism."

[edit] Memoir

At the age of twenty four, Cody wrote her memoir Candy Girl: A Year in The Life of an Unlikely Stripper. According to Cody, the memoir began after a publisher showed keen interest to the acerbic wit and popularity Pussy Ranch had received. After the book was published in December 2005, it was heralded for possessing an original quality steadied with self-deprecating tack that made Cody endearing to her reader. It was the same model used in Pussy Ranch: astute and almost unbearably unflinching observations into the psyches of women in the stripping business. Many critics commented the memoir took an objective look without being too formal.

Detractors delved into the usual items of blog-to-memoir books, namely disparagement such as "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" (i.e., why pay for a book when the blog is free). Other critics and past fans of her blog commented that the writing in the book was stilted, lacking the unrelenting directness and force that had made her blog noteworthy. Others still said she had been too sardonic and unappreciative to an industry that helped gain her notoriety. Feminist analysis (Candy Girl is often placed in the Feminist literature section of many larger-named bookstores) claimed guarded approval to the ideas put forth in the memoir.

[edit] Screenplay

After completion of the book, Cody was encouraged by Mason Novick, the manager who helped her secure a publisher for the book, encouraged her to write a screenplay. Within months she wrote the screenplay Juno, a coming-of-age-story in the comedic vein of Napoleon Dynamite. Juno follows the story of an unplanned pregnancy for a unique teenager living in Minneapolis. The Jason Reitman-directed comedy will star Ellen Page and Michael Cera. Advance praise for the script has commended Cody on fluid writing closely tied with the arc and three-dimensional characters that are fully realized.

[edit] Trivia

On March 20, 2006, Cody appeared on Late Show with David Letterman to promote Candy Girl. Letterman, imbued with fascination with the sex industry and her observational prowess, inducted the book as the opening pick of ‘Dave’s Book Club.’ There have been no additions to the book club since.

During the interview with Letterman, Cody likened herself to a naked Margaret Mead (a 20th century cultural anthropologist) in her fascination with stripping and the “seedy underbelly” of society. In the interview, Busey-Hunt said she chose a penname because Brook sounded too tedious. Diablo is the Spanish term for the Devil.