Diablo Cody is My Master Now

Stef, aside from cooking a mean miso salmon steak, has an eclectic taste in books. A few weeks ago, I suggested she read Fugitives and Refugees. She, in turn, recommended I read Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody.

Cody, as some of you may know, was a sex worker from my up-to-then most-hated of all midwestern burgs, Minneapolis. I've followed her adventures since she was still a regular at City Pages, her local weekly alternative paper. Today, she's a famous screenwriter and her first film, Juno, is in theatres now.

Surprisingly, I still haven't seen it, but it's on the list.

Candy Girl is her autobiographical account of going from administrative keyboard jockey at a Twin Cities ad agency to becoming somebody who grinds her girl bits into strangers for cash. It's a positively gripping read, a short and well-written book that kept me up late into the night and which, even when physically exhausted, I did not want to put down.

Part of Cody's appeal is her unbelievably sharp writing. It's what you'd expect to read if Joss Whedon knew his way around a makeup counter and wrote with an edgy, (pop-) cultured eye towards detail regarding things like watching a man finger himself while talking to you through one of those prison-style phones where you're separated by a sheet of glass.

I love the guy, but Joss doesn't write about those kinds of things. He probably shouldn't or they'd take his kids away. Diablo is the delightfully uncensored version of Joss Whedon: sharp, shrewd, and completely unfettered by any trumped-up code of ethics to not describe the perversions she faced in her time riding a pole for dollar bills.

This is her story and she tells it well, goddammit.

I generally don't take notes on autobiographies now that I'm out of sixth grade, but Diablo Cody is so brilliant, you just have to document it. She goes from talking about The Pixies and Un Chien Andalou on one page to describing how she's never chucked a bottle of Delirium Tremens at somebody on the next. Who but Diablo Cody, I ask you, thinks "I have to write about stuff I've never thrown. What's good? I know, an obscure Belgian strong ale you only find in specialty stores."

She's naked by the end of that very same page. If you're curious, it's page seven. This is a good fucking book.

Cody can weave intelligent discourse seemlessly with crass pottymouthery. I can imagine that Diablo Cody thinks in much the same way Isaac Asimov did when his brain was still inside a hormone-addled fourteen-year-old boy's body. Brilliant, but never above making a joke about body functions. A hilarious joke, mind you. Riotous in its punchline and, at times, as intricately designed as a pocketwatch. I want Diablo Cody cryogenically frozen so that she can babysit my as-of-yet unconceived kids once they're old enough to start turning into smartasses. She'd be the cool lady from down the street who could teach them how to properly smoke a cigarette while still virtuous enough to never let them actually light one.

Cody's tale of bouncing from strip club to strip club is fun, funny, and infinitely quotable. She can, and will, work her own lexicon into your daily speech patterns. You'll find yourself at ease with her hep lingo like referring to a stripper's feminine endowment as "superhuman breasticles", or remarking to your S.O. that you are both now officially out of milk and butter, thus "we need groceries in this bitch".

Cody's writing is exactly as immature as it sounds, but the fact that it's coming out of a grown woman and not a junior high zit-factory who's never even touched a girl's breasticle completely changes the playing field. Her writing, though often profane, is seldom really derogatory. She has a natural aptitude to take what could be a rather traumatic and negative look at the sex industry in the American midwest and simply put it in an entertaining and surprisingly non-judgmental light.

She danced around in uncomfortable shoes for a year and learned about the complex social dynamics that evolve between women who work "together", to use the word loosely, getting strange men to shower them with money. It is what it is.

I really, really enjoyed this book, for no reason more than Diablo Cody wrote it. Her style is unique, bold, unapologetic, and amazingly approachable. I take great comfort in knowing that a live, human female person is equally capable as I am of letting her mind spontaneously flash back to the "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble" scene from The Kentucky Fried Movie while watching a coworker soap up her superhuman breasticles in the shower. Male chauvinism, it seems, is immune from any kind of criticism you could level at Diablo Cody because, you see, she is not male. This gives her an un-fucking-believable quantity of power at saying and doing the kinds of things that men would very likely get kneed in the groin for attempting themselves.

It's liberating to see this kind of goofy honesty in print — a joke wrapped around a sometimes unpleasant kernel of truth — written by a woman, and written amazingly well. If poop jokes were the only thing Cody had going for her, she wouldn't be nearly as successful, nor as entertaining. It's her fusion of this behavior with her college degree, jumping back and forth between juvenile banter and high-brow sophistication that really paints the picture of a well-rounded mind who, for some fool reason, felt a compelling need to go shake her breasticles at strangers for a while.