Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published February 2006]
Diablo Cody: Candy Girl
Emma Garman talks to the author of Candy Girl: A Year In The Life
Of An Unlikely Stripper
One night, 24-year-old recent Minnesota transplant
Diablo Cody was walking home from her dull ad
agency job when the words “Amateur Night” on a topless
bar’s marquee beckoned irresistibly. Even though
Cody had only once been inside a strip club – and, with
her idyllic middle-class upbringing, devoted boyfriend
and conspicuous lack of emotional scars, hardly fit the
stereotype of a sex industry worker – one try-out as
an amateur led to a year of professional hard graft as
a stripper, lap dancer and peep-show performer. The
equally hilarious, titillating and gruesome account of
her exhausting adventure, Candy Girl: A Year In The
Life Of An Unlikely Stripper, is far more than just another
stripper memoir or dispatch from the dark side:
Cody’s analysis of what she found within the walls of
upscale men’s clubs and sleazy sex palaces, and within
herself, is shot through with a laser-like wit and punk
rock sensibility likely to influence all political shades of
opinion on sex jobs and raunch culture. Cody – who’s
now hung up her white platforms to work as a successful
screenwriter and arts editor – talked to me on the
phone from Minneapolis.
BUY Diablo Cody books online from and
Even jaded readers will be fascinated by some of
the real-life characters in your book. Like the jizzlicking
guy at the peep show.
He’s the celebrity of the book! He would come
crawling in and lick up as much as he could. The thing
that was really fascinating about him was that he was
so clean cut. He was the last guy you would ever think
had a habit like that. I shudder to think about it.
What else did you come across that fazed you?
You know, people who just had really strange fetishes.
Incest would come up a lot: People who would
want you to masturbate as their sister, or their mother.
That was something I was not comfortable with. I tried
to be pretty game, but that really freaked me out. And,
you know, a lot of cross dressers. There seemed to be a
lot of men who wanted to come in and talk about gay
sex. To me that was really surprising, that they though
of the booth as a safe haven for their fantasies, even
though it was obviously straight-oriented entertainment.
That was weird.
So you became a stripper as an experiment – were
you surprised to find you became addicted? And
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