Sometime in the last year (or two?) I saw the movie Juno and was vaguely aware that it was written a woman named Diablo Cody.
So when I was browsing through one of my favorite bookstores recently and saw her memoir Candy Girl I decided to take a quick flick through it. After finishing the book a few days later I can see why Hollywood took an interest in her.
Originally, Candy Girl started out as a blog which chronicled Cody’s life as a stripper and sex phone worker in Minneapolis over the course of a year.
Candy Girl is part of a genre of female writers who choose to take up some sort of unusual occupation or hobby and then blog about it. The most obvious being Julie Powell cooking her way through Julia Child’s cookbook in one year in the blog (and later book and movie) Julie and Julia.
It’s a genre that really doesn't interest me because it seems to follow a general format: girl takes up hobby, writes about its effect on her life, scores book deal, etc. I guess that’s one of the reasons I found myself reading (and enjoying) Candy Girl. Cody makes it clear that during her stint as a stripper she achieved no grand lesson or personal breakthroughs. She’s just a girl who got sucked into the outskirts of the sex industry because the money was better than office work.
Cody does attempt to explain how she decided to start working as a stripper. She points to a lovely, drama-free childhood in the suburbs, devoid of any real risk taking. The catalyst (if you can call it that) was her moving from Chicago to Minneapolis in 2003 to be with her boyfriend Jonny. Starting over in a new city with no history seemed to liberate her. She states: “My life felt like a dry-erase board that had been wiped of all its past transgressions...” (4).
Slowly, Cody began to dip her toes into the world of stripping, starting off at Amateur Night and moving on to work one to two nights a week while still keeping her job as a copy typist at an advertising agency.
She freely admits to feeling like an idiot when she’s up on stage and to not fitting in with the blond, tan, hard-bodied strippers who populate the clubs she works at. Cody excels at describing the cool, darkness of the clubs and the strange mating dance the strippers engage in with potential clients. Aggressiveness and general lack of rejection seems to be the key factors in earning money.
What I found most fascinating was the economic maze of the various strip clubs Cody worked at. Most strippers must sell a certain number of dances and a certain number of drinks in order to even get paid. If they don’t make their quota they might end up owing the club money at the end of the night.
Cody is soon disabused of the notion that stripping is easy money. Most shifts last eight hours and involve wearing shoes that should be classified as torture devices. The dancers must quickly learn to sniff out which clients are willing to part with their money, but even then there are no guarantees.
She eventually burns out at the end of the year for obvious reasons: the constant groveling to gross men who populate the clubs just wears her out. But overall she walks away unscathed with some fun stories and a good pile of money.
Her writing style is light and easy, and Cody comes across as likeable and self-deprecating. For those looking for a more serious take on stripping, this isn’t your book. Cody’s foray into stripping skims the surface, never dwelling too long on the darker, destructive parts of the industry.
