Book Review: Candy Girl by Diablo Cody

I took a break from business books to finally get around to reading Diablo Cody’s book: Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. I really love the scripts for Juno and United States of Tara so I was looking forward to this book. I was not disappointed.


The book details the year that Cody entered the world of stripping, exotic dancing, entertaining, whatever it is you want to call it. Her perspective is very unique. She loved stripping, craved it. The book details her time at several strip clubs in the great Minneapolis area. The parts I found most interesting were how she details the economics of the job and how hard girls had to hustle to meet quotas so that they didn’t owe the management money at the end of the night. It’s interesting that the work she found most degrading was trying to get men to buy a drink coupon or a t-shirt. I generally like her writing style. Sometimes the pace gets stymied by a lengthy description, but overall it’s a fast read. I especially liked that she wasn’t trying to impart a moral or teach a lesson. She set out to tell the story of her year as a stripper and she did that well.