Candy Girl: A Year In The Life Of An Unlikely Stripper
by Diablo Cody
Humor and eroticism are two things that are highly subjective. Unlike performing arts or music wherein you can defend something with the “classic” card (i.e.-you may not like Bach or Raphael but because you cannot deny their impact, you have to give them much more credit than you would for, say, Bob Seger or Robert Indiana), humor and sex are either funny or sexy; there really is no middle ground. If your friend finds Steven Wright unfunny or Salma Hayek unattractive there will be little you can do to change their mind.
The same logic is applied to Candy Girl, a book that is both funny and deals with sex written by Diablo Cody before her award-winning Juno received praise and awards. If you did not like Juno it will be almost impossible for you to enjoy this book. If you enjoyed the movie like I and many others did, it is a delicious and quickly digestible little gem. (Juno note: while I found the movie to be funny and all-around really good, the ending is what sealed the deal for me. I did not see the poignancy of the letter on the wall coming at all and the use of Cat Power’s version of “Sea Of Love” during the hospital scene gets nothing short of four stars from me. But I digress.)
Men tend to think of themselves as being sexier than they really are while women tend to drastically undervalue their sexiness, instead opting to hunt for and associate themselves with their deficiencies–however real or imagined they may be. From the get go, Cody describes herself as possessing a geek figure in which she is too pale, is prone to wear a scowl, and believes herself to be at times a little frumpy but you always get the sense that she is comfortable with her body. On a lark one day, she decides to try out for amateur night at a strip club she walked by on a regular basis. From here the book takes all of the detours you expect it to–stories about some of the other strippers, the men who pay for service, the veritable ins and outs of the strip club and its economy and mentality, how it affected her personally and professionally (she still had a “regular” job during the day), and other funny and random thoughts about the profession. Candy Girl is not groundbreaking but the voice of the writer is refreshing enough to make you feel as if you are reading something new. Cody is a neophyte in the stripping world so the book is more about absolute endpoints–I never thought about stripping and then I did it to see what it was like and then that was it–than an oh-how-the-times-have-changed perspective from a veteran of the industry. And, by all appearances, Cody did not delve into this out of irony or with an impulse to expose and shock; it is a memoir in the truest sense, a reporting of events mixed in with opinion and a willingness to subtract judgment on the industry and its participants.
Candy Girl offers some keen observations (women prefer blondes too) and a lot of humor (best songs to strip to and the selection of stripper names, just to name two) about the stripping world and her role in it. But, like Juno, after all is said and done it is the ending that seals the deal. Cody, born Brooke Busey from Lemont, Illinois, uses the last pages to draw out sketches of her childhood and how it is not always girls from broken homes that try the stripping business out. An excerpt from the last chapter, “A Stripper Is Born”:
“Most sex workers… cite a past incident of sexual abuse in trying to explain the illicit path they’ve stumbled upon. I have no such justification. I was never molested as a child, probably because I wasn’t very attractive. Though my mother did her best to outfit me in the preppy armor of the era, I always looked disheveled and owlish. I had obsessive-compulsive disorder and facial tics. My grey eyes shrank behind oversized, Plexiglas-thick spectacles, and my teeth were fenced in by a glittering array of modern orthodontia… I wasn’t a dimpled, curly-haired Campbell Kid ripe for diddling by an older relative. In fact, if I’d been called upon to endorse a product, it probably would have been a set of junior encyclopedias. Or bulk birdseed. Something boring. The point is, my formative years were entirely free of sexual trauma.”
She goes more into her childhood: her parents never divorced, the family owned a successful restaraunt, and they had an education at one of the best private Catholic schools in the area (“My older brother, Marc, and I were coddled to the point of asphyxiation”). Cody writes that her school life was “a fairly typical academic experience for Catholic children in the 1950s; however, this was the eighties” and that maybe those two forces throughout her childhood unconsciously forced an ambition upon her to try weird things before she settled down.
And maybe that is the ultimate point of the book. People change when they enter adulthood regardless of who is around to watch or hang around with them. Some people become drug users or orthodox churchgoers or successful in an under-the-radar sort of way, while others develop serious relationship problems or become rich or are normal, loving parents. It would be unfair to misconstrue this book as being something that paints the stripper atmosphere as something fun and worthwhile. Cody does mention that the money was good at times but it is not being glamorized really in any way. It is a memoir of a girl who went through a brief metamorphosis of experimentation and realized when to get out.
We have all done it in some respect; most of us, however, cannot write about it as concise and as funny as this.
