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“Of course, the strippers also take pains not to appear too innocent, valorous, or bookishly inclined. (In direct opposition to the Swayze Mandate of 1987, everybody puts Baby in a goddamn corner.)��

�� Diablo Cody, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper

If one is looking for a slow burn type novel..a slow moving and languid read, filled with ever growing intensity as it takes you on a long and patient tour into quiet and astonishingly complex Historical and Literary places , that takes days..maybe weeks to read..and leaves you shaken and stirred, mind reeling, as you contemplate the month long philosophical journey you just experienced..this is not your book.


Sorry about that. However all is not lost. If you want a short and fast paced attention grabbing book..something quick witted, and eye popping, trashy and flashy, vulgar and glittery, with Prose that one will either love or loath (or both) written by an Avant-Garde Oscar winning Film screenplay writer who once worked as a stripper AND peep show girl AND phone sex operator..congrats! This is your book.

And judging from the thousands of reviews on here I am not the only one who could not resist. How could I? I have seen some of this writer's work. In case you have not, she got the Oscar for writing the screenplay for the movie "Juno" but she also has other film work, including "Young adult" a great film starring Charlize Theron. However, before she became this Film Maker, she took a bit of a walk on the wild side. Actually..more than a bit.

Diablo Cody certainly marched to the beat of her own drum. And I tend to love gritty reads so I was all in on this one.

The thing is..I didn't like it at first. The writing style grew on me however and I did fly though the book. I would rate it 3.5 stars.

To really do my review properly, I must compare this to another book I read on the same subject, many years ago. It is called "Ivy League stripper" and was written by a student from Brown university who paid for college by stripping. I will be comparing the two books a few times through this review.

These are the only two books I've really read that go into the weeds on the subject by writers who have been there, done that. I think this one was quite a bit better then Ivy League.

First off, STRIPPING..SEX..PEEP SHOWS..PHONE SEX.. NOT PG RATED!

This book is vulgar as I said but it pulls no punches. It makes no attempts to glamorize the industry and while I myself was never a dancer, I've had friends who have been and I've been inside these clubs. I know this is not a life of glamour and celebrity.

That was my main dislike of Ivy League. I did enjoy that book but felt many times like the writer was writing about an Oscar party. She prettied the work up to the point where you had to wonder if it was all real. I mean..she made it almost sound like nirvana at times and although she did not pretty up everything,..there were some dark things described.. there was a bit to much...."this is great" and "hot girls making money" aspects involved in the writing, for me to take it as seriously as I'd have liked.

Not so here. Diablo will take the blinders off any rose colored glasses wearing gal. Her writing is punchy and quick, an homage to gritty Rocker girl Prose and quirky Film maker. One thing's for sure. Her style is utterly unique.

So I sure learned alot. For example..and I will keep this part brief..I never knew Phone sex operators get scripts or that Peep show girls have "day shifts". Also there are the strip clubs. Diablo worked at several and the one thing they all appear to have in common was their seeming desire to rip the girls off as much as possible.

So it was a wild and furious read and while I enjoyed it, I changed my mind about giving it a four for one main reason.

I did not get the depth I wanted. It is a pretty short book and I never really found out WHY she chooses to become a stripper. I also never got the sense of the other gals in the business. Ivy league did that really good as you did get the sense of the other workers as their own individual selves. Not so here. Most were in it only briefly and most felt like caricatures..I never really felt I knew them

I wish the book had been longer. I am very impressed at the self depreciation that Diablo has which is something Ivy League never had. That writer seemed obsessed with her own beauty to the point where it felt like I was reading a love letter from the author to herself. Not so in Candy Girl.

Diablo Is unafraid to poke fun at herself, at others, at just about everyone and everything, ( which at first annoyed me and then intrigued me and then had me roaring with laughter.) And her musings were at times painful. I could relate much more to her then the writer of Ivy League.

In closing..if you like gritty reads that are edgy to the core and are interested in the subject matter, this might be for you. I mean it IS fascinating but not for the faint of heart, not this book. It is good to know she got out of that life and became an award winning film maker. Her writing of this book makes clear her creativity and is worth reading just for that.