Here's my deal when I form crushes: They start off as intense, and I consume as much of that insta-passion as I can. I read and listen and talk and write and share and compare notes with anyone else who may have this same crush. It's a complete high, and while sometimes it's temporary, most of the time the crush is quietly permanent. If I've liked a piece of art once, or I've liked its artist, it's unlikely I'll ever hate it later, although I may sour to some of its meanings. And, so, in the natural progression of my insta-passion for Diablo Cody's writing, I ran out yesterday to grab her debut memoir Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper.

Despite the fact that Cody told me in passing that she had no grounded writing background, both Juno and Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper are so well crafted that I had a hard time believing her. Turns out I was right in my skeptiscism. Although Cody made light of her talent (and natural training) with me, she's been in the writing game for a while. As a high schooler she wanted to be a poet, and then post-collegiate days found her working--most unhappily--as a copy typist. It was this last unsatisfying job that would lead to the stripping gigs, the blog and finally the book deal.

In a sense Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper is a twisted coming-of-age tale, albeit for a 24-year-old witty cynic. By investing time in the gritty, mundane and sometimes unjust skin industry, Cody's Oh-so-Catholic-influenced-and-suburban shell breaks down as she witnesses primitive and eccentric yearnings, chronicles the humanity and sometimes cruelty of other women and learns to find in herself a new confidence.

An essential question of Cody's exploration, and one of the reasons she presumably keeps returning to stripping and its variants of peep shows and phone sex, is: 'Why am I not a natural stripper?' With managers telling Cody that she looks too mean to dealing with lackluster banking nights, the question compounds on itself throughout the narrative. Refreshingly the question is addressed without self-loathing. It's less about an intrinsic failure on Cody's part and more about a failure of understanding. Then, as if right on ending cue, Cody begins to understand, "When I'd danced before, I'd tried to disguise my weak corporate butt as bona fide candy ass. This time, there'd be no hiding. I would become what I wanted to be..." Or, rather, she's become, quite appropriately, what she already is.

At its 200-odd pages, the memoir reads quickly, and its style, free of any moral heavy-handness, defines a space of quirky and intelligent ease, a space not to be confused with quirky and vapid Chick lit. It's not terribly demanding or challenging, and yet its anthropological nature allows for a pure fascination, its minute details mining man's oddities.

While far from directly connected to Juno, book elements do show up in the film--HVAC references, the hamburger phone, the plethora of pop and rock tangents. It's easy to see how the two pieces of writing are connected, how Cody's distinct voice created both. In an industry where writers' names are barely mentioned by mainstream media, Cody has with these two efforts bandied her way to recognition, Karen Valby's Entertainment Weekly profile of Cody a sure marker of this.

An ancedote to close this piece: When I first approached Cody to say hello on Wednesday night, a handsome gentlemen, probably in his forties, had cozied up to her to talk about the film. "I was working as a stripper," she told him, to which he gave her an utterly blank stare. Cody stared back with her genuine bluish-gray eyes and watched as the man realized she wasn't kidding. "I'd read that," Lindsay, a friend of Cody's Atlanta publicist, said. And, at that, the man turned his eyes down and suddenly looked sheepish. I'd wear the same expression a few minutes later but for an entirely different reason. Where this gentleman was awed that she had been a stripper, I was awed that she's a writer. We all have our weaknesses.

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