Candy Girl by Diablo Cody

Books are like Mexican food. What taste good to one person just doesn't cut it for another. We have all these romantic memories and points of reference, needs, prejudices, bad days, and sometimes just bad taste that dictate what we like or don't. And just because a book is on all the bestseller lists, that doesn't mean it is good. For example, The Shack, which was so infuriating and insulting that I am embarrassed to even mention in this blog. So book (movie, food) reviews can be rather meaningless, but that doesn't stop me from reading them, nor writing them.


I also can't seem to learn that just because someone writes one thing well that means that everything they write is sterling. I was so sure that Candy Girl: A Year In The Life Of An Unlikely Stripper, by Diablo Cody, who wrote the screenplay for the movie Juno, would be fun, fun, fun. But it was dumb, dumb, dumb.

I admit that I have a rather strange fascination with strippers, which probably had as much to do with the purchase of Candy Girl as my expectations about the author.

I was always pretty prejudiced against strippers (degradation of women, blah, blah, blah) until I found out that someone I really liked a lot lived the secret life of a stripper, and when I outed her, she described it as liberating, a great way to stay in shape, and an important source of income for a lot of single moms.

But back to the book. Diablo is certainly a very clever girl, and if I were a young bohemian, I would probably love this book, but for this old gal it just felt like a sophomoric, angst-ridden piece of fluff, but not as bad as The Shack, which was just infuriatingly stupid.