Diablo Cody is the pseudonym of Brook Busey-Hunt, a Los Angeles-based writer and blogger (originally from Chicago via Minneapolis) originally known for her yearlong foray in the stripping and peep show circuits of Minneapolis, candidly chronicled on her Pussy Ranch blog and in her 2006 memoir Candy Girl: A Year in The Life of an Unlikely Stripper. Cody has also written the forthcoming movie Juno, and a sitcom called The United States of Tara, based on an idea by Steven Spielberg, is currently in pilot stage at Showtime. Several other scripts are in development stage at various studios.

Cody has likened herself to a naked Margaret Mead (a 20th century cultural anthropologist) in her fascination with stripping and the seedy underbelly of society. In an interview on Late Night with David Letterman, Busey-Hunt said she chose a penname because Brook sounded too tedious. Diablo is the Spanish term for the Devil.

Cody graduated college with a media studies degree, and her first jobs were doing secretarial work at a Chicago bankruptcy law firm and later proofing copy for advertisements that played on Twin Cities radio stations. Both positions provided copious fodder and perspective for later writings. Her commencement in the online world began with a parody of a weblog called Red Secretary, detailing the (fictional) exploits of a secretary living in Belarus. The events were thinly-veiled allegories for events that happened in Cody's real life, but told from the perspective of a disgruntled, English-idiom-challenged Eastern Bloc girl. Her first bona fide blog appeared under the nickname Darling Girl after Cody had moved to Minneapolis from Chicago to “live-in sin” with Jon Hunt, a musician she had met over the internet. They eventually married.

The Darling Girl weblog would be forerunner to the more risqué Pussy Ranch. In Darling Girl, Cody detailed her daily experiences and interactions, colored with personal reflections such as her changing taste for soda brands and pickles and growing zen for Minneapolis lifestyle.

On a whim, as Cody would later describe it, she signed up for amateur night at one of the raunchiest Minneapolis strip clubs. Although she did not win, Cody so enjoyed the novelty of the experience that she contemplated stripping as a career. Eventually she quit her day job.

Her time in the strip club world would not be limited to stripping. Later she would indulge readers with her exploits in private shows and simulated intercourse. Cody also spent time working peep shows at SexWorld, a Minneapolis adult novelty and DVD store. Eventually she became disillusioned with stripping and switched to phone sex. Her short stay there stemmed from the way women were treated as a whole in the sex industry. Cody soon made retreat to more traditional employment in journalism, and a budding writing career stimulated by her skin trade days.

While still stripping, Cody began writing for City Pages, an alternative Twin-Cities weekly. Cody drew literary fans and received accolades for puff-free accounts and columns, with special emphasis on critiques of society and popular culture. In one instance, she humorously referred to her time at the Village Voice-owned newspaper as "yellow journalism." She left City Pages just before it changed editorial hands. Cody has since written for the now-defunct Jane magazine.

At the age of 24, Cody wrote her memoir Candy Girl: A Year in The Life of an Unlikely Stripper. The memoir began after a publisher showed keen interest to the acerbic wit and popularity Pussy Ranch had received, according to Cody. After the book was published in December 2005, it was heralded for possessing an original quality steadied with self-deprecating tack that made Cody endearing to her reader. It was the same model used in Pussy Ranch: astute and almost unbearably unflinching observations into the psyches of women in the stripping business. Many critics commented the memoir took an objective look without being too formal, and commented favorably on the book's black humor.

Detractors delved into the usual flaws of blog-to-memoir books, such as "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" (i.e., why pay for a book when the blog is free). Other critics and past fans of her blog commented that the writing in the book was stilted, lacking the unrelenting directness and force that had made her blog noteworthy. Feminist analysis (Candy Girl is often placed in the Feminist literature section of most larger-named bookstores) claimed guarded approval to the ideas put forth in the memoir.

On March 20, 2006, Cody appeared on Late Show with David Letterman to promote Candy Girl. Letterman, imbued with fascination with the sex industry and her observational prowess, inducted the book as the opening pick of ‘Dave’s Book Club.’ There have been no additions to the book club since.

After completion of the book, Cody was encouraged by Mason Novick, the manager who helped her secure a publisher for the book, to write a screenplay. Within months she wrote Juno, a coming-of-age-story about an unplanned pregnancy for a unique teenager living in Minneapolis. The Jason Reitman-directed comedy will star Ellen Page and Michael Cera. Advance praise for the script has commended Cody on fluid writing closely tied with the arc and three-dimensional characters fully realized.

In July 2007, Showtime announced that it would be producing a pilot of Cody's Dreamworks television series The United States of Tara. Based on an original idea by Steven Spielberg, Tara is a comedy about a mother with dissociative identity disorder (a.k.a. multiple personality disorder). Toni Collette has signed on to play the title role. October of 2007 saw a flurry of activity for the writer, as she sold a script entitled "Girly Style" to Universal Studios, and a horror script called "Jennifer's Body" to Fox Atomic. The latter is set to star Megan Fox, and will begin lensing in early 2008. In addition, she rewrote a script called "Burlesque" for director/screenwriter Steven Antin.

Juno was the runner-up for the Toronto Film Festival People's Choice Award, and top prize at the Rome Film Festival. In addition, Cody received a Hollywood Film Festival Award for Breakthrough Screenwriter.

*Unlikely Pole Dancer Tells Strippers' Story by Megan Scott for the Associated Press, published in The Orange County Register on March 10, 2006. Retrieved on October 7, 2006. *Meet the 'Candy' Stripper by Jessica Shaw for Entertainment Weekly on December 16, 2005. Retrieved on October 7, 2006. *Beauties, Beasts, Biz by Nicole LaPorte for The New York Observer on January 16, 2006. Retrieved on September 21, 2007. *Biography for Diablo Cody Internet Movie Database. Retrieved on October 7, 2006. *Page, Reitman Join Juno by Daniel Kreps for Ioncinema.com, October 4, 2006. Retrieved on October 8, 2006. *Diablo Cody on the Late Show, posted March 21, 2006 to youtube. Retrieved on October 26, 2006.

*The Pussy Ranch * *Interview with Cody about Juno