Busey-Hunt, Brook

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Busey-Hunt, Brook

(Brook Busey, Diablo Cody)

PERSONAL: Married Jon Hunt (a musician).

ADDRESSES: Home—Minneapolis, MN. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Gotham Publicity, Penguin Group, 375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014.

CAREER: Worked as a typist and as a stripper in Minneapolis, MN; City Pages (alternative weekly), Minneapolis, associate arts editor.

WRITINGS:

(As Diablo Cody) Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper (memoir), Gotham (New York, NY), 2005.

Writer of screenplays, including Juno.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A screenplay.

SIDELIGHTS: Brook Busey-Hunt is a screenwriter and the author of a memoir of her experiences as a stripper. After meeting her future husband, keyboardist Jon Hunt, online, she moved to the Twin Cities, where he lived, and worked in an office. When Busey-Hunt saw an ad for an amateur night on the marquee of a strip club, she began a new career, one that she documented in a journal.

Busey-Hunt wrote Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper under the pseudonym Diablo Cody. In the memoir, she tells of her time as a stripper, moving from club to club, giving lap dances and stripping behind glass. After a year she took a different career path and became arts editor of a Minneapolis alternative weekly. Her book reflects her fondness for the women with whom she stripped, but reveals how they are often exploited by the clubs. A Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that "readers will wish the book were longer, though they'll be glad it ends before anything really ugly happens." A Kirkus Reviews contributor wrote that "for the most part this is an honest and amusing memoir that trades in neither pathos nor down-and-out freakery."

Amy Carlson Gustafson, who interviewed Busey-Hunt for the Pioneer Press, commented on Juno, Busey-Hunt's first screenplay to be made into a film. Gustafson wrote that "the buzz is that Juno, about a young teen dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, is in the same vein as the quirky cult hit Napoleon Dynamite. One Hollywood-type has dubbed it 'Fallopian Dynamite.'"