How Minnesota Shaped Writer Diablo Cody

Diablo Cody—who goes by Brook, her birth name, these days—hasn’t lived in the Twin Cities for nearly 20 years, but she still has a strong connection to this place. Sure, her brief time here was half her lifetime ago, but it was maybe the most pivotal chapter in it. After all, the Twin Cities is where Brook became Diablo and where Diablo became a blogger and where that blogger became a stripper and where that stripper became a memoirist and, ultimately, where that memoirist became an Oscar-winning screenwriter. 

Now firmly rooted in California, with three kids and a veritable plate-spinning act of projects and potential projects, Brook Maurio, her legal name since marrying actor and producer Daniel Maurio in 2009, has made something of a conscious uncoupling from much of the person she created while living here, including, most notably, her name. 

Still, when we chat in late May about her turning Alanis Morissette’s seminal 1995 album Jagged Little Pill into a Broadway musical—her pacing around her L.A. living room and me pacing around my neighborhood—it’s clear there’s still some Minneapolis Diablo left in Brook and that that person isn’t done with this place just yet.

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Jagged Little Pill is coming to Minneapolis for the first time.

Which is super exciting.

But the show is old news for you by now, right? Like, you worked on it pre-pandemic.

Yeah. I mean, this was my first foray into theater, so I wasn’t aware of how long of a life it could have. Ideally, it keeps going in some form or another.

We’re the same age, and you talked about something—

So, super young.

Totally.

Super young and cool. 

I mean, the reality of being in my mid-40s does feel way younger and cooler than my impression of what my mid-40s would be when I was 18.

My impression of mid-40s when I was 18 was, like, “dead.” 

We’re also sort of generationless. I think we’re [Gen] X?

Yes. I definitely have always identified more with X than I do with millennials, because I had the mandatory childhood neglect that all of us experienced growing up in the 1980s. But at the same time, I have Gen X friends who are 55, and I don’t feel like I’m in the same cohort.

And we’re that singular group that got introduced to the internet in real time while we were still in school, but after already understanding life without it. 

Yeah, we were unplugged for all our childhoods, pretty much, which is amazing. I didn’t get an email address until I was 18.

Same. College email addy. I’m walking my dog. What are you up to?

I’m in between school pickups. I just picked up two of my kids, and then after we get off this call, I’m going to go pick up another one. So, basically, I am just the school pickup chauffeur. 

Before you were a school pickup chauffeur in L.A., you were here.

I lived in Robbinsdale.

But that was before Robbinsdale got cool things like Travail.

I don’t even know what that is. 

It’s a hip, cheffy restaurant.

What?! Yeah, no, that’s where I was because it was super affordable. I haven’t been back to Robbinsdale in quite some time, but yeah, that’s crazy to hear, actually.

So, what have you been up to—when not chauffeuring?

Well, I’ll tell you what I’m not doing: writing. Because the Writers Guild of America is on strike right now.

Ope!

Yeah. I am, in fact, striking. Prior to the strike, I was working on some cool stuff: I was developing a cheerleading show for Netflix. I wrote a horror movie that I think is going to come out in the next few months called Lisa Frankenstein. Actually, it’s more like Beetlejuice vibes, I’d say—like, goth-teenager fun vibes. I try to stay busy, but the industry is in absolute chaos right now.

Speaking of, I read in Vulture that you think Juno could not have happened for you the way it did in any other moment than exactly when you made it.

Oh, absolutely not. I mean, I’ve been in the industry for 18 or 19 years now. And it has changed dramatically since I rolled in. I don’t even know what kind of a career I would have as a new writer today because what I do—these more indie-flavored films that I built my career on—I have no idea how I would even get those movies made now. I feel really fortunate to have gotten in under the wire. But I’m turning 45 next month; I still want to work—I kind of have to. So, I need to figure out how a creature like me survives in this new ecosystem.

Can you figure that out right now—while you’re on strike, can you work?

I can’t write for people. I cannot contribute to these people’s profit in any way. If I want to sit down and write a novel, that’s fine. And I have been thinking about it, like, I should use this strike to my advantage, and I should probably try to do something creative. But I, for the most part, have just been rotting in my bed.

It’s like the pandemic again, but just for screenwriters.

It does feel a little pandemic-y. Not to turn this into the darkest, most dystopian conversation of all time, but there’s also this artificial intelligence issue that we’re grappling with, and it’s a big deal. Yesterday, my son who’s turning 13 said, “Mom, I have a great idea for an action movie.” And I said, “Oh, that’s awesome.” Because obviously, it’s my narcissistic fantasy that one of my kids becomes a screenwriter. And he starts reading it, and I’m like, “Dude, did AI help you with this?” And he’s like, “Well, it helped me with the grammar.” And then that turned into, “Oh, it helped me organize some of the thoughts into paragraphs.” And then finally, it was like, “Well, it helped me come up with the character names too.” And I was like, “I am not OK with this. I’m not going to praise this.”

I think the most dystopian thing about that, other than how effortlessly kids seem to be able to use AI to their advantage, is how quickly it went from being this nebulous “in the future” concept to being a tangible thing.

It happened a lot faster than I expected, and I’m not entirely sure how we’re going to negotiate our way around that as a union. 

You mentioned writing a book. I read that you’ve come to regret aspects of your memoir, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper.

I definitely would not write that book, or at least I wouldn’t write it the same way that I wrote it. I don’t have any regret about sex work; it’s just crazy to me that I could write that book while simultaneously having such a massive blind spot about all the different reasons people wind up doing sex work. It’s wild to me. 

But without that book and the blog that led to it, you wouldn’t have this career.

Oh, yeah. That is why I’m here. It was also because of Minnesota, though. I felt an energy there that was very inspiring. In Minneapolis, I just felt the freedom to come out of my shell in a way that I hadn’t in the past. I love Chicago, which is where I’m originally from, but I just felt like I was in a really big pond there, and I felt lost.

You’re not the first person who’s come here and found their voice. Lizzo found that here. Marlon James found that here.

I enjoy telling people that Minnesota is not what they think it is. Because there is a belief out here among the native Californians that everybody in the Midwest is some conservative creep. And I’m like, “You’d be surprised.”

They must never have read your blog. Which, speaking of—social media was a catalyst of your career, but you’re famously not “online” anymore.

It’s true. But I have to say, I did very recently, like in the last month, return to long-form writing online. My friend Jenny [Mollen Biggs] and I had this idea to do a Substack together. So, I have been essaying, and that’s been throwing me back to my old blogging days. I’m just kind of posting about stuff that happens in my life, and it’s cathartic. I mean, the reason I started blogging was because I kept getting rejection letters, and suddenly I realized, like, Oh, wait, you can literally just write whatever you want and put it on the internet without an editor, without a publisher? Anything? And, yeah, that feeling is still fun, as it turns out.

Like, “How have I not been doing this the whole time?”

Exactly. And I really haven’t written about parenting a lot, because there is just such a glut of parenting content online, and so much of it is obnoxious. But I was like, “I’m going to do it for myself.” And man, it is like therapy. Even if nobody else cares about it, it feels good to write about the challenges of raising three sons. 

People don’t want parenting advice; they want stories about kids trying to pass off AI-generated action movie scripts as their own.

You know what, I’m going to write about that. I wasn’t planning to, but you’re right, that would be a good one.

It’s totally a good one. Because the weird thing about our kids is that their internet worlds have somehow made them more cunning than we could ever be.

I know. They truly have grown up differently than any generation prior to them, and it’s trippy to observe.

Nothing is unusual to them.

No. I mean, the fact that they went through that pandemic is so funny to me. Not funny “haha,” but like, “What the fuck?”

I was freaking out, and they were just like, “Dad, it’s fine.”

That’s true. I actually don’t remember any of them ever panicking about it, which is interesting. But I did. 

And now that it’s sort of past us, it’s crazy how nobody talks about it.

I was literally just thinking about that because my kids’ school has this huge fair every year, and the fair was cancelled for two years because of the pandemic. And I was at the fair, and I’m just volunteering, doing my thing, whatever, and everyone is just crowded together and acting like it’s a normal fair. And I was like, “It literally is like that didn’t happen.”

I think that it happened so dang much that now we’re all like, “I don’t want to talk about that crap ever again.”

Yeah. Why bring it up? Exactly. I had a friend who was pregnant along the exact nightmare timeline, and I was just like, “I’m so glad I’m not her.” Anyway. 

So, here we are, the two people who are still wanting to talk about it, apparently.

Yeah, I know. I like this pandemic summit.

Getting us somewhat back on topic: I just rewatched Young Adult last night. Was Mercury, Minnesota, actually Mankato? I feel like it has to be.

I like that you are trying to guess. I actually can’t remember—it may have been Mankato. I wrote that movie in, I think, 2009. 

When you were long gone from here?

Actually, I came back because I owned the house in Robbinsdale for much longer than you’d think, because I was renting it to friends. So, I would pop back in, and I do remember writing some of Young Adult in my house in Robbinsdale. 

Um, that’s literally what Charlize Theron’s character is using as her excuse to be back in Mercury.

Oh, my God.

Like, she says she’s checking on her real estate.

I was not stalking an ex, though. I was literally just—

I mean.

No. I know. It would be funny if I was completely outing myself. Yes, I’m a complete psychopath. 

Your words, not mine.

So, my relationship to the city—it’s just always going to be a special time and a special vibe. And it’s strange, because I only lived there for four years, but it was just this incredibly formative time in my life, probably more so than any other four-year segment, other than maybe my first four years of motherhood. It was really liberating to move away from my hometown, where everybody knew me as this very anxious, introverted, cerebral person. And when I moved to Minnesota, I could reinvent myself and be like, “Well, actually, my name is Diablo, and I work at a strip club.”

Had you tried that at home, you—

I never would’ve gotten away with it. I have so much family, so many friends that would’ve just been like, “Oh, cut it out.”

“Oh my God, Brook is stripping now, and she’s calling herself Diablo.”

Oh, believe me, those conversations were had in Chicago. 

But it’s different when you’re down at the neighborhood strip club.

I would never have had the balls to do it in Chicago. That’s why Minneapolis was such an oasis and such a place of reinvention and fun. I’m pretty boring now; I wasn’t then.

Those early-20s years, to me, are when the good stuff happens.

It’s so much more fun than college.

And you came here for a relationship that blossomed but also ended. That’s not insignificant.

No, it was huge. I got married. It was a lot going on. I think about it a lot.

You’ve said that Diablo Cody is a character you needed to inhabit for a time, but not so much anymore.

By the way, there are people that still do call me “Diablo” that I work with just because it’s easier. I don’t have, like, a hard preference, but it feels silly. My kids did not know about my pen name until they were old. I think my oldest kid was 8 when one day he came up to me and said, “Who is Diablo Cody?” Because he’s seeing things around the house.

I mean, he found your freaking Juno Oscar, right?

Exactly. He just always thought it was somebody else’s. 

“Who is this person? Is this your friend? Why do you have their Oscar?”

And I was like, “No, that’s me.” It’s just really kind of this weird little footnote.

You used to interview celebs in a camper. You called it Red Band Trailer—I found it on YouTube.

That was something that I just decided to do for, actually, no reason. I just had this Airstream that I was really psyched about, and as it turns out, I’m not great at camping. But I was like, “I could do something with this. I’m going to interview people in the trailer.” And I’m not calling myself a trailblazer here or anything, but this was before Between Two Ferns and before all the podcasts were—

Before Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.

Yes. Exactly. But, yeah, it was kind of a lot of work because I was doing it all myself—like, booking the people. It was literally, like, the trailer and a couple people.

And it was just in your yard, right? Because in the one with Zooey Deschanel, she was like, “Oh, there goes your pool guy,” as a guy walks by the window with a hose!

Yeah. It was just in the driveway. It was so exciting to have opportunities and be like, “Oh, my God, if I want to call up John Krasinski and interview him on camera, I can.” I was just like, “I’m going to take advantage of everything I can before they kick me out of this town.”

Zooey didn’t know Diablo wasn’t your real name.

I mean, only someone born and raised in the industry like Zooey Deschanel would think that that was someone’s real name, because out here there are people named, like, “Diablo” and “Laser.”

She also made a pretty good point: that your given name, Brook Busey, has a ring to it.

I don’t mind it.

It’s alliterative. But you share a surname with Gary Busey, which probably cuts both ways.

When I first started working out here, people thought I was a Gary Busey nepo baby. I am, in fact, not related to him. 

I just listened to your appearance on Whitney Cummings’s podcast, and it was fascinating. I wish she could just magically have all of Joe Rogan’s listeners.

Yeah. Whitney’s a great interviewer. You know what? Joe Rogan is not the problem; the guy that scares me is Andrew Tate.

True, but when you have a megaphone the size of Rogan’s, you’ve got to be careful what you shout into it, even if you don’t know that what you’re shouting is bad.

Yeah. Like, maybe don’t tell everybody you’re taking hydroxychloroquine. [Shuffles around.] Sorry, I was trying to find some M&M’s, but I couldn’t find them. 

For you or for a kid?

For myself. 

I’m pacing around outside right now with no M&M’s in sight.

Speaking of, I pace compulsively. My friend calls me “Pacey Witter.” When Jagged Little Pill was in previews, I would go see the show every night, as is my job. And I cannot sit through a two-and-a-half-hour musical every night; I cannot sit. So, I would pace behind the last row of seats in the mezzanine. And the ushers would literally go to the producers and be like, “Who is the crazy woman pacing?”

What was your relationship to those glitzy Broadway musicals before writing this show?

I wasn’t a huge theater nerd, but I was definitely an enthusiast who had seen my share of touring musicals. But it wasn’t something I had ever aspired to do, especially because it is a New York–based profession and I’m very much rooted out here in L.A. But my agents lied to me and said that it would not require an extensive amount of travel. And I didn’t realize that that was a lie until I was very deeply embedded in the process. So, in case anyone’s reading this and they’re curious, if you want to write a Broadway show, you are going to spend a lot of time in New York.

You saved maybe one person from spending more time in New York than they wanted to with that warning.

The role of the writer in theater is different than a film. A film, you can just write a screenplay and fuck off, because the director is going to take over. And in theater, the writer is the main person. And I was like, “Oh, my God, what have I done?”

And you were trying to do something very novel: to create a fictional storyline using an album that famously tells a very nonfictional person’s very nonfictional story.

I was scared to death. I was so intimidated. I thought, “All I can do is make Alanis happy; I need to put everything else aside.” And when ultimately she was, that was the greatest feeling, because I was like, “I don’t care what happens. A global pandemic could hit and shut our show down, and I won’t care because I made Alanis happy.” 

Writing a hit Broadway musical was not on your career bucket list, and yet here you are with a Tony. I read that writing a watercooler TV show is on said bucket list. So, where’s your Emmy?

I don’t think it’s possible anymore. The only watercooler show I can think of right now is Succession. There are obviously super popular shows like Yellowjackets that have big, devoted fan bases, but I feel like the era that I grew up in where everybody was talking about what happened on Friends last night is over. It was a dream of mine to write, like, OK, my Seinfeld, my Friends. And now I don’t think that is a thing, because we have so many options and so many platforms that you’re not going to get 50 million Americans to sit and watch the same thing.

It’s not possible?

I mean, it is, but I guess you have to be, like, a Jesse Armstrong–level talent, which to be perfectly honest, I don’t know if I’ve got that in me.

But you didn’t know you had Juno in you either.

Yeah, that’s true. I mean, I don’t know I have anything in me. It’s always a surprise whenever I don’t completely shit the bed. I tell myself all the time I can’t do things. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I’m like, “I cannot pack another lunch,” and then, what do you know, I do.

Lunchables.

One of my kids did go to school with a Lunchable today, just FYI. 

Both of my kids did! Is Minnesota ever going to be a setting of yours again?

I think so. I see no reason to stop, and I certainly don’t feel like traveling to some other locale to soak up the flavor and do my homework, so I’m just going to stick to writing about Minneapolis.

“In Minneapolis, I just felt the freedom to come out of my shell in a way that I hadn’t in the past.”

—Diablo Cody

When you can write again—which, who knows when that will be? I’ll let you go pick up your kids. You have my permission to pack them Lunchables tomorrow.

This has been a Lunchable kind of week. The problem is, if I put more effort into it, they don’t want to eat what I make. Whatever, I’m not going to rant about this. 

I get it. All the “good” lunches end up in the trash.

It’s a bummer. Anyway, they’ll appreciate us someday.

Maybe. All right. Good luck with your son and his artificial intelligence movies.

Oh, yeah. Thanks. Good luck to you, too.

[Twenty minutes pass.]

Hey Brook. Sorry to break the phone-interviewing fourth wall by texting you a question I’d intended to ask you earlier, but alas. You said you want to set another project here. Any idea what that project might be? (Minnesota only takes slight offense to the fact that you set Jagged Little Pill in Connecticut, BTW.)

Hi! First of all, I set JLP in Connecticut because it needed to be a world of image-obsessed phonies and I didn’t encounter many of those in Minnesota :-) (emoticon throwing it way back). I actually do have plans for another Minnesota-set project. I’m obsessed with the idea of doing something new in the world of Jennifer’s Body, so we’d have to go back to Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota, for that. There needs to be more Minnesota gothic content out there. Fargo isn’t enough!

Movie or TV show?

I originally planned to pitch it as TV, but I think it’s shaping up to be a movie. We’ll see!

But a demonically possessed literal man eater who says things like, “Ope! Let me scooch right past ya!” and drinks Mich Golden Light is surefire watercooler-show fodder.    

😂

You’ve gotta actually respond to that (with more than an emoji), and really stick the landing, or it’ll never be an effective kicker to end this Q&A.

Jeez, pressure! I don’t think a polite Minnesota cannibal would pull the Superbowl-level ratings I’ve been dreaming of, but I appreciate your faith in my vision! 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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To Diablo and Back

By Rebecca Mennecke

From Minneapolis stripper to Hollywood screenwriter, here’s a peek at Diablo Cody’s rise to stardom.

2001: Brook Busey launches her first blog, Red Secretary, detailing the fictitious adventures of an English idiom–challenged Belarusian secretary. 

2003: Busey moves from Chicago to Minneapolis for a relationship that eventually leads to marriage. She launches her first bona fide blog, Darling Girl. 

2003: Using the nom de plume “Diablo Cody” (invented while traveling through Cody, Wyoming, listening to “El Diablo” by Arcadia), Busey divulges tidbits about her experiences stripping through her blog Pussy Ranch. 

2005: Cody publishes her memoir, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. 

2007: Cody amicably divorces and begins writing for Entertainment Weekly as a columnist. 

2007: She makes her cinematic debut with the hit film Juno, set in Elk River.  

2008: Juno wins the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, as well as the BAFTA Film Award for Best Original Screenplay. 

2009: Diablo Cody loves roller coasters, and her boyfriend, Daniel Maurio, proposes while they ride one together. 

2009: From heartfelt to horror: Diablo Cody writes, acts in, and associate produces Jennifer’s Body, about a Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota, high schooler who kills her male classmates while possessed by a demon. Later, after the emergence of the #MeToo movement, the film is regarded as a feminist cult classic. 

2011: Inspired by a story in the local paper, Cody writes and produces Young Adult, which tells the story of a selfish, abrasive writer who returns to her hometown of Mercury, Minnesota, exploring what it means to leave one’s youth behind. 

2015–2017: Cody writes and executive produces One Mississippi alongside comedian Tig Notaro (of Netflix’s Tig Notaro: Happy To Be Here fame).  

2018: Cody writes the book for the musical adaptation of Alanis Morissette’s album, Jagged Little Pill. The same year, she writes and produces Tully, which premieres at the Sundance Film Festival. 

2020: Cody receives the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for Jagged Little Pill. “I can’t believe you guys get up here all the time,” she tells the audience. “This is very scary. And you like it. You can’t get enough of it.”

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