I am so not cool. I am so not cool. This refrain echoes through my head as Diablo Cody enters the restaurant where our interview is to take place and she starts to speak. Not only has she written a brilliant film and a half-hilarious, half-cringe-inducing book, she's clearly very cool and I just know I'm about to develop a serious crush on her. This is not going to go well.

Her immediate concern is that I will write a disparaging physical description of her. It is early on a Friday morning and, yes, there might still be sleep in her eyes, but she does not look haggard or hungover. Quite the opposite, actually. Her nail polish is chipped (I hadn't noticed, I swear), and she fears I will compare her appearance to that of a meth addict. I'm a professional. I would never do such a thing.

She sports a Dancing Elks High School Condors T-shirt-the fictional high school of Juno -and Spicoli-esque checkered Vans. She is impressed I recognize the shirt and goes on a riff about how people get confused. The school's name is Dancing Elks, but the mascot is actually a condor. Get it? The emblem: two elks awkwardly slow-dancing in an unnatural, upright position. Her excitement fades, and she's concerned that I will describe the wearing of the T-shirt as some lame act of self-promotion. I'm a professional. I would never do such a thing.

I ask where I can get one for myself.

Diablo Cody (the former Brook Busey-Hunt) has written just one produced feature, and she could probably retire on all the accolades it has garnered so far (let's see: Best First Screenplay Independent Spirit Award nom, Hollywood Film Festival Breakthrough Screenwriter of the Year, Best Picture at the second annual RomeFilmFest-and all this before the film's official release). Juno is directed by Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking ) and tells the story of 16-year-old suburban high school student Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page), who gets pregnant after boredom leads to a sexual encounter with her nervous, track-star pal Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). She then decides to give the baby up for adoption to infertile thirtysomething couple Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman, Jennifer Garner).

Juno is Cody's first screenplay-not only first produced, but first written. The 29-year-old had a memoir published in 2005: Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper (more on that later), and for years she's had a blog, The Pussy Ranch. So where exactly did this script come from? “The character of Juno, I think, was always there, fully formed, as dorky as that sounds,” she reveals. “The character is definitely autobiographical. But I never got knocked up in high school, so it's not, you know, factual.”

Juno's predicament, then, was completely fabricated. “The first thing I hit upon was the image of a pregnant teenage girl sitting in a living room with a couple of uptight yuppies and they're auditioning to become the parents of her unborn child. I don't know what inspired that, but I thought, That is the most awkward situation I can imagine,” she says. “A lot of comedy comes out of awkwardness, so I took that and ran with it. Adoption used to be this kind of cloak-and-dagger thing where the adoptive parents never met the birth mother, but now that's very common. It's this dynamic that's arisen in society, and I hadn't seen a movie that really addressed that.”

When Juno tells her parents she is pregnant, her father, Mac, is borderline impressed by the apparent fertility of the meek and scrawny Bleeker, while her stepmom Bren immediately brings up healthy eating, prenatal vitamins, and doctor appointments. This is rather atypical of how such things normally play out onscreen. “That's what loving parents do,” insists Cody. “They're concerned about their child first and foremost. People thought-I actually didn't see this coming-that was an unrealistic reaction to Juno's announcement. They wanted yelling and screaming and gnashing of teeth, but I've seen families in crisis. You just have to get through it. The histrionics aren't necessary.”

As Cody discusses her creations and their onscreen behavior, she credits the film's actors, who in turn were no doubt all drawn to the complicated characters and rich dialogue of her script. She singles out her onscreen pseudo-alter-ego.

“Ellen Page is a fuckin' machine,” Cody says, clearly in awe of the young actress who plays Juno. Of particular note are Page's flawless line readings: the character is verbose, witty, and at times seems to speak a language entirely of her own invention. This was by no means intentional. “I didn't set out to write stylized dialogue. I was just an inexperienced screenwriter. I didn't realize the dialogue was going to be a challenge. It was never a challenge for Ellen. She spits it out like she was born to do it. During the audition process, it was surprising how extensively some people were able to mangle it.

“It was my first screenplay,” she continues. “It wasn't like I was sitting down and was like, I'm going to do something totally crazy and baroque and blow people's minds. I just wanted to tell a story. But being inexperienced and unable to visualize the finished product, all I had was the page and I wanted to make the page as pretty as I could so I just went to town.”

About the film's at times odd vernacular, Cody says, “I made most of it up. I didn't research 'Teen Speak' or anything. It's all totally manufactured. I'm pretty immature. I didn't have to dig real deep.”

Unsatisified

The snow-bound suburban setting of Juno is one of its most authentic elements. It is rooted in Cody's time spent in Minneapolis, where she moved to be with the guy who would become her husband (graphic designer and music writer Jonny Hunt, now her ex). There she began writing her blog, and worked for a time as an arts editor for the alternative weekly, City Pages. She remained a Twin Cities resident, even after her screenwriting career began to find traction, eyeing the industry from afar. “I spent a couple years as a Minneapolis-based screenwriter, which is kind of weird, so I traveled a lot,” she recalls. “I spent about a week to two weeks every month in L.A. I was kind of lonely. There was a Lost in Translation phase in my life.”

However, the experience had its upsides. “Living in Minnesota is extremely conducive for writing. It's such a low-pressure environment,” she says. “You're not surrounded by other screenwriters at the coffee house. You get to kind of be the proverbial big fish.”

Photo: Jilly Wendell Diablo Cody

Moving to Los Angeles put her in the thick of the action and for the first time she made the acquaintance, and friendship, of other working screenwriters. Her peers. “Me and two other writers are a club. Dana Fox-put this in, it's really important-and Lorene Scafaria. The three of us are a special club and we're cooler than those Mexican directors that have a club [Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo Del Toro, and Alfonso Cuarón]. Print that. Thank you. Those girls are geniuses.”

This club, are there meetings?

“We have frequent meetings,” she reports. “And we go shopping. Because we're ladies. That's what women do,” she jokes. “We're trying to think of a name for the club.”

How about The Condors?

“That would be cool.”

Satin jackets could be made up.

“Yeah, satin jackets. We didn't even think about that,” she admits. She likes my idea! “I think we mentioned T-shirts. That's one of the valuable things about moving to L.A. Yeah, you're suddenly in the Twilight Zone, but you meet other writers. You feed off each other. You form all kinds of amazing symbiotic relationships.”

Since Juno, those relationships have multiplied for Cody. “One element of all this craziness surrounding Juno that surprised me was the amount of actresses that approached me and met with me. People I admire, just to talk,” she says. “They desperately wanted to connect with somebody who could write a strong female character. I couldn't believe it. Like, Really? There's not that many of us? I didn't know I was one of a small number. A lot of them are tired of playing the girlfriend. They're tired of being the pretty girl who trips and falls to give her humanity. They want to do something with substance. It's like I've become even more of a feminist since working in this industry. If I can change any of it in some small way…”

Achin' to Be

The strong female character that was Cody's own online persona was the first thing to attract the attention of BenderSpink's Mason Novick. The Los Angeles-based literary manager read her blog and knew he'd found somebody with a great writing style. He e-mailed her and asked if she had written any screenplays. She hadn't. But she'd always wanted to give it a shot.

“And then I did,” she recalls. “He convinced me to try and I figured, what can it hurt? This guy's connected. If I write something good, I mean, the most difficult part is getting your work out there. So I thought that job is done. All I have to do is write a screenplay. So I sat down and wrote Juno.”

She is aware of how incredible this series of events happens to be.

“I know how ludicrous it is [now], and he knew how crazy it was too. I didn't understand because I was so green,” she admits. “Looking back, I'm incredulous. I can't believe it happened. I remember the day Mandate optioned the script [of Juno ]. Mason called, and he was incredibly excited. So was I. But I didn't have a handle on how improbable the whole thing was. He did.”

She credits not only her manager for discovering and encouraging her as a screenwriter, but the medium through which they met. “The Internet's magical,” she says. “I don't know what I would be doing without the Internet. Languishing in obscurity. Still writing in little leatherbound diaries like I used to before blogs.”

Having never written a screenplay meant research. “I didn't exactly know how a screenplay was formatted, so I went to Barnes & Noble and got [the printed screenplays of] Ghost World and American Beauty, because I enjoyed those movies,” she recalls. “I flipped through them. I wasn't looking for act structure or dialogue tips or anything like that. I was honestly just looking for how it looks on the page. That was what I did. And those were shooting scripts, so I think I formatted it improperly anyway.”

Taking a moment to consult my notes, Cody eyes my research material. “Oh, you have a little folder? You're very organized, aren't you? You have your notes in a little thing. I like that.”

She finds you endearing. Keep it together, keep it together.

You were reaching for said folder to ask about her Wikipedia entry. Is she aware of it? No, she hasn't seen it before. In the section on Juno, it reads: “Advance praise for the script has commended Cody on fluid writing closely tied with the arc and three-dimensional characters fully realized.” She laughs and sort of wrinkles her noise. “Who wrote that, are they in Japan? I don't understand that, do you?”

Talent Show

It's time to talk about stripping. It was bound to come up. While it is not usually gentlemanly to bring up someone's sordid past on a first date, she did write an entire book on the subject. Before there was Juno, there was Candy Girl, Cody's 2005 memoir of her year spent working in the Minneapolis sex industry. What possessed this college-educated, reasonably well-employed twentysomething to ditch the corporate day job for a nightly gig dancing au naturel onstage? Like Juno's decision to have sex with Paulie, the book suggests that the whole nude dancing thing was, well, sort of arbitrary. And if nothing else, she did get that fascinating book out of the experience.

I have one obligatory question about Candy Girl and her stripping experiences.

 “I'm surprised you have one,” she says. “Generally, people have about 95.”

Actually, I haven't finished reading the book yet.

“It's a tough read,” she teases me. “It's my Anna Karenina.”

(The book is a mere 212 pages long.)

I've had other stuff going on, I'm sorry, I'm sorry…

“I know, it's grueling, right?” she continues. “I think there might be a reader's guide to it.”

She hates me. I've failed her.

Stop it. You have a job to do here.

The book reveals that there is no screening or interview process when it comes to working in a strip club. You simply show up, present an I.D. that says you're 18, and start dancing that night.

“Yes! Instantly!” She marvels at this as well, even though she's the one who actually went through it. “I always thought there was this audition process, like a sleazy guy was going to look me up and down. None of that happened. They would honestly be like, Are you sentient? Do you have any open sores? And can you work tonight? They would just make a Xerox copy of your I.D. and you would change and go to work.”

One day you're a copy typist, the next day you're a stripper.

“And that is the weirdest day of your life,” she admits. “It happens so quickly. Even once you go into the dressing room, put your tarty little outfit on, and come outside, you're still somewhat grounded in reality. Then you go onstage, then you're naked and it's like, Oh, if my mom could see me now! It's very weird. I used to have almost disassociative episodes when I was stripping. If I saw myself in the mirror, I would never recognize myself right away. I just couldn't wrap my mind around what I was doing.”

Cody has a deal now for a second memoir, this one detailing her unlikely (and somewhat stratospheric) rise as a working screenwriter. The rarity of which cannot be overstated. “It's sort of the continuing adventures … the jump I made from local humorist and ex-stripper to screenwriter was really sudden,” she says.

Sort of like stripping. One day you're not and the next…

“Exactly. It was exactly like that,” she agrees. “And I feel that story needs to be told. It is very unbelievable.”

Sixteen Blue

Minneapolis strip clubs are a far cry from the hallowed halls of the Catholic high school Cody attended in her Chicago youth. Originally, the high school in Juno was to be a Catholic high school, named Perpetual Blood. The subject matter was similar to the 2003 comedy Saved! (written by Brian Dannelly and Michael Urban), so the school became a public one instead, Dancing Elks High.

“I went to Catholic school for 12 years, so it was strange for me to have the characters attending a public school. I don't know what it's like to live a life that normal,” she admits. As a public high school graduate, I inform her that her depiction is pretty spot-on. She's glad to hear it. “I marched off to school every day in my crisp pleated skirt. I remember once getting a week's detention because the back of my blouse was untucked. It was a very strict environment.” Teen pregnancy was not prevalent in her experience during those years. “At my high school, if you became pregnant, you vanished from the premises immediately. There was never a pregnant girl in high school, in four years. I find that rather suspicious.”

The more she discusses the film, the clearer it is that she did dig deep, contrary to her earlier admission. The script's tenderness and honesty when it comes to the foibles of young adults is where the film hits its stride. The dynamics between teens and adults are acutely observed and provide some of the most revealing character moments. In fact, you'd think Cody had actually been a heartbroken 16-year-old boy at some point, the way a character like Paulie is so achingly, awkwardly alive onscreen.

With the protagonist, there is a realistic mix of cockiness and naïveté. Juno thinks she knows everything, acts like she has it all figured out, but she's also still just a kid. In one scene, her father asks where she's been, and she smartly replies she's been out dealing with things well beyond her maturity level.

“The one adult she looks up to, who's got it together, turns out to be the one with the greatest weakness,” Cody says of Mark Loring, the prospective adoptive dad. “That's a tough thing for her to swallow. That's what it's like being a kid. That's why I think teenagers are so disdainful toward adults, because they're constantly failing you. Then you realize, Is this what I'm destined to become? Much better to be a teenager. I still agree. I want to stay a teenager at heart forever. I don't want to ever become an adult. When you're a teenage girl, people do try to put you in a box. You're either a good girl or a bad girl, and so many of us are a curious mixture of both.”

I Will Dare

There are many stories one reads about Diablo Cody and for the most part, they appear to be true. One of my favorites appeared in Rolling Stone this past summer, in their annual Hot List issue, where she was named Hot Screenwriter of 2007. She demurs when told that this is an appropriate commendation, but I agree with them. In the accompanying piece, it says that Cody watched Superbad this summer, felt challenged (or inspired, take your pick), and immediately went home to start writing. This is true.

“I had no plans to write a spec. I was already up to my ears in assignments,” she reveals. Like a two-script deal at Warner Bros., for one. “But I saw Superbad, I came home and started writing immediately. Immediately. It's wonderful to be inspired like that. It was part inspiration because I found the movie so hilarious and it was part a feeling of … it seemed like a challenge.” The resultant spec, Girly Style, is set up at Universal. She describes it as “kind of a college sex comedy told from the female perspective. I had never really seen anything like that with female protagonists.”

The morning that we meet, there has been an announcement in the trades that film actress Toni Collette has taken her very first TV series role: the lead in Cody's pilot, The United States of Tara, the story of a suburban housewife and mom-who happens to have multiple personalities. Cody is giddy about this development. The single-camera comedy is for Showtime and originated as an idea by Steven Spielberg.

This is also true.

When it came time to make this jump from writing for big screen to small, she found it to be a rather fluid transition. “TV is just a more accelerated pace, which I enjoy. It's a challenge. But I just kind of did it. I have been such a hardcore television watcher my entire life, that TV format was just kind of second nature to me.”

This theory also applied to her work on Juno. “I think if you watch enough movies and you love movies, you can write a movie,” she says. “In recent years I have not read any books on screenwriting, but I have begun watching way more movies. That is the best education you can get.”

It is clear a few short weeks after our interview, in terms of that education, that she has quickly risen from an undergrad to an upperclassman (or -woman). Yet another script of hers has sold, this one to Fox Atomic. Jennifer's Body is a horror comedy to be produced by Reitman and will star Transformers hottie Megan Fox.

Seriously. Do you hate her yet?

For a person with so many positive developments in her life, it seems appropriate that the word Yes is tattooed inside her left wrist. When asked about the tattoo, she says simply, “It's the most beautiful word in the human language.”

Bastards of Young

Beyond watching more movies, Cody found that her time spent on the Juno set was also educational. “And it's humbling to see the finished product,” she adds. “Because I think a lot of writers, whether or not we admit it, are kind of self-aggrandizing. We know we're the genesis of the story. We tell ourselves that every night as we gaze at ourselves in the mirror. But when you see the film and you realize how much a great director can take material to the next level, you go, Okay, this is definitely a team effort.”

It is an experience she continues to chase. “I visit as many sets as I can-even when it's trespassing,” she laughs. “I've become an addict.”

Juno director Reitman is a screenwriter in his own right; sensitivity to the writer's material was likely paramount to him when directing the film. The finished product is closer to the original script than its creator expected. “I always imagined the film was never going to seem quite like the movie that unspooled in my mind while I was writing,” she says. “A lot of people think visually when they're writing. But now that I've seen the movie, it's eerily similar to the Diablo Cody cut, so to speak.”

She credits Reitman for their symbiotic collaboration. “Jason-I don't know if he'll ever direct anybody else's script again. I think he'll direct his own material-but he has a gift for collaboration. I'm still shocked he did it. Jason is something else. I really look up to him. It constantly blows my mind that we're the same age. He's so literate in film, so intelligent, so well-spoken. I just feel like a grubby little sister next to him.”

Reitman's first feature, Thank You for Smoking, was an assured, sophisticated film, inspiring and infuriating-he was all of 27 when it was made. “Doesn't it piss you off?” Cody jokes. “He just turned 30. He can go to hell with his young self.”

Of course, the same could be said of Cody.

“No, the same could not be said of me,” she says affirmatively. “I spent a lot of years dicking around. I think I had a screenplay in me when I was 18, 19, but unfortunately I was stubborn and pessimistic. I didn't think I could make that a reality.”

Some people are born writers, and Cody seems to be one of them. It just took her a while to figure it out. “I have always loved to write, always,” she says. “And I was always encouraged by my teachers. It's funny I didn't listen to them. I definitely wasn't lacking for support.”

So she didn't begin writing seriously until college. “I went to the University of Iowa. They have the writer's workshop there. They have an undergraduate workshop, and I got in,” she tells me. “I mainly focused on poetry. I laugh about that now. I actually think it wound up being helpful because as a poet you develop a certain efficiency with language that I think you use as a screenwriter. Every line of a poem has to be striking. In prose, you can pad it out more, but screenwriting is … I don't know, it's the same way.”

It seems the highest compliment I can pay Cody is that her work is inspiring. After watching Juno the first time, I wanted to go home and write myself. “Really? That makes me happy,” she says. She likes me! “That's the best thing I could hear. It's funny the movies that inspire you. They're unexpected. I had just started writing Juno, and I was watching Napoleon Dynamite with my family on Thanksgiving. I remember being struck by the urge to go back to Juno and keep writing. That movie renewed my confidence. I realized you can make a small, weird movie that touches a lot of people. This could be a big deal for you, I thought. So I went right back to it.”

Having written Juno in the screenwriting wasteland of Minnesota, far from Hollywood's influence, there was a decided lack of self-awareness to the process that Cody hopes to maintain. From the vantage point of a produced work, various studio assignments, and time spent on set, she's found herself becoming more self-aware as a writer. “Once you've become more experienced, go through the development process and get notes from people as I have on other projects, then you unfortunately become more self-aware,” she observes. “I don't know if it's superstition or what, but I don't read books about screenwriting. I do not like to talk about the craft of screenwriting. I don't like to read about other screenwriter's experiences, I don't ameliorate other screenwriter's methods. I try to keep things as raw as possible. I feel I had success with that method, so I'm going to stick to it.”

The waiter arrives with our check. No! Breakfast is finished and our time almost concluded. In humble, nerdy fashion I ask Cody if she will autograph my copy of Candy Girl. She obliges-a memento of our time together!

From her blog to her book to her movie, all the work shares an original voice that is honest, hilarious, and real. As we leave and I pay her this final compliment, she thanks me for the interview (She really, really likes me!) and says, “I'm glad that I have a voice. I think you spend years experimenting with different voices as a writer so when you hit on one that feels real, it's a good feeling.”

She's gone and I think to myself, I wish I'd known a girl like Juno MacGuff when I was in high school. Just like in the movie, she'd tell me I'm the coolest person she's ever met. And that I don't even have to try.

And just like Paulie Bleeker, I'd have to admit, I try really hard, actually...