MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota — Catholic girl. Office drone. Self-described dork.

Nothing in Diablo Cody’s background seems to explain why she decided to take her clothes off in front of paying strangers.

She had never so much as entered a bikini or a wet T-shirt contest when she saw a downtown topless bar advertising amateur night, as she trudged home one evening from her copy typist job.

Cody soon returned and, ignoring the bouncer’s laughter, gave it a try.

“I just thought I have to do it. I really don’t know what got into me. I just thought it sounded like fun. And I’d really hit the wall of boredom,” she recalls.

She quickly found out she was the only amateur competing, but despite losing — “I was definitely the worst stripper there” — Cody kept stripping for the next year and turned her adventures into a sharp and funny memoir, “Candy Girl,” subtitled “A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper.”

After a rollicking appearance on “Late Show With David Letterman” — where he named “Candy Girl” the first pick of “Dave’s Book Club” — Cody awaits the start of production this fall on her movie script, “Juno.” Brad Silberling (“Lemony Snicket’s a Series of Unfortunate Events,” “Moonlight Mile”) is slated to direct.

Cody, who just turned 28, also is planning another memoir — this time, about everything that’s happened to her in the past year.

“It was like being shot out of a cannon,” she says, looking punk with her tongue stud, black fingernails, skull-and-crossbones head scarf and upper-arm tattoo of a bikini-clad miss emblazoned with the words “JONNY’S GIRL” — Jonny being her husband.

Talking about sex has never been a problem for Cody, a longtime blogger who grew up the younger of two children in a boisterous Italian family in Lemont, Illinois, near Chicago, and attended Catholic school for 12 years. (Brook Busey-Hunt is her real name. She chose Diablo Cody for its cool, androgynous sound while visiting Cody, Wyoming. As a stripper, though, she used names such as “Bonbon” and “Roxanne.”)

“For some reason, I’ve always just had total verbal diarrhea when it comes to sexual issues. I’ve been making people’s jaws drop with frank sexual talk since I was about 10 years old,” she says.

Her “textbook parents” — dad works for the state of Illinois, mom’s an office manager — are “cool” with her new fame, Cody says.

“My dad always told me that his main objective in life was ensuring that I was not ordinary. So he’s happy to see me stand out,” she says.

In high school, Cody was “lead screamer” for Yak Spackle, a punk band she and her friends started. “It was such a horrible band, it almost qualified as performance art,” she recalls. But the exhibitionism was a precursor to her stripping.

She got her first tattoo the day she turned 18. Besides the arm tattoo featured on the cover of “Candy Girl,” Cody has another tattoo of a pinup girl on her left leg and the word “yes” — her reply to her husband’s marriage proposal — on her left wrist.

She wears a simple dark dress with a crucifix at her neck to an interview. Her hair, which has been “every color on the visible spectrum,” is at the moment its natural reddish-brown, and her slate-blue eyes are rimmed in black. While she wears dresses every day, Cody says, “I always say it’s drag for me. I always say I’m a big drag queen.”

“I don’t think I’m a very sexy person,” she says. “I am just loaded with testosterone. I’m just like a hairy, trash-talking woman, and I have no grace.” (During her month as a phone-sex worker after she quit stripping, her low voice served her well when she would pretend to be a transsexual.)

Highly intelligent (her IQ exceeds 140, she says), Cody aspired to be a writer and attended the University of Iowa, famous for its Writers’ Workshop, but hated academic life. “I could not get out of college soon enough,” says Cody, who graduated in 2000. She eventually she met her 35-year-old musician and graphic designer husband, Jon Busey-Hunt, on the Internet and moved to his hometown of Minneapolis in 2003.

A blogger since 2000 (her blog’s name is not family friendly), Cody spent her year as a stripper writing by day in coffeehouses, then lugging her laptop to write more at night at strip clubs, where people assumed she was doing her homework.

“People aren’t used to seeing a stripper writing her memoirs in real time,” she says.

“Candy Girl” hit bookstores just after last Christmas and sold out its initial shipment, said Lauren Marino, executive editor at Gotham Books. She says the hardcover is enjoying “a nice long, steady sale” and got a bounce in sales at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Borders after Cody’s appearance on Letterman in March.

Marino said she wasn’t looking for a book about stripping and strippers.

“It wasn’t so much the subject matter that attracted me as it was her voice. She can write about anything and make me want to read it. She’s so intelligent and witty. She’s funny, she’s edgy and she’s got a great sensibility,” Marino said.

Cody always had seen strip clubs as dangerous, creepy places — “I would actually shiver a little” walking past them, she says — but she soon got over her fear of stripping.

“It occurred to me very quickly that it is not that scary to be on stage naked,” Cody says. “Because, that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. If you’re a waitress, you carry sandwiches. If you’re a stripper, you take your top off.”

Cody had a job typing up radio ad copy when she entered amateur night at the Skyway Lounge. She remembers being shocked when some guy tipped her five bucks the first time she stripped.

“That’s when I started to think to myself, ‘This could be a nice way to make money.’ And it’d be a lot more fun than typing copy.”

But she soon discovered that clubs would expect the strippers to sell a quota of lap dances or T-shirts. At the end of a long shift, dancers could end up with the club taking a big cut, says Cody, who was a low-earner.

“To be a stripper, it’s not just about your body or your face or how erotic you can be on stage. It has to do with being able to create a fantasy for men and maintain that illusion for them, so that they actually believe that you are their girlfriend or companion, and that you are interested in what they have to say.

“And I cannot feign interest in anything to save my soul.”

Cody was living with her husband — her fiance at the time — while working as a stripper. His reaction?

“He loved it,” Cody says. “He’s never been the type of guy to hang out with women of ill repute. Now he was engaged to one, and it was very exciting for him.” They still exchange smiles when a song from her stripping days comes on the radio, she says.

After getting married, Cody wrote “Juno,” about a geeky pregnant teenage girl who develops a sexually charged rapport with the adoptive father of her unborn baby. Her screenplay, which she says is based on her best friend, was among the top of the 2005 Black List of “most-liked” scripts in Hollywood and was hailed by Entertainment Weekly, which graded it A-minus.

Until her appearance on Letterman, Cody says her neighbors didn’t know about her stripper past. She says they thought she only wrote for the alternative weekly City Pages, where she’s the TV critic.

But the response has been positive, says Cody, who is now a suburban stepmom to her husband’s 7-year-old daughter, from his second marriage — this is Cody’s first marriage.

And she bristles at suggestions that anyone who strips could write a book.

“If that were the case, the legions of women that I worked with, who were desperate to get out of it, would have done the same. There’s a reason that I did it and they didn’t. And the reason is, that I’m a storyteller.”