The woman sitting across from me is, for all intents and purposes, Diablo Cody.

When her children hear the name cited onThe Simpsonsand ask, Diablo Codys you, right?

When she goes to the doctor, thats the name on her file.

Diablo Cody (aka Brook Maurio) is seated, wearing all black and looking at the camera.

When I arranged to speak with the screenwriter of thenew filmLisa Frankenstein, thats who I asked for.

Im doing my best.

Writers dont have stylists, says Diablo Cody.

Diablo Cody (‘Lisa Frankenstein,’ ‘Jennifer’s Body’) poses next to succulents.

Im stuck with it, she shrugs.

The pen name was born online in the early aughts, when she was a 20-something Midwesterner.

She was working soul-sucking 9-to-5s, receiving nothing but rejections from literary magazines for her poetry and feeling stuck.

Diablo Cody sits in a wicker chair and looks at the camera.

And they did, which is so predictable.

The blog eventually landed her a memoir deal, paving the path for her first screenplay.

And she won an Academy Award.

Diablo Cody, screenwriter of ‘Juno,’ sits on a printed couch, with a wooden screen behind her.

But just as Diablo Cody was ascending to Hollywoods greatest heights, a weight was tied to her ankle.

Shortly beforeJunopremiered, theNew York Timespublished a story titled Diablo Cody: Climbing the stripper pole to Hollywood stardom.

The Associated Press went with Ex-stripper Diablo Cody beats odds with Juno screenplay.

Screenwriter Diablo Cody (‘Lisa Frankenstein’) poses against a wall of ivy.

Most girls I knew hated strippers, she writes in her memoir,Candy Girl.

They used stripper as an adjective to dismiss anything that was crass, blowsy or distasteful.

From the outside, she seemed to keep it together.

She has that rare gift to see herself standing there in third person.

Looking back, I should have just worn a full-length [dress].

I should have worn sleeves.

Its not fun having people fat-shaming you, she says.

People did not like it.

(Really, the boys it was marketed to did not get it.)

Theattacksonthatmovie, they felt like they were personal to me and to Megan Fox, says the writer.

Suddenly, living in Diablo Codys skin no longer felt tenable.

And that was when I officially was like, this has gone too far, she says.

So she decided to reinvent herself, this time as Brook, The Mom.

I was ready to escape from this thing that I had created, to get back to something real.

Still, the battle scars of the early aughts remain.

When Theron met Cody on the set ofYoung Adult, she was shocked by her humility.

She was a little twitchy and kind of like, Am I in the way?

Should I be here?

Thats not the first layer that you see of her.

These days, the severed penises no ones going to bat an eye, Cody says.

Lisa Frankensteins relatively painless path to theaters might speak to our eras appetite for mens comeuppance.

(Whats a little on-screen castration in the name of catharsis?)

It has ascended to cult-classic status.

Now that Cody knows the audience will be there, she wants to make a sequel toJennifers Body.

Theres plenty of material to sink her teeth into.

We didnt get to go there, at least not as much as we wanted to.

Luckily the subtext was there, and people were able to take that away.

But I want to know what their background is.

I know theyve been friends a long time, but lets talk about that.

InLisa Frankenstein, little is suppressed in the subtext.

I fought that, because there was one scene that was really important to me, Cody says.

I thought that was powerful.

Its not this up-close, kind of intimate experience I wanted it to be.

But we had to lose it to get the PG-13, and ultimately, Im glad we did.

Nobody needs sex-comedy-horror more than high school girls.

For every beloved Diablo Cody project, theres one amazing-sounding one that never came to fruition.

Her live-action reboot of thePowerpuff Girlsmade it to pilot before getting shelved.

Madonna is a god.

I’m constantly reinventing myself, I always have, she says.

I dont think thats necessarily a good trait.

It is a strategy for me.

It belongs to the past: a different country, with more rights.

Shes all but disowned her 2005 memoir for its myopic take on sex work.

So I love seeing her being validated as a thinker [today].

Still, she wonders if theres a space for redemption.

Maybe theyre just tougher than I am, I dont know.

I do believe that people can grow and change, she says.

I personally know that I have.

There are so many opinions I had in the past that were problematic that I no longer have.

We change; we stay the same.

She fingers a scar on her forehead, hidden behind her jet-black bangs.

This morning I was getting my makeup done.

The makeup artist said, Oh, you have a scar up here, she says.

The scar on my forehead is literally from 1979.

Because I cannot fathom that Im still that baby.