The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hi, this is Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, here with a Slate Spoiler Special podcast on Young Adult, the new Jason Reitman movie starring Charlize Theron.

Joining me from the Slate, D.C. Office is Dan Koyce. Hey, Dan.

Hi, Dana.

So every time I've done a spoiler with you in the last few years, I've had to ask, are you writing for the voice now? Are you doing things for the post? Are you at New York Mag? And now I can finally say Slate, senior editor, Dan Coise. I'm really psyched. You guys finally just swept me off my feet. You belong here all the time. And now we've got you here, which means, among other things, that I can spoil a lot more movies with you. So I'm really excited. And actually, by rights, you should be hosting this spoiler podcast because you're reviewing young adult, not me.

That's true. So I'm... This is a slate spoiler special for a young adult.

Yeah, take it from the top. So let's talk about young adult.

We forgot to mention also, we forgot to mention that it's written by Diablo Cody, which is every bit as much the brand name above the title as Jason Reitman and Charlie's Theron, I would say.

Yeah, so I was just about to say that, you know, it's a Jason Reitman movie, but I think in the long run, what we're all more likely to think of it as is the Diablo Cody movie where she comes to terms with being Diablo Cody.

How so? And is that a good thing?

Well, it's, you know, she's given a lot of interviews already in which she talks about how it's sort of a lot of aspects of the story are particularly personal to her, this

notion of going off from her small town, ending up somewhere else, achieving some level of

success that's essentially inconceivable to the people she grew up with,

and then sort of trying to cope with that in her relations with the people she grew up with.

And I hope that Mavis Gary, the character that Charlie's Theron plays, is a horrible version of Diablo Cody

and not an actual documentary of Diablo Cody. But I do think there's a lot in this movie of Diablo Cody and not an actual documentary of Diablo Cody.

But I do think there's a lot in this movie of Diablo trying to figure out what it means to have grown beyond where she grew up and the person she was in high school.

So Mavis Gary, this stand-in for Diablo Cody in the movie is not a screenwriter, but a young adult novelist, hence the title.

She actually writes under a pseudonym, we find out halfway through. She's a ghost writer for a

popular, sort of a Sweet Valley High type, popular syndicated girl series. So that's the modest

level of success that she's found. She lives in Minneapolis, and she finds herself one day

going back to her own hometown.

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