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Summary
Summary
#1 New York Times Bestseller
"Amy Schumer's book will make you love her even more. For a comedian of unbridled (and generally hilarious) causticity, Schumer has written a probing, confessional, unguarded, and, yes, majorly humanizing non-memoir, a book that trades less on sarcasm, and more on emotional resonance." -- Vogue
" The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo is an alternatingly meditative, sexually explicit, side-splittingly hilarious, heart-wrenching, disturbing, passionately political, and always staggeringly authentic ride through the highs and lows of the comedic powerhouse's life to date." -- Harper's Bazaar
"This is your happy hour with Amy Schumer...It's Bossypants meets Trainwreck meets your long weekend." --TheSkimm
"Amy's got your back. She's in your corner. She's an honesty bomb. And she's coming for you. "
--Actress Tilda Swinton and Trainwreck co-star
The Emmy Award-winning comedian, actress, writer, and star of Inside Amy Schumer and the acclaimed film Trainwreck has taken the entertainment world by storm with her winning blend of smart, satirical humor. Now, Amy Schumer has written a refreshingly candid and uproariously funny collection of ( extremely ) personal and observational essays.
In The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo , Amy mines her past for stories about her teenage years, her family, relationships, and sex and shares the experiences that have shaped who she is--a woman with the courage to bare her soul to stand up for what she believes in, all while making us laugh.
Ranging from the raucous to the romantic, the heartfelt to the harrowing, this highly entertaining and universally appealing collection is the literary equivalent of a night out with your best friend--an unforgettable and fun adventure that you wish could last forever. Whether she's experiencing lust-at-first-sight while in the airport security line, sharing her own views on love and marriage, admitting to being an introvert, or discovering her cross-fit instructor's secret bad habit, Amy Schumer proves to be a bighearted, brave, and thoughtful storyteller that will leave you nodding your head in recognition, laughing out loud, and sobbing uncontrollably--but only because it's over.
Author Notes
Amy Schumer was born on June 1, 1981 in Manhattan, New York City, New York. She is a graduate of Townson University with a degree in theater. She is a stand-up comedian, actress, writer, and producer. She considers herself a feminist and addresses social issues through her comedy and writing. Her film work includes Trainwreck, which she wrote and played the leading role. In 2015 she was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people. Her book, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, was published in 2016 and is a bestseller.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her first book, the Emmy Award-winning comedian offers an entertaining and eclectic collection of 30-plus essays, including "An Open Letter to My Vagina" and "Forgiving My Lower Back Tattoo." Her prose, like her popular comedy act, is plucky, forthright, hilariously raunchy-and honest. Though she claims the book is not an autobiography (at the age of 35, Schumer asserts, it's too early to share her life story), readers will learn of her childhood on Long Island, born into "New Money" (her father ran an exclusive baby furniture shop). By the time she's 10, however, challenging times have fallen on the family: the business is lost, her parents eventually divorce, and her beloved alcoholic father is diagnosed with MS. Schumer works various jobs (waitressing, pedicab driver, etc.) but ultimately is true to her passion for inspiring laughter. The book's centerpiece is a comparatively longer essay on her career, revealing the hard work of touring and the dedication, heartaches, missteps, and triumphs on the path to stand-up success. Along with off-the-wall one-liners, anecdotes, and confessions, Schumer shares some solemn experiences, such as bodysurfing with her disabled dad for the last time, and her involvement in an abusive relationship with a boyfriend ("When you're in love with a man who hurts you, it's a special kind of hell, yet one that so many women have experienced"). Amid ill-fated dates, alcohol-induced blackouts, and late-night eating binges, Schumer, in these candid, well-crafted essays, wears her mistakes "like badges of honor." (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Schumer recently said she is not trying to be likable, but you wouldn't guess it from this book. Such memoirs are pitched as feminist statements, but of what kind? A few years ago, journalist Kaitlin Fontana wrote about the rise of a literary genre she dubbed "the Femoir". Femoirs, she wrote, are "memoirs written by female comedians ... propelling their authors from acts to brands". And not even memoirs, really, but a collection of confessional essays loosely strung together on a self-help string. As this was 2012, Fontana was referring to Tina Fey's Bossypants, Chelsea Handler 's My Horizontal Life, Sarah Silverman's The Bedwetter and Mindy Kaling 's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, all of which were smart, funny and deservedly bestsellers. If Fontana's term seemed niche then, it feels ubiquitous now. Since 2012, there have been femoirs from pretty much every high-profile American female comedian under 50, and with repetition the format has calcified. Whereas a memoir will underline its subject's uniqueness, the femoir intimates that the author is just like the reader. It will include anecdotes about how the writer is insecure but also, like, really strong, and there will be a continual emphasis on how the writer is fallible but simultaneously inspirational. The limitations of the femoir reveal how narrow the parameters still are for women in the public eye, who are expected to be exceptional but also an everywoman. These books are invariably pitched as feminist statements; because the bar is still so low, it is apparently a triumph of equality when a woman admits to enjoying sex. But there is a fine line between a woman feeling able to say something and feeling obliged to do so for her brand. The bar is still so low, it is apparently a triumph of equality when a woman admits to enjoying sex The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo is the femoir from Amy Schumer, one of the highest profile comedians in the world right now. Schumer has an interesting story to tell: she was born into a family of privilege, but her parents lost all their money when she was a child; she went from taking private jets to the Bahamas to sharing a bed with her mother in a basement flat. At the same time, her father developed MS and her parents' marriage collapsed after her mother had an affair with the father of Schumer's best friend. Schumer started doing standup in her early 20s and, within a decade, had achieved huge success. The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo is not, she writes, a memoir: "I just turned 35, so I have a long way to go until I am memoir-worthy." But considering she discusses everything from her hatred of watercress to her bowel movements before a show, it's hard to imagine what else she could include in an autobiography. Presumably she would feel less obliged to include such typically femoir-esque "you go girl!" sentences as, "I feel beautiful and strong" (which contradict less cliched lines such as, "I sometimes forget a man may have actual feelings for me"). Nor would she need to soften her edges. Schumer is at an awkward point in her career now, transitioning out of the dumb white woman stage persona she created over the last decade -- when she'd say such things as "I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual" -- and trying to become more palatable to the mainstream. This is apparent throughout her book; for example, she will compare an elderly African American woman to "a California raisin", then to add hastily: "That is not racist. If she'd been white, she would have looked like a yellow California raisin. Anywhoozle ..." Alongside the vogue for women to reveal their personal lives is another which excoriates them for revealing too much Early in the book she jokes, "Damn, it's hard to write a book and not get yelled at", and that is certainly true. While the rise of the femoir reflects the current vogue for women to reveal their personal lives in public, alongside this trend is another in which women are excoriated for revealing too much of the wrong stuff. Lena Dunham fell victim to this after the 2014 publication of her femoir, Not That Kind of Girl, when she was accused, absurdly, of being a sexual abuser after writing about the time she realised her baby sister had shoved some pebbles into her own vagina. (Gynecological narcissism is another common element of the femoir: Dunham discusses her vagina at least two dozen times in her book; Schumer kicks off hers with "An Open Letter to My Vagina".) In a recent Guardian interview, Schumer insisted: "I'm not trying to be likable." You would not guess that from her book, in which she claims the only change her new riches have made to her life is she gives bigger tips. I'd have been a lot more interested to read how it felt when she negotiated her book advance from $1m to $8m, but that would perhaps have strayed too far outside the femoir's approachable everywoman bounds. In trying to be so likable, Schumer seems dishonest. The only essays that ring true are those about her family, in particular the one in which she describes how it felt to watch her increasingly sick father lose control of his bowels in an airport and, later, how furious she still is with her mother for having had an affair 20 years ago. I subscribe to the school of Nora Ephron -- arguably the mother of the femoir -- which says the statute of limitations for being mad at your parents for ruining your childhood is up when you leave home. But you can't tell a woman to reveal her feelings and then damn her for having the wrong kind. As you'd expect of a comedian of Schumer's calibre, the writing captures her voice and is often funny. But this book proves the theory that the larger a book's advance, the less editing it gets. I went to see Schumer's live tour while reading this book and, although she relates many of the same stories on stage, the contrast between the two experiences underlined the reductive nature of the femoir. On stage, she dealt with the subject of inane women's magazines in a brisk, amusing five minutes. Here, she spends 10 stodgy pages on the subject, making heavy weather of their effect on women's self-esteem and saying nothing new. It feels like Schumer is fighting the genre, insisting she has "no self-help or advice for you", only to claim later, "I am all of you". The femoir was meant to celebrate original female voices, but it has ended up smoothing down their spikiness. Far from showcasing funny women, it grinds them down into feminism lite. - Hadley Freeman.
Booklist Review
One of Schumer's recurring bits as a comic and performer, who writes and stars in her own TV series, Inside Amy Schumer, is that she's a consummate oversharer who leaves little to the imagination. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that her book, besides being laugh-out-loud funny, is also pretty daringly personal. (Schumer's introductory note to readers is quickly followed with An Open Letter to My Vagina.) It will come as a surprise that she's an introvert, that she had a storied career as a teenage shoplifter, that she's never, ever going to live in L.A., and that there are still 44 other things readers won't know about her, all handily gathered in the chapter, Things You Don't Know About Me, in case you wanted to skip ahead but don't.If, somehow, George Carlin were to come up with an updated list of, say, 15 words you can never say on television, they would probably all be in here, and there's lots of, well, sex stuff from the writer whose comedy special was called Mostly Sex Stuff, but many of the I can't believe she wrote that are provoked by heavy things, too. She's candid about her dad's multiple sclerosis, the abusive relationship she couldn't pry herself from in her early twenties, and the bummer that was the international press tour following the release of the successful movie she wrote and starred in, Trainwreck. The moment she learned that two women died in a shooting at a showing of the film is tied for the worst in her life, and precipitated her fervent interest in speaking up for stricter gun control.Schumer is obviously grateful for her success and its spoils, but she makes it clear how hard she's worked for it all, which is in itself refreshing. This is one woman's paean to comedy (standup remains her favorite part of what she does), hard work, and, boldly, herself. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This book, and the multimillion-dollar advance Schumer received, have been buzzed about for ages. Readers are primed.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
UNTIL RECENTLY I was an audiobook virgin. Oh, I suppose there was an ear half-cocked as LibriVox recordings of "Alice in Wonderland" aired during long car trips for the children, a respite from the Lord God Our iPad, but I was hardly paying attention. My virginity has now been taken from me - forcefully, though not disagreeably - by Amy Schumer: the 35-year-old comedian who parlayed a surge of showbiz success into a publishing deal with Simon & Schuster worth many millions of dollars more than one she had canceled with HarperCollins. Schumer is not shy, but rather an introvert, she stresses in the ensuing product: an insouciant mélange of memoir and feminist treatise that commences with an open letter to her vagina. This is a boundary previously breached by Nancy Friday ("My Secret Garden"), Eve Ensler and Naomi Wolf. Bold women, they were hardly tiptoeing through the tulips, but Schumer is more of a gleeful trampler. On better days her genitalia smell of "a small barnyard animal," perhaps "a freshly washed goat or something of that size and potency," she shares during one graphic account of a sexual encounter; on worse ones, "an unwashed shark tank." Her suitors' nether parts are not spared scrutiny either, and while she regularly performs such material before crowds of thousands, there's a special quality to hearing her "work blue" - flaming blue - in the confidential tones of a new friend huddled next to you on a pleather couch. In short, and it is long (though broken up by neo-Nietzschean epigrams, interludes and annotated journal entries), "The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo" is about as suitable for minors as the waning days of the 2016 presidential election were. And possibly more topical, including an exhortation for gun control impelled by the murder of two women at a screening of Schumer's movie "Trainwreck" in Lafayette, La., last year, There are also cautionary tales about domestic violence and bodily trespass while under the influence (her term for not-quite-rape is "grape") and a nod to the modern choose-your-own-gender adventure. "Whatever she does will be fine," Schumer says of her 2-year-old niece during a segment about her own penchant for stuffed animals. "Or he. Damn, it's hard to write a book and not get yelled at." Most of the issues addressed by the author, however, are not the Republic's but her own. Money! (After reduced circumstances in childhood following the failure of the family business, young Amy enlisted her little sister in a spree of grand larceny; she now freely gives away six-figure checks.) Mommy! (The senior Ms. Schumer used sign language to announce to her older daughter that she had fallen in love with a schoolmate's father.) And looming as he tends to do in a woman's life, Daddy, a onetime party animal who built Amy's confidence during body surfs in the Atlantic but has long suffered from multiple sclerosis, the scatological debilitation of which is not elided here. Despite admissions of binge-eating and heavy drinking - on occasion boxed wine through a straw - Schumer herself seems afflicted mostly with what she calls "the disease of being a comic." At least it is a well-managed case. A dissolute, flaky, noisy persona may have made Amy famous, but underneath are fierce loyalty and enviable discipline, conveyed in a librarian's hush. But will she have the enduring appeal of Carol Burnett? Could anybody? TWO GENERATIONS BEFORE Amy Schumer, Carol Burnett began down and out in a one-room Hollywood apartment with her grandmother Nanny, longing to star on Broadway, which she pronounces on her new audiobook in a way that lets the listener visualize the white lights popping on. She does not describe bedding dudes, but falling asleep while performing in the original production of "Once Upon a Mattress." Folksy without being prissy, Burnett has already written three memoirs, including a tribute to her eldest daughter, Carrie, who died of cancer at 38. This one is more of a Thanksgiving, to the cheerleaders and collaborators on her most successful vehicle, "The Carol Burnett Show." It was broadcast for over a decade by Bill Paley's CBS, going off the air before Comedy Central's "Inside Amy Schumer" was even a licentious gleam in a cable TV executive's eyes. While I greatly enjoy Schumer's sketch comedy when pals hurl it to me in YouTube links, I must admit that Burnett's used to be appointment television, when that regal hour of self-indulgence still existed. She reminded me cozily of a family friend who had forgotten to put the top on the blender when making pumpkin-pie filling, and her subjects included some favorite literary classics. "Rebecky," after Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca," with Mrs. Danvers's ominous ubiquity mocked by her head popping up after the dome was lifted on a silver serving dish. "Went With the Wind," after Margaret Mitchell, with "Starlett O'Hara" appearing in a dress by Bob Mackie incorporating a curtain rod. "I saw it in the window and I just couldn't resist it." Not rape jokes but drape jokes; not parodies but spoofs orchestrated by a self-described kook that were a goof and a hoot. Burnett's well-loved voice can sound a little wooden reminiscing about "back in the covered wagon days," as she calls them, but it's the creaky, comforting wood of a favorite Shaker rocking chair, greased with salvaged audio of the supporting players Vicki Lawrence (her young doppelgänger), Harvey Korman and the zany Tim Conway. Explained is the somewhat routinized process of putting out a variety show, back in a brass age of them that somehow stretched to accommodate both Dean Martin and the Muppets. Burnett's schedule allowed her to catch "All My Children" at lunch hour and be home for dinner with her children at 6:30 on the nights she wasn't taking guest stars out to Chasen's. She made the entire A-list do cartwheels, with the exception of Joan Crawford, who tolerated "Mildred Fierce" but not "Torchy Song." In between a Who's Who of that era in entertainment, Burnett slips some reflection about what it meant to be a female comic then, having to act besotted with her handsome announcer and soft-pedaling direction to the male writing staff. "I would somehow find a way to ease into expressing an opinion and still be 'ladylike,' thus avoiding being a 'bitch,'" she says ruefully, And later: "I was totally nonconfrontational. Actually, you could say I was chicken." But this is poppycock. Burnett was a brave pioneer of prime time who enabled women like Schumer to go forth and scramble the very concept. And though only one of their narratives is suitable for playing to the children, the fact is they are both Alices in Wonderland, through the looking glass, flabbergasted at living their dreams. There's a special quality to hearing Schumer 'work blue' in the confidential tones of a friend huddled next to you on the couch. ALEXANDRA JACOBS, an editor for the Styles sections of The Times, is writing a biography of Elaine Stritch.
Library Journal Review
Here comedian, actress, and writer Schumer (Inside Amy Schumer; Trainwreck) looks back on her teenage years, her relationship with her parents, her sex life, and her boyfriends. Schumer doesn't hold back, talking about everything from her sexual awakening to the body shaming she experienced; no story is off the table, including experiencing lust-at-first-sight while in the airport security line or discovering her fitness instructor's secret bad habit. Read by the author, this memoir brings to the table her well-known sass and comedic timing. VERDICT Fans of Schumer will pick this up without hesitation. Readers who enjoy memoirs by strong, opinionated women will want to give this a try as well.-Jessi Brown, Huntington City-Twp. P.L., IN © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.