10 Most Surprising Reveals From Amy Schumer's New Memoir
The following sentence will probably sound obvious, but: Amy Schumer's new book, The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo, is really, really funny. What's especially compelling are the ways in which Amy folds in hilarious observations alongside revelations from her past. Schumer superfans will notice she's talked publicly about some of these parts of her past before, including her history of shoplifting and the fact that her first experience of sexual intercourse was sexual assault, but the book discloses plenty of new details. Here are the 10 most surprising.
1. She's only had one one-night stand. Anyone who's listened to Amy's stand-up or watched Inside Amy Schumer with regularity has probably picked up on the fact that Amy's crazy sex stories come (no pun intended) from her most notable sexual misadventures, not from a life in which she has wild sex every single day. Still, it was a little surprising to learn she's only had one one-night stand. What was not surprising to learn was how she sealed the deal: Via text, she joked about becoming a magician's assistant. "Is he going to saw you in half?" asked One-Night Stand Dude. "I was hoping you would," she replied. That's how it's done.
2. She spent years in an abusive relationship. The parts in which Amy recalls her past relationship with an emotionally abusive man are some of the most powerful in the book. Amy writes candidly about the details of her relationship with an ex she calls Dan: Dan screaming and shaking her, pulling open the shower curtain to laugh at her body, "accidentally" shoving her, and more. It's a reminder anyone can get stuck in an abusive relationship - even women we hold up as role models of confidence - but that anyone can find the strength they need to leave too.
3. That relationship nearly ended her life. The most shocking revelation in The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo comes in a chapter called "The Worst Night of My Life," a description of a horrible night that has to be read to be believed. It includes the Latin Kings, Dan breaking a mug over his head, and a whole lot more, and ends with Dan pulling a massive butcher knife out of a drawer, causing Amy's "life to flash before [her] eyes."
4. But she got back together with the man anyway. Is it surprising Amy got back together with an abusive partner? No, actually. It's relatively common for women to struggle to leave abusers, especially because those partners are often adept at promising to change. Still, because there's so much shame around domestic abuse, it's surprising and gratifying for Amy to admit that she went back to Dan one more time (in part to try to "damage [him] from the inside"). Her honesty about that is going to help a lot of women.
5. She's had 28 sexual partners, to be exact. That seems like a perfectly reasonable number of sexual partners (pro tip: the definition of "reasonable number of sexual partners" is "the number of sexual partners each individual finds to be reasonable for him or herself"), but, even though Amy is reliably frank about her sex life, it was a little surprising to hear her disclose the exact body count. Like, now I'll theoretically be able to someday tell my grandchildren, "In 2016, global temperatures hit an all-time high, Channing Tatum was cast as a mermaid, and Amy Schumer had slept with 28 men."
6. Her popular "grape" joke comes from personal experience. She's spoken about this before, but it was still hard to read: When Amy was a teenager, she was dozing and half-watching wrestling with her boyfriend, then suddenly realized his penis was inside her - not kissing her, not looking her in the eye, and not even making sure she was awake. "The facts in my situation are pretty clear to me still: He was inside of me in a way I hadn't consented to," she writes. She stops short of calling the experience "rape" - "I'd call it 'grape,' as in 'gray-area rape,'" she writes - but that's what it is. "It's not some crackhead who popped out of the bushes in Central Park and raped me," she says. "I wasn't screaming no ... He was only inside me for a short time. But it isn't right that it happened that way ... My first time didn't need to be perfect, but I would have liked to have known it was going to happen. Or have been part of the decision. Instead, he just helped himself to my virginity - and I was never the same."
7. Her most disturbing Inside Amy Schumer guest was … a matchmaker? Amy herself presents this as a surprising fact: seriously, she's brought on pickup artists and sociopaths, so surely a matchmaker would be harmless, right? But Amy tells a deeply emotional story about interviewing the matchmaker, then going on a date she'd set up. First, she had to listen to all the ways in which the matchmaker thought she was unattractive, and then she had to go on a date with a total dumpster fire of a human. It was an awful experience, but it taught her, "[Women] don't deserve to be manipulated into thinking this is something they should strive for - this decaying turkey of a man who'd been encouraged to believe, like so many other men, that he was a great prize for someone like me."
8. Her relationship with her mother is complicated. Amy's always put out a solid "family first" vibe, so it's a little surreal to learn her relationship with her mother is very different from her relationship with her other family members. There's a chapter that's all but a laundry list of the ways she and her siblings have felt "emotionally suppressed or manipulated by [their mom]." Amy's feelings and the boundaries she's set for their relationship are 100 percent justified, but it's a little jarring to think about how Amy's mom might feel reading this. It also brings to mind the quote by memoirist Anne Lamott: "If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."
9. She once shoplifted shot glasses … seven years before she could legally drink. Amy's made no secret of her criminal past - she and her younger sister were once arrested while stealing upscale items from Bloomingdale's - but the book goes into detail about how random and silly some of her other shoplifting escapades were. As a kid, she stole things like multiple shot glasses, a hat with fake Rastafarian dreads hanging down from it, and Coed Naked T-shirts. (Remember when those got banned from your junior high? No? Just me?)
10. Her employment history is way more interesting than yours. Sure, Amy's been a comic, a writer, and a showrunner, but before that, she was, among other things, Gretl in The Sound of Music (although that was more of a pro bono thing), a basketball referee, a baby model, a child floor-show model, a shampoo girl, a pedicab driver, an aerobics instructor, a lesbian bar bartender, and a bodega salesgirl. Now she's a star. 🙌
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