“As it turns out, being OKAY ALL THE TIME as a child makes for a difficult entry into adulthood.”
-Amy Schumer (from The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo)
I enjoy Amy Schumer’s stand-up and it’s always a treat to watch one of her many talk show appearances. I liked her movie Trainwreck, although my favourite moments were not those relating to the main plot, but rather the asides with LeBron James and Bill Hader, every second with the underrated Colin Quinn, and the unforgettably hilarious movie theatre scene with John Cena, who has such a marvelous screen chemistry with Schumer that I can see them doing a cop buddy picture together, but I hope her career never degenerates to the point where she starts doing formulaic fare.
Being funny on stage or on TV and film is quite different from being funny with the written word. One simply cannot take what is said and put it on a page to the same effect. Will Amy Schumer fall into that trap with her first effort, The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo? Let’s find out!
Right away the author proclaims her book to be a series of essays, observations, and life lessons she learned the hard way and not a straight forward autobiography. The 30+ chapters leap around timeline-wise and contain humorous anecdotes, personal lists, and excerpts from her journal at various ages (with commentary), as well as a number of heartbreakingly painful tales of growing up.
All too often Schumer annoyingly follows a facetious line or observation with “JK” (for those of you who do not know she is not referring to the Academy Award-winning pitchman for Farmers Insurance or the creator of Harry Potter…it means “just kidding”). Someone should have told her this is not a tweet, text or email; every last one of them was completely unnecessary. I also could have done without the lists, like “Things That Make Me Insanely Furious” (P.185), which did make me laugh a little, but they are something that belongs in a blog not a book…at least not this book. (Note that I avoided the temptation of saying that said lists made me “insanely furious”…hurray for this guy!) And the above question? Unfortunately yes, she does employ techniques like capitals for emphasis and asides in parenthesis that are better live than in print.
For me the most amusing parts were the aforementioned journal entries with commentary, and I wish there were more of them.
The more personal material makes up the bulk of the text and are the best parts of The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo. Smart, witty, and insightful, Schumer is a talented writer and storyteller. When I came upon a chapter titled “How I Lost My Virginity” I was expecting a silly yarn about adolescent awkwardness. Instead I got a sobering and moving narrative of hurt and disappointment that I am still thinking about (all teenagers, both boys and girls, could benefit from reading that particular story), and that is not atypical of what is found in the volume. At times I identified with the author (her parents have six marriages between them while mine have five, and both our parents divorced when we were thirteen) and I think that is the primary reason I enjoyed it as much as I did despite its faults.
The book reads more like the works of Sedaris and Bombeck, and although Schumer does not quite write on that level (yet), she doesn’t pretend to; she does her own thing and does it well. I believe the greatest comedian essay/anecdote/auto bio remains Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up (which I think is still in print), but The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo is not that far behind.
Amy Schumer appears live at Le Centre Bell on November 11th.
Twitter: @AKessaris
Blog: essaysbyandreas.blogspot.ca
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