Tomorrow my book “The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo” get it here https://t.co/L7P2AVNWRn please RT for puppies pic.twitter.com/KsxKWcNhxE

— Amy Schumer (@amyschumer) August 15, 2016

Amy Schumer has just released her first book, a memoir entitled The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo. Amy’s acerbic humor appears throughout, like the number of people with whom she has slept and the fact that she can’t remember all of their names so she’s given them nicknames. I might possibly relate to this more than I should. However, some of the memories she shares are dark and painful. Below are a sampling of some of the essays in the book. Two of the references in the excerpt deal with abuse so be warned for those reading.

She found boyfriend Ben Hanisch on a dating app: While hanging out with friend – and Trainwreck costar – SNL cast member Vanessa Bayer, Schumer says, “Vanessa said she’d heard of a dating app for your phone specifically aimed at creative people.”

After searching for possible dates, she “liked” a few men before matching with one guy: Ben Hanisch. He wasn’t an actor or photographer, as many of the men on the app were, and he didn’t live in N.Y.C. or L.A., but in Chicago.

She lost her virginity at 17 – during nonconsensual sex: “Without asking first, without kissing me, without so much as looking me in the eyes – or even confirming if I was awake,” she writes. Her boyfriend, upset the next day, apologized. Then Schumer says, she comforted him, telling him everything would be OK. “I was seventeen years old and wanted my boyfriend to like me.”

Her Mother Had an Affair With Her Best Friend’s Father: Schumer spoke about the moment that one of her dearest friendships came to an end, because the actress’ mom fell in love with her best friend’s dad (while still married to Schumer’s father).

Amy explained that one day she came home to find her mother extremely distraught, and that’s when she found out what was going on. “Because she couldn’t communicate vocally, she had to sign it to me. Since she is a teacher of the deaf, we all know a good amount of sign language in my family. Slowly, her hands trembling, she rose and signed to me, ‘I am leaving your father. Lou and I have fallen in love with each other.’ I signed the world, ‘again’ because I needed her to repeat herself. Again she signed, ‘I am leaving your father. Lou and I have fallen in love with each other.’”

She Was in An Abusive Relationship: “It proceeded to get worse and worse, and I started escaping the apartment whenever I could. I’d go to Starbucks, lock myself in the bathroom, and sit on the floor and cry. I knew I should go back to the East Coast, but I thought no one would ever love me as much as he did. I believed he was just as passionate about me as I was about him, and that if I did a better job of not making him mad, we’d be fine. I really felt he loved me. And I really loved him.

“I think somewhere in the course of our relationship, I started to confuse his anger and aggression for passion and love. I actually started to think that real love was supposed to look like that. The more you yelled at each other, the more you loved each other. The more physical an demeaning it got, the more you were really getting through to each other. And the more I was willing to stand by him, the more he’d understand I truly loved him and that we should be together forever.”

[From People and E! News]

Among the other stories in the book is Amy’s sad recounting of her father’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis when she was ten years old. So much happened to Amy when she was young. She was thirteen when her mom left. To clarify, her mother teaches sign language but she can speak, she was just distraught in that moment. I appreciate how upset she was but I really think she should have been thinking more about Amy receiving the news than her not wanting to deliver it. Amy’s abusive relationship took place when she was only in her early twenties. Amy emphasizes, “It can happen to anyone. You’re not alone if it’s happening to you, and you’re not exempt if it hasn’t happened to you yet.”

As for the part about her boyfriend, I can’t find what app she used but when Amy first went public with Ben, it was reported that they met on the feminist app Bumble. Amy quickly shot that down and pointedly said she had never been on Bumble in her life. At the time, I thought she was issuing such a strong statement because she hadn’t used any app but I guess she just really did not want to be associated with that app – and that makes me curious as to why? Also, about Ben not being an actor or photographer? He has described himself as both those things.

All in all, it sounds like the book is a mixture of both humorous and deep stories that shaped Amy’s life and comedy. I hope writing them down was cathartic for her, she’s had to overcome quite a bit. Amy’s world tour begins in Dublin on August 26 and she just wrapped her still untitled mother-daughter action/comedy project with Goldie Hawn.

Photo credit: Twitter and WENN Photos