Amy Schumer gets surprisingly poignant in her hilarious, brutal memoir

Amy Schumer’s comedy mixes a keen understanding of gender and expectations with knowing self-deprecation. She takes jokes to its extreme conclusion, she has a knack for pop culture references, and she’s unapologetic about her comedy. The Girl With The Lower Back Tattoo is signature Schumer through and through—a hilarious, brutal, and graphic read. Coming in book form is both a strength and weakness; writing lets Schumer be a little more intimate with her audience, going into asides and longer, more thematic material than works for stand-up and sketch comedy. But those are also where Schumer is strongest, and it occasionally feels like some of the material would be better suited to TV, in front of a live audience.
It helps to imagine Schumer reading it aloud, which isn’t hard as her voice is deeply imbued in the book—she understands pretty well how to translate her stories and jokes to the page. Lower Back Tattoo is mostly straight memoir, with some internet-type listicles and very short essays sprinkled in. The opening chapter “An Open Letter To My Vagina” is hilarious, if misleading, as the rest of the book follows a more straight-forward storytelling approach. The material is thick with jokes, landing effortlessly from someone you can easily imagine as your good vulgar friend, filling you in on the mundane and the sordid details of her life.
Schumer’s at her best when telling anecdotes, as in the chapter “My Only One-Night Stand.” Her comedy chops are perfectly suited to meeting a man “every inch of Gaston from Beauty And The Beast” in an airport:
I audibly sighed, and before he walked through the metal detector, he looked at me. All the blood rushed to my vagina, and I smiled at him before immediately remembering I looked like Bruce Vilanch…. I found some blush and ChapStick, and thought, Perfect. That’s all I need to take me from a two to a four.