I was midway through a serious novel on POWs on the Burmese railroad when I realised I was just in too fragile a state for quality fiction about crimes against humanity. I therefore took emergency action on Amazon, and this yielded THE GIRL WITH THE LOWER BACK TATTOO.
I recently took similarly urgent action in an airport before a transatlantic flight with two other books by female American comics: Tina Fey’s BOSSYPANTS (great) and Amy Poehler’s YES PLEASE (horrible). I always used to hesitate to remunerate what I know to be cynical publishers trying to make money of TV tie-ins, but I guess I’m just getting less scrupulous as I get older. By the time I’m fifty I’ll be reading golfer’s autobiographies.
Schumer’s book is unexpectedly wonderful. It’s very funny, and very clever, and kind of dirty, as you’d expect. But it’s also sort of inspirational. Let’s start with the funny and clever. Here she is on Hollywood:
I’m sure no one is too shocked to hear that it’s an industry of people who judge most women almost solely on their appearance, and where every day women feel themselves barreling toward death and decay while smaller, hotter actresses like Selena keep appearing like Russian nesting dolls.
Or on being caught by the paparazzi:
One of the first times I was papped they caught me stand-up paddle boarding in Hawaii. I didn’t even recognise myself. I saw the shots and thought, ‘Oh cool, Alfred Hitchcock is alive and likes water sports.’ But nope. It was me.
And on to the inspirational. It’s hard to capture exactly what I mean by this. It’s largely I think about the degree of honesty with which Schumer talks about her life, and particularly her family. People so rarely tell you how they really feel that it’s always touching when they do. Being a comedian who talks about her own life means that Amy has spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to share yourself. She tells a story about a time she was with a group of friends in the early years of high school, and had an experience which earned her the nickname ‘silver dollars’.
While we were hanging on the playground, the ten guys somehow convinced the six girls to lift up their shirts and show them their boobs. They’d presented the very good argument of “Why not?” We had no counterargument for that, so we lined up and, on the count of three, lifted our shirts. I wrapped my fourteen-year-old fingers around the bottom of my Gap tee and yanked it over my pimpled, plump face with abandon. . . . I then looked down the line and realized that all the other girls had just shown their bras. In a perfect metaphor for my life, I had revealed too much. I’d pulled up my entire bra too. I was the only skins player on the team. . .This was my very first experience of the stripped-down, cold, unprotected space where vulnerability meets either confidence or shame. It was my choice, and I had to learn (I’m still learning) how to choose to be proud of who I am rather than ashamed. Lucky for me, I’m a woman, so I’ve had the opportunity to practice this lesson over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
She is particularly interesting in her acceptance of – and openess about – her own mistakes. That is in fact what the title is about – the terrible cheesy lower back tattoo she got when she was eighteen.
So now, . . . , I’m thirty five, and any time I’m in a bathing suit people immediately know in their hearts that I’m trash. Any time I take my clothes off for the first time in front of a man and he sees it, he also knows in his heart that I’m trash and that I make poor, poor decisions. And now that the paparazzi think it’s interesting to take photos of me doing absolutely nothing noteworthy on a beach somewhere, the whole world has been treated to photos of my lower back tattoo hovering crookedly over my bikini bottoms. But I promise you from the bottom of my heart I don’t care. I wear my mistakes like badges of honor, and I celebrate them. They make me human. Now that all of my work, my relationships, my tweets, my body parts, and my sandwiches are publicly analyzed, I’m proud that I labeled myself a flawed, normal human before anyone else did. I beat all the critics and Internet trolls to the punch. I’ve been called everything in the book, but I already branded myself a tramp, so the haters are going to have to come up with something fresh.
Somehow, though the above may sound a little cliche taken out of context, I actually believe her – believe she accepts her mistakes. And I find the idea that someone could actually really do that sort of mindboggling and also very encouraging.