The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo

The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo (2016), American actor and comedian Amy Schumer’s autobiography, features vignettes from her upbringing and early career, as well as essays covering issues such as sexual assault, gun violence, and consent. The book topped the New York Times Best Seller list and garnered generally positive reviews. Its title is a reference to the popular Swedish thriller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Born in 1981, Schumer belongs to a wealthy family living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Her father, Gordon Schumer, the son of Jewish Ukrainian immigrants, owns a successful baby-furniture company. Though her mother, Sandra, comes from a Protestant upbringing, Schumer is raised Jewish and frequently faces anti-Semitism as a child. She also has a younger sister, Kim. Some of the luxuries Schumer enjoys as a child of wealth include flying with her family in a private jet to the Bahamas.

However, when Schumer is nine years old, her father's business goes bankrupt, and the family has to move out of their fancy Upper East Side home. It is a dramatic turn of events for Schumer, who goes from living a life of luxury to sharing a bed with her mother in a small apartment. Things take another turn for the worse when her father is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.



Sometime after that, Sandra has an affair with Gordon's best friend, putting a great deal of strain on her relationship with her daughter. Sandra and Gordon divorce, and Schumer moves to Rockville Centre on Long Island with her mother. Schumer's feelings about her mother's betrayal of her father are enormously complicated. Despite the betrayal, Schumer and her mother remain extremely close for many years, "not a single healthy boundary between us." It isn't until Schumer is thirty-years-old that she finally confronts her mother. It is not only the affair that upsets her but the years her mother spent "manipulating me into supporting her through all this." With that conversation, the nature of their relationship changes: "We are kind to one another but I keep my boundaries clear."

In Rockville Centre, Schumer attends South Side High School where she is voted both "Class Clown" and "Teacher's Worst Nightmare." She also attends Hebrew School at the Central Synagogue of Nassau County, where her mother serves as a board member. In one essay, Schumer opens up about her experience with sexual assault during high school. She reveals that she lost her virginity at the age of 17 to her then-boyfriend while she was asleep. She contrasts the reality of rape with the way popular culture usually depicts rapists as strangers who jump out of bushes to attack a woman. More often than not, she writes, the assailant is someone who is known, and the act itself might exist in an area that seems gray to the assailant and victim. When it's someone you're close to, like a boyfriend, the emotions surrounding the assault are that much more complicated: "I was confused as to why he would have done this to me in this way, but the most dominant feeling I felt was that the guy I was in love with was upset and I wanted to help him. I was seventeen years old and wanted my boyfriend to like me."

Upon graduation in 1999, Schumer moves outside Baltimore, Maryland to attend Towson University where she majors in theater. After graduating with a theater degree, Schumer moves to New York to study the Meisner technique of acting and performance at Will Esper Studio. She also works as a bartender and server while acting in small plays. On June 1, 2004, she delivers her first stand-up comedy performance at the Gotham Comedy Club in Chelsea.



Around this time, Schumer is in a relationship with a violently abusive boyfriend: "I got hurt by accident a lot that year. He'd get jealous about something I did and would squeeze my arm too hard and I'd get a horrible bruise but of course it was an accident, and he always felt terrible afterward." The abuse escalates to the point where the boyfriend pushes her into a car and later threatens her with a butcher knife: "And that's when I was sure he was going to kill me." At that point, Schumer successfully escapes the relationship, adding, "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."

In 2007, a huge year for Schumer's career, she records a live stand-up special for the cable network Comedy Central and is a contestant on the NBC reality show, Last Comic Standing, advancing to the finals and placing fourth. Over the next few years, she appears on various comedy series like 30 Rock and Curb Your Enthusiasm before landing her own show, Inside Amy Schumer, on Comedy Central in 2013.

Arguably, the apex of her career thus far comes in 2015 when she writes and stars in the hit film Trainwreck. The success is dampened, however, when a gunman kills two people and injures nine more in a July showing of Trainwreck in Louisiana. In the book, Schumer includes a powerful essay about gun violence and the sorrow she feels for the two victims, twenty-one-year-old Mayci Breaux and thirty-three-year-old Jillian Johnson.



The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo is "far less a portable joke factory than it is a real, deep dive into Schumer's life" (Entertainment Weekly).