The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer

I keep picking up these memoirs written by my favorite female comedians expecting them to be funny, and then the memoir inevitably turns out to be a "I may be a funny person for a living, but I'm so much more - let me list out the innermost details of my psyche for your pleasure so you can understand my soul" type of deal. Which is fine. I can totally understand why comedians would want to do that. I'm sure you have off days where you don't want to be funny, where the last thing you want to do is laugh, where you'd like to talk politics seriously without being expected to toss out a Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump joke. But on the other hand, that's exactly why people are suckered into these memoirs.

People like me.

Even when she's in "funny mode", Amy Schumer is one of those celebrities you will likely love or hate. She's brassy and bold, and outspoken about sex and girl power. Her comedy sketches push the line on the things that it's acceptable for women to talk about, and her movie, Trainwreck, is basically a gender-flipped take on the Judd Apatow "foul-mouthed slacker gets the girl" trope. I've heard pro-Amy and anti-Amy spiels, and I can understand both camps to a degree. She's controversial. She's assertive. She's in-your-face. But hey, it certainly gets her noticed.

Going back to this memoir, Amy decides to turn "funny mode" down a few bars. She still tries to be funny, but she also tries to tell us about the woman behind the humor. She talks about her childhood, her adolescence, her struggle to get her foot in the door. This is a pretty typical arc for celebrity memoirs, so I'm sure you expected all this. I was. What I didn't expect were some very odd digressions in this collection of essays. Essays about Amy's horror carnival collection of stuffed animals. Excerpts from Amy's childhood and teenage diaries, replete with footnotes and analyses from adult Amy. An essay about the difference between Old Money and New Money. Lists about things that annoy Amy. Lists about things that Amy loves. A two chapter long instruction guide for what Amy wants at her funeral. I'm sorry, what does any of this have to do with anything?

There are a few good essays, but for every good essay there's at least one bad one. I was expecting THE GIRL WITH THE LOWER BACK TATTOO to be controversial or provocative, but what I wasn't expecting it to be was boring. The second half is disproportionately variable in terms of the quality of content, so I found myself skimming over the last 50% of the book, especially the self-promo bits. I liked the photographs at the back, and thought it was nice that she paid homage to the women who were shot at one of the showings of Trainwreck, but I had zero interest in seeing Amy's analysis of her favorite things and what kind of eulogy she wants.

Like her or hate her, Amy does bring attention to feminism. She might not always go about it in the most PC or ideal of ways, but PC doesn't always grab the spotlight in the same way. Some of her sketches are really funny, especially the Last F*ckable Day and the Makeup one. This book, however, was not, and I can't really say that I'd recommend it to Amy Schumer fans, feminists, or celebrity memoir aficionados. Maybe if the collection had been better curated, and funnier, it could have been a decent read. But the way it is now, I could barely make it through the pages without glazing over.

1.5 to 2 out of 5 stars.