Her father suffers from a debilitating disease.
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In a frank essay about her mom Sandra, Schumer recalls the day her world changed, when her mother revealed she would be leaving her husband Gordon because she had fallen in love with another man, who was the father of Amy’s best friend.
“One day after school I came home and saw my mother slumped on the couch”. “Now that I’m all grown up and no longer driving up the price of bad tchotchkes in Old Sacramento, I’ve graduated on to the next-level hustle – making people laugh”, she writes.
As her mother was a teacher of deaf students, she was able to sign to her daughter what she couldn’t bring herself to say out loud.
“I shrieked”, Schumer admitted, recounting her reaction to watching a clip of Streep’s comment over the weekend.
Amy Schumer says she had a life-threatening encounter with an abusive ex-boyfriend. The book, out today, recounts painful moments like losing her virginity to non-consensual sex at age 17, almost losing her leg in a surfing accident and a boyfriend who physically and emotionally abused her during her 20s.
Her romance with Chicago-based furniture designer Ben began in January (16), and Amy considers him her first real boyfriend. “I’m a strong-a- woman, not someone most people picture when they think ‘abused woman, ‘” she writes.
Amy Schumer is using her platform to discuss the importance of not victim-blaming, and shares that her first sexual experience at the age of 17 was not consensual. “He wasn’t an actor or photographer by trade like all the other guys – and he didn’t live in L.A. or New York”, Schumer wrote.
The book intersperses light stuff (one chapter is just called “Things That Make Me Happy”) with some pretty heavy shit. “I’d go to Starbucks, lock myself in the bathroom, and sit on the floor and cry”, she wrote. She escaped, but has words of warning for others in the book: “You’re not alone if it’s happening to you, and you’re not exempt if it hasn’t happened to you yet”.
“Then she said, ‘There was a shooting in a theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, at a showing of Trainwreck.’ My heart broke right then and there”.
Amy with her boyfriend Ben and her sister Kim and brother Jason.
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“The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo” is available now!
