6 heartbreaking moments from Amy Schumer's new book

Amy Schumer's new essay collection, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, is often described as "hilarious." And it is. Even when the self-deprecating jokes about her appearance start to wear thin, Schumer compensates with the kinds of comedy curveballs that make her Comedy Central show a pleasure to watch. Whether she's compassionately describing a gorgeous hoarder's apartment or recovering after a matchmaker sets up her with someone who gets his jewelry from sharks, Schumer tackles the absurd with a deft hand.

But the book isn't all jokes. In fact, it contains a surprising amount of difficult material, thoughtfully rendered. The frankness Schumer is known for scans differently — and more powerfully — when she's recalling a sexual assault or recounting what it feels like to be in a codependent relationship with her mother. Her candor achieves some unexpected depths. Here are some of the more disturbing and moving instances. (And be warned — most of these are for an adult audience.)

1. On losing her virginity without her consent:

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Schumer's restraint in this chapter is palpable: The dominant register throughout this whole account is confusion. She's telling this story the way many women experience it: as a combination of compassion and love for the offending party against a confused sea of unwanted contact and unexpected pain.

Our "templates" for sexual assault are few. One of the difficulties about the current conversation about rape is that everyone agrees in the abstract that sexual assault is a very bad thing, but when specifics come to light, our lens softens. Somehow the description of which part did what dissolves that horror into an agonized uncertainty that wants very badly not to think about it anymore. Shrug it off as a misunderstanding: Well, we say, a boundary got crossed in territory that's murky and hormonal and tough to police. This temptation is so strong that victims give into it too. For all this talk of a "culture of victimhood," the fact is this: Processing that someone you love caused you physical pain and violated you is actually extremely hard to do. It's almost always better to pretend you're okay and cry alone.

2. Trying to understand what happened:

Schumer talks elsewhere in the book about how her mother raised her to always "be okay" no matter what. What "being okay" means in this context is making things easier for others by refusing to recognize your own pain. It can make for intense confusion or (as Schumer does, when her mother leaves her father) getting inexplicable headaches. It means repressing or even denying that a bad thing happened in order to spare the people around you and (hopefully) convince yourself. Schumer's book illustrates this very well: "I was confused as to why he would have done this to me in this way," she writes, "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 put my head on his chest and told him it was okay. I comforted him. Let me repeat: I comforted him."

3. On how she felt about sex for years after that:

Schumer's description of how her sexual attitude evolved out of this encounter is one of the more insightful things I've ever read concerning how early experiences program a person's intellectual as well as physical sense of their own sexuality. "The strangest part is that even though Jeff apologized and told me how bad it had made him feel, I don't remember ever really taking him to task about how it made me feel. I did what most girls do and continued on. ... I was 17 years old and I wanted my boyfriend to like me," she writes. They started having consensual sex a couple of months later. (Think of how that would play in a courtroom! But her reasons, as sketched out here, make a sad but perfect sense.) "The second time we did it," Schumer writes, "I tried to pretend it was the first time. I even went in my mom's room after and told her I'd lost my virginity."

4. On abusive relationships:

5. On the shooting at a showing of Trainwreck:

6. On whether it's a comedian's place to philosophize about gun control:

The real value of Schumer's essay collection is not its humor. It's the richer and weirder (and not always successful) discussion of control and autonomy. Schumer offers a messy object lesson in unlearning the frames we grow up with. If Schumer recognizes (and sometimes even capitulates to) society's invitation to repress things it prefers not to recognize, the book works as well as it does because we often see her really struggling with this. The essays that fall into the How I Did It category are much less interesting than her How I'm Trying To Do It pieces.

That seems right. Schumer advocates making giant mistakes (the book's title even references one), and she's made plenty. That's to be expected as we grope toward a world capable of producing, rather than demanding, "okayness."