I often wonder what makes people want to bare their souls to a fickle, hostile public. 
 
 It's not an unfamiliar inclination — I frequently delve into personal details in my own writing. But I'm not sure I can succinctly explain why. As a way of bearing witness to my own life? In the hopes that someone will recognize herself/himself in my experiences? Masochism? 
 
 In "The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo," Amy Schumer is the latest celebrity to take the skeleton of what we know about her and flesh it out with anecdotes and confessions and observations collected along her path. She's 35, so she is (hopefully) only about a third of the way along her path, but what she offers here is a better, more deeply felt life-so-far book than most I've read. 
 
 After some initial throat-clearing in the first 30 pages (the book's weakest), Schumer weaves a brave, vulnerable tale without falling into the usual celebrity traps of neediness and defense. 
 
 She writes about her dad's multiple sclerosis, a sexual assault she endured as a teenager, her experience living with an abusive boyfriend, her parents' multiple failed marriages and her own reckoning with an entertainment industry that prizes appearance over substance. 
 
 In so doing, she subtly offers a rationale for all this self-revealing: It strengthens you. 
 
 MOST READ ENTERTAINMENT NEWS THIS HOUR 
 
 "I've been criticized from so many angles and laughed at for all the wrong reasons," Schumer writes. "But, as many comics have realized, there is a gift in being laughed at, or heckled, or even booed off the stage. When your fears come true, you realize they weren't as bad as you thought. As it turns out, the fear is more painful than the insult." 
 
 In the chapter titled "Beautiful and Strong," Schumer relives a couple of soul-crushing dates (maybe too generous a word) at pivotal moments in her life. The self-doubt and humiliation are eminently relatable, even if you've never been set up with a guy wearing a shark-tooth necklace and hair plugs who reminds you you're "no model." 
 
 "Sometimes I want to quit — not performing, but being a woman altogether," she writes. "I want to throw my hands in the air after reading a mean Twitter comment and say, 'All right, you got me. You figured me out. I'm not pretty. I'm not thin. I don't deserve love. I have no right to use my voice. I will start wearing a burka and move to a small town upstate and wait tables at a pancake house.'" 
 
 But of course she doesn't. 
 
 "I know my worth," she writes. "I embrace my power. I say if I'm beautiful. I say if I'm strong. You will not determine my story. I will. I'll speak and share and (expletive) and love, and I will never apologize for it. I am amazing for you, not because of you. I am not who I sleep with. I am not my weight. I am not my mother. I am myself. And I am all of you." 
 
 She's also hilarious, which manages to come through on the page. (No small feat.) 
 
 Her teenage journal excerpts, which she footnotes with 2016 thoughts, contain some of the wittiest writing I've experienced. The chapter titled "Athletes and Musicians" has very little from which I can quote here, but trust me when I say: It's spit-out-your-Starbucks-in-public funny. 
 
 "An Exciting Time for Women in Hollywood" is a scathing send-up of both Hollywood and the reporters who cover it, based mostly on her experience hawking "Trainwreck" to a suspicious press corps. (The list of titles for "Trainwreck" in various foreign markets, by the way? Fantastic. "A Disaster Girl." "Derailment." "A Girl Without Complexes.") 
 
 "First, I'd like to thank all the people who pointed out that I was a woman," Schumer writes. "Your compliments were phrased very precisely so that I was never just described as 'funny,' but rather, a 'funny woman." You made sure I didn't lose sight of my ovaries. Thank you. Without your constant reminders, I may have just forgotten my uterus on a crosstown bus." 
 
 Schumer dedicates a chapter to Mayci Breaux and Jillian Johnson, the two women killed in July 2015 when a man opened fire in a Lafayette, La., theater showing "Trainwreck." She launches into an impassioned plea for sensible gun control — a cause she adopted after Breaux's and Johnson's deaths, and for which she offers no apologies. 
 
 "I know that for many of you, this might not be a chapter you signed up for and you may be thinking, Get back to telling your vagina jokes! Make us laugh, clown! I hear you. When I've written sketches about gun safety on my TV show, people have responded by saying they wish I'd just be funny. ... I'll tell you what I tell them: No! I love making people laugh and am grateful that I'm equipped to do that. But when an injustice affects me deeply, I will speak about it — and I suggest you do the same." 
 
 In many ways, "The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo" is 314 pages of Schumer finding her voice and using it to speak about injustices that affect her deeply, some more grave than others. 
 
 It's an exercise in either vanity or courage when a celebrity offers a self-reveal. In this case, it's mostly the latter. And even the parts that veer into the former are witty enough to make you glad you stuck around. 
 
 hstevens@chicagotribune.com 
 
 Twitter @heidistevens13 
 
 The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo 
 
 By Amy Schumer, Gallery Books, 314 pages, $28 
 
 RELATED STORIES: 
 
 Amy Schumer describes how she met her Chicago beau in her new book 
 
 Watch Amy Schumer assume Chicago suburban accent on 'Tonight Show' 
 
 Amy Schumer will stop in Naperville on book tour 
 
 Amy Schumer talks relationship with Chicago beau in Vogue cover story 
 
 Check out the latest movie reviews from Michael Phillips and the Chicago Tribune. ||||| Comedian Amy Schumer's new essay collection, The Girl with the Lower-Back Tattoo, is out. It's ranking No. 2 in Amazon's list of bestsellers and No. 1 in Satire and Humor sections. Nettled, perhaps, by the book's success, or by the fact that a female comic's business acumen landed her one of the most lucrative celebrity book deals in the business, a small group of fans of the now-defunct Opie and Anthony radio show are trying to sabotage the comedian by leaving fake one-star book reviews. 
 
 The plan was hatched in a subreddit dedicated to the show, which was hosted by shock jocks Gregg Hughes and Anthony Cumia until Cumia was fired for racist rants in 2014 (he was subsequently arrested for allegedly strangling a woman). (The show was renamed "Opie with Jim Norton.") Fans admired Cumia and Hughes for outrageously pushing the envelope on what comedy could do. The Amazon caper was proposed by one poster yesterday and got off the ground on a dedicated thread about an hour later, as users advised each other on how to create fake accounts and congratulated each other on especially witty entries (one poster broke the fourth wall by plugging another comic in his Amazon review, while a third suggested that "someone do that thing where you give a 5-star review but it's actually still a bad review disguised as a good one."). 
 
 An unusually clever entry: 
 
 "Do your part. Submit more reviews. It's still too high at 2.4 stars," said one poster yesterday. The book remains the No. 2 bookseller on all of Amazon, but with a 2.3 rating and comments like "boooo" and "Lena Dunham is fat" rising to the top, these self-declared comedy experts are teaching Amazon readers a lesson on what humor is. Lili Loofbourow
– Amy Schumer's new collection of essays, titled The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo, currently sits at the No. 2 spot on Amazon's bestsellers list, with Heidi Stevens at the Chicago Tribune describing it as "a brave, vulnerable tale" that's also "hilarious." Its Amazon rating of 2.8 doesn't quite reflect that. That's because trolls perusing a subreddit dedicated to the now-defunct Opie and Anthony radio show have set out to sabotage the comedian by leaving fake one-star reviews, reports the Week. "Do your part. Submit more reviews. It's still too high at 2.4 stars," one Redditor wrote on Tuesday. One recent one-star review reads simply, "Amy's book gets one half star because the book comes with a front and back cover.” Another notes, "Lena Dunham is fat." Except for a handful of two-star reviews, all others give the book five stars. "Ignore the low-life Redditors' fake, one star reviews. This is a great read," one reviewer writes. Another describes Schumer's "candid honesty and brilliant humor." If her book is any indication, Schumer will be ignoring the trolls. "I know my worth. I embrace my power. I say if I'm beautiful. I say if I'm strong. You will not determine my story. I will," she writes in the book.