The Radical Exposure of Amy Schumer

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This kind of physical and emotional frankness feels instinctive to Schumer, even as it takes such an obvious toll on her that you wonder whether it’s worth it. In one scene, riding the train to a show on Long Island, she takes the phone from someone who’s snapped a picture of her and sent it to a friend. Her face freezes when she reads the reply. “He’s not really a fan,” the bystander sheepishly confesses. Schumer asks why he’d send a picture to someone who hates her in the first place. Her willingness to offer up so much access to herself, though, sometimes feels like a similar impulse. Anyone who’s watched Schumer’s comedy or followed her on social media knows that her extreme honesty comes not just from extroversion but also from a desire to connect. In January, she shared a photo of her bruised abdomen, splayed by a wide, purple Cesarean scar, and revealed that she was undergoing IVF. She asked her followers who’d undergone the same process to share their advice and experiences with her. In Expecting Amy, she reveals a little about what she hopes to give in return. “I would imagine it’s a lot like what having kids is like,” she says of performing through pain. “Whatever you’re going through, you have to be strong for your kids … This is their time, this is the audience’s time, and I’m doing it; I’m doing the best I can.”

Throughout Expecting Amy, viewers see that, for Schumer, the process of creating comedy is inextricably tied to what she’s experiencing. Her work is a huge, but not all-consuming, part of her life. She experiments with versions of the same joke—a bit on male ineptitude and laziness during sex—over and over in different cities until it’s finally, undeniably perfect. She tests out different venues and concepts. More than making people laugh, “I think the doing, the making, is what she loves the most,” her agent says to the camera. Schumer does all this while contending with serious illness. The first day she’s supposed to film Growing at a comedy club, she’s hospitalized instead because she’s been vomiting for hours and can’t even keep down water.

How does it feel to see all of this in a TV series? Probably, for a lot of people, alarming. I felt relief so profound, I cried. I haven’t suffered from anything as serious as hyperemesis, but with twins, I had twice as many hormones in my body and twice as much nausea. At work, I had to find the only single-stall bathroom in the building, two floors up, and hope the elevator would arrive quickly enough for me to make it there without incident. On the sickest day of my pregnancy, I left to interview Rose McGowan ahead of the Harvey Weinstein trial while doubting that I’d manage not to vomit on her. (I didn’t, and Weinstein went to prison, so a win on both counts.) To try to do your job while physically and emotionally debilitated, and to have to hide that debilitation from everyone because it’s still too early to know whether the pregnancy will work out, is quite an ask. Expecting Amy, in that sense, doesn’t just demystify pregnancy. It promises that pregnant people can do more than merely get through the day—that they can even continue to create and be enriched (as well as depleted) by what they’re going through. And—spoiler—it has a happy ending. “Everyone was saying it would be worth it,” Schumer says, after she gives birth and a simple surgery to repair her uterus turns into a three-hour ordeal. “But it’s like, I would have done so much more to meet him.”

Sophie Gilbert is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers culture.