[This story contains spoilers from Hulu’s Life & Beth.]
Two-thirds of the way through the penultimate episode of Amy Schumer’s latest creation, Life & Beth, the camera lingers on a pile of hair.
The moment isn’t the set-up for any kind of raunchy joke, as often is the case with Schumer’s fare, but rather a window into a disorder that she has grappled with since childhood. “It’s called trichotillomania,” her on-screen mother is told in hushed tones as a younger version of Schumer is being fitted for a much-needed wig a scene or two later.
For a woman who’s been mining her vulnerabilities for material for the entirety of her career, Schumer had managed to keep her struggles with compulsive hair pulling under wraps until now. “I think everybody has a big secret and that’s mine,” she explained over a breakfast that bled into lunch in mid-February, a month or so before all 10 episodes of her Hulu dramedy rolled out March 18. “And I’m proud that my big secret only hurts me but it’s been what I’ve carried so much shame about for so long.”
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Like the character in Life & Beth, which borrows plenty from Schumer’s traumatic past, she once plucked out so much of her own hair that she, too, found herself in need of what was ultimately an ill-fitting wig before returning to school. “And everybody knew,” she says now, noting that the disorder first presented itself during a period when so much else in her life was in disarray. (As Schumer revealed in her 2016 essay collection, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, her dad declared bankruptcy and had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and her mom left him for the married father of her best friend all before Schumer hit her teens.)
“And it’s not that I used to have this problem and now I don’t,” she clarifies, “it’s still something that I struggle with.” It is also something that she fears her nearly 3-year-old son could one day struggle with, too, since there is a genetic component to trichotillomania: “Every time he touches his head I’m having a heart attack.”
Schumer acknowledges that she was surprised to see that her depiction of the self-harm behavior wasn’t being flagged for any kind of audience warning. “I was like, ‘I’d want to be warned,'” she says. What Hulu opted to do instead was feature a resource card at the end of the episode’s credits, which reads: “If you or someone you know experiences Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors, the TLC Foundation for Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors offers support and resources.” It then provides a website where one can learn more.
The TLC Foundation has since praised Schumer, the series and Hulu “for their accurate and respectful portrayal of a person experiencing trichotillomania.” The foundation’s executive director added, “Our community is breathing a collective sigh of relief after having our behaviors mischaracterized and misinterpreted for so many years.”
Still, Schumer says it’s too early to know whether its inclusion will prove cathartic for her — at least not in the instantaneous way that writing about her messy relationship with her mom had been. (She had her mother read every script and then they watched every episode of the series together, even the ones that weren’t easy to watch together.) What Schumer is clear on is why she chose to write it in: “I really don’t want to have a big secret anymore,” she says. “And I thought putting it in there would be good for me to alleviate some of my shame and maybe, hopefully, help others alleviate some of theirs, too.”
