University of Georgia Press
240 pages
September 1, 2024
In the winter of 1984, Sharon Nicorvo was violently raped while delivering pizza to Fort Monmouth Army Base in New Jersey. At the same time, her seven-year-old son Jay was being subjected to repeated and secret sexual abuse by his babysitter. Best Copy Available delves into these devastating events and their long aftermath. Thirty years later, Nicorvo receives a photocopy of the criminal investigation report documenting that brutal night. This report offers a primer to better understand certain assumptions about class and race; sex and violence; crime and punishment; low and high culture; sanity, madness, and masculinity; and the facsimile nature of the truth.
As various American men—some real, some imagined, all prone to violence—move in and then out of their hardscrabble lives, mother and son spend decades avoiding and ultimately confronting what happened to them in that formative year. From the Jersey Shore to the Gulf Coast of Florida to the Midwest, Best Copy Available tells a harrowing and sometimes hilarious American story: how the love of a single mother helped end an awful cycle of abuse and abandonment.
Most ambitiously, Best Copy Available lends voice to an alternative version of American boyhood, manhood, and fatherhood. One where the sons of deadbeat dads can grow up to be stay-at-home dads, and where our boys and men may realize that the most courageous show of strength is not the determined use of force. It’s knowing when and how to ask for help.
Jay Baron Nicorvo is the author of the novel The Standard Grand and a poetry collection, Deadbeat. His nonfiction has twice been named “notable” in Best American Essays. Nicorvo’s writing has been featured on NPR and PBS NewsHour. A proud community college graduate, he’s taught at Eckerd, Cornell, and Emerson colleges. He lives with his wife, Thisbe Nissen, their son, a couple of cats, a dog, and a dozen chickens on a defunct farm outside of Battle Creek, Michigan.