Jay Baron Nicorvo's "Best Copy Available: A True Crime Memoir" (Review)
In a way, it’s a shame that Jay Baron Nicorvo’s award-winning new memoir, Best Copy Available, had to be subtitled A True Crime Memoir. The book does deal with crime — that of his mother’s rape, while delivering pizza as a single mom in the early 1980s; and of his own childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a babysitter — but it’s about much more than the retelling of these traumatic events, the bulk of the work being dedicated to exploring the resonances of both of these acts, in Nicorvo’s own life and with the culture at large. (See malformed masculinity, poverty, and America’s legacy of racial injustice.) But, marketing. That’s another thing about America — we love us some true crime.
A fact that Nicorvo tackles head-on from the outset: “You think I enjoy this?” he asks the reader directly. “You think my mom does? Relaying and reliving this mess? You enjoy it? Get a kick out of it?” It’s adversarial, but the confrontation with the audience ends there. Once the strange nature of this relationship has been called out, our being here for the reenactment of his pain, we’re on this ride together.
Which starts in New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen territory, geographically and atmospherically, a world populated by people familiar with hard times. Chief among them are Nicorvo’s mother and aunt, two women getting by on their own, Nicorvo’s aunt always a little better off, financially, having borrowed the money to open a deli for locals, though she never makes so much that she isn’t working a second job. The sisters stick together, rolling up to midnight Mass a little tipsy the Christmas Nicorvo’s mom doesn’t have money for presents, which is the same Christmas the aunt saves the day by collecting donations from friends, enough to bury Nicorvo and his two younger brothers in gifts. They move to Sarasota, Florida, together, at which time the book embarks on its second section, told in the second person, a point of view that mostly addresses the mom’s new boyfriend, who loves the boys in his way but doesn’t ultimately last.
The you of this section also shifts to include the boys’ biological father and an actor young Nicorvo likes to imagine is his dad. It takes in Nicorvo’s molester, too. And the three brothers. And God. Always men (speaking traditionally, in God’s case), who form a pantheon of masculinity that the book interrogates. “These men,” Nicorvo tells us, “they become one man.” And this is what haunts the adult Nicorvo, whom we meet in the book’s last act, now married and with a young son of his own: “My greatest fear,” he says, “the fear that not only keeps me up at night but that pushes me over the edge in my middle age — is that the one man they become is me.”
We leave the second person by the book’s final section, although this last part of the book does continue Nicorvo’s experiments in style, this time in the presentation of a conversation he has with his mom about her rape and his abuse. Nicorvo records the talk as a sort of interview, but he can’t bring himself to listen to the part about his experience, which leads to him using an automated transcription service to obtain a written record of his words, a transcript that comes back as a poem that Nicorvo reproduces on the page. It’s unintelligible, but that’s the point — Nicorvo, at this time, feels like the trauma is driving him crazy.
Nicorvo’s healing comes through the love of his family, his decision to seek help (he hadn’t been in therapy before this point), and, one has to assume, the writing of Best Copy Available. Which brings us back to the title. Throughout the book, Nicorvo offers multiple takes on the title’s meaning: It is, most literally, what is stamped on the copy he receives of the crime report of his mother’s rape. But it is also a way to talk about the nature of memoir-writing, how one has no choice but to accept that “a story, any story, even a true story, can only ever be a copy.” And it’s a gesture toward hope, signaling, as Nicorvo writes, “my want to be a better copy of myself, available, even if I can never be the best.”
— Carolyn Wilson-Scott
Fiction Editor
