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.
"The (true) story unfolding in Best Copy Available is almost unrelentingly bleak, but that relentlessness also makes it difficult to put down. The voice is jagged, dangerous, compelling, and, above all, appropriate."
Geoff Dyer
"An unflappable, unrelenting examination of abuse and violence, Best Copy Available holds nothing back. Nicorvo is fearless as he confronts the past and fearless as he steps into his future."
Ann Hood
"A compulsive descent into darkness, a fearless portrait of the invincibility of our fragile hearts. Nicorvo leaves it all on the page. A bravura performance."
