This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jay Baron Nicorvo, whose memoir, Best Copy Available: A True Crime Memoir, is out today from the University of Georgia Press. Nicorvo’s memoir reckons with the harrowing aftermath of tragic events from the author’s childhood. In the winter of 1984 his mother, Sharon Nicorvo, was violently raped while delivering pizza to Fort Monmouth Army Base in New Jersey. At the same time, seven-year-old Jay was being subjected to recurrent sexual abuse by his babysitter. In honest, unsparing prose, Nicorvo tells the story of how the love of a single mother helped end a cycle of abuse and abandonment. Geoff Dyer selected Best Copy Available as the winner of the Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Junot Díaz calls the book “a compulsive descent into darkness” and “a fearless portrait of the invincibility of our fragile hearts.” Jay Baron Nicorvo is the author of the poetry collection Deadbeat (Four Way Books, 2012), and a novel, The Standard Grand (St. Martin’s Press, 2017). Nicorvo has taught at Eckerd College, Emerson College, and Western Michigan University. He was mostly recently a guest artist at the Cornell College’s low-residency program in creative writing.
Jay Baron Nicorvo, author of Best Copy Available: A True Crime Memoir. (Credit: Thisbe Nissen)
1. How long did it take you to write Best Copy Available?
I got my start in September 2015, unintentionally, as an e-mail reply to a friend, Nelly Reifler, and I finished in October 2019. So, four years to write and revise. Then, five more years—almost to the day—to reach shelves. A glacier made of molasses moves faster.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Those scenes of my childhood sexual abuse. The entire years-long experience of writing the book was torturous, but I’d been terrified of those scenes my whole life. The irony is that there were no scenes I was better prepared to write, because I’d been replaying them on a loop, against my will, since boyhood.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Where: at a desk I built out of reclaimed porch posts and barn flooring. When, and how often: every morning for a couple hours, seven days a week, and I don’t take days off, unless I’ve got husbandly or fatherly duties to tend to.
4. What are you reading right now?
In light of current events, I’m rereading J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. He and I share some overlap in our upbringings, though we disagree on a lot, which is a reason I read nonfiction. Authors I’m in agreement with are not the best use of my time. So, I’m going back to figure out how the seemingly decent guy who wrote a decent memoir could morph into such a gelatinous lacky. Goes to show. Never trust a memoirist.
5. Which author or authors have been influential for you, in your writing of this book in particular or as a writer in general?
If there’s an area where books by writers in my cohort are underrepresented, it’s memoirs by men who’ve experienced childhood sexual abuse. While writing, I was dying for a book like the one mine was becoming. There are essays out there—by Barry Lopez, Junot Díaz, and Alex Chee—but there are very few memoirs. (Corey Feldman’s tell-all Coreyography did not do me much good.) So, I turned to the best of what was available to me: books by Dorothy Allison, Roxane Gay, and Lacy Crawford. These narratives are invaluable, but they do leave something to be desired for men who’ve known abuse at the hands of other men.
6. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Best Copy Available?
That I would know no catharsis while writing and, once done, I’d feel more of a psychic hangover than any kind of release. Now, though, years have passed, and I do have more peace about my past and my process. From afar, I can finally see what I was doing, and why. It was masochism of a kind, but toward a better, healthier end.
7. What is one thing your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Well, what has stuck with me wasn’t anything I was told. What’s stuck was the silence. At one point, a year and a half went by without so much as a word from my agent, this while the book was out on interminable submission, for 887 days—but who was counting, really—racking up rejection after rejection. 24 passes in all. Though we remain friends, I ended up firing my agent over this book, and not because she couldn’t sell it—which she couldn’t—but because she stopped communicating. With this memoir, communication felt like everything, more important than publication even. After that, I figured contest submissions were what was left to me. Then, the first memoir contest I sent it to, it won. What does that say?
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Best Copy Available, what would you say?
“Don’t do it! Write something else!” No, I’m kidding, mostly. I guess I’d say, “This book is not the one you want to write—it’s certainly not the one your agent or your editor wants you to write—but it’s the book you need to write. So, know that both the writing and the publishing of this book are going be harder than you can imagine—ruinous really—and will take years. But it’ll eventually be for the best. And all thanks to Geoff Dyer.”
9. What forms of work, other than writing, did you have to do to complete this book?
Oh, man, does five years of therapy count? Because without guidance from a mental healthcare professional, the completion of this book would’ve driven me mad—more mad.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
I was in a workshop taught by Dennis Lehane when I received word I’d gotten into a PhD program. I asked Dennis what I should do. He knew a couple writers who went through the program. It was known to be theory-heavy, and those friends weren’t writing much anymore. So, he advised me against it, and never had earning an advanced degree sounded like such a dumb idea. Dennis being Dennis, he told it to me bluntly, if lovingly. What I got was a taste of the tough Dorchester love. “Jay,” he said, “if you go get a PhD in fiction writing, you are a fucking idiot.”
