When I asked Jay Baron Nicorvo’s son, Sonne, what he liked best about his dad’s memoir, Best Copy Available, he had a ready answer.
“Well, for starters, the Uncle Don story. I heard the first half of this morbid tale one night at dinner, some months into quarantine. Just as it was getting good, my dad smiled, stopped himself, and decided that I would have to read the rest of it for myself in his memoir, when it was finished. Well, after four years, I’ve gotten closure. It was worth the wait. The hype is real.”
I agree with Sonne about the Uncle Don story (which I won’t spoil here)—and would extend his idea to the entire book. When it comes to Best Copy Available, the hype is real.
The book is brave and harrowing and aggressive and artful and more. It is a personal story—about family and poverty and abuse and violence and mental health—with societal implications. It is an investigation of the nature of truth wrapped in subjectivity, reconsideration, and the vagaries of time and the limits of one’s point of view.
Like his son, Jay answered questions via email. (So too did Thisbe Nissen, wife to Jay, mom to Sonne, and long one of my favorite writers in her own right; I’ll share our e-conversation next month).
Memoir has long been an intriguing genre to me. I’m interested in the impulse to write and publish them—and the impulse that drives readers to pick them up. I think those questions are particularly intriguing in a couple of kinds of memoirs: the “trauma and its aftermath” memoir and the “creative nonfiction” memoir that leans into artistic choices. Arguably, Best Copy Available is both of these things. So tell me about the impulse to write the book—and how you felt writing it, and how you feel now that it’s out in the world. And if you thought about the potential reader as you were writing.
In my acknowledgements, I mention how the book started first as an email to a friend and became a kind of love letter—to Sonne, my son; to Thisbe, my wife; to my mom; and to myself, really. So I was thinking of potential readers at every stage. And as far as my impulses go, I will say that I did not want to write this book; I needed to.
Because, as you learn in part three of the memoir, in 2015 I suffered a kind of acute midlife crisis. I had a psychotic episode that lasted about as long as a feature-length movie, and ultimately landed me in the ER. After I’d recovered somewhat, I wrote that email to a friend, who’d asked how I was doing, and I described to her what I’d just gone through.
And then I just kept going. I kept writing, trying to figure out why I’d gone to pieces. The memoir is really a reordering of those pieces, of my troubled childhood mostly. When finished writing, I concluded that there wasn’t any single reason why I lost my shit—excuse my foul language—that, instead, there were numerous reasons, which I detail in the book, and the memoir is kind of a map. It’s my map back to sanity, and it’s also me making peace, albeit fragile, with my past.
And now that it’s out in the world, I’m hearing from readers, and I’m realizing the map I made isn’t just for me, not anymore. In the same way I leaned into other memoirs while writing mine, I think mine is already becoming a map for other readers and writers to follow, to refer to, especially for those of us men who’ve suffered sexual abuse, and for the women and men who love us.
At times, you take a fairly adversarial tone with the reader. That, combined with the shifting nature of the “You” in the narrative, puts the reader on their back foot. What drove those narrative/aesthetic decisions?
And don’t forget my use of profanity! Which I don’t resort to much in my daily life. On the page, though, especially in this memoir, I’m trying to capture and convey an overwhelming experience—sexual abuse. Across three books now, I’ve learned you sometimes have to get in the reader’s face a little, simply to get their attention, especially these days. And I wanted to be a bit accusatory, of the reader but also of myself, because I can’t help but feel we’re all somewhat complicit, and we need to get out of our comfort zones when it comes to sexual abuse.
The book is the best investigation of the nature of truth that I’ve read since The Lifespan of a Fact. What did you hope to reveal about truth and subjectivity?
Wow, that’s high praise, because I think John D’Agata is maybe the best thing to happen to American nonfiction since, I don’t know, Hunter S. Thompson? And while I love D’Agata’s essay “What Happens Here”—I remember reading it in The Believer when it first ran—and how the book you mention was born out of that essay, I must admit I did not think of it while writing mine. When it comes to truth, I was thinking more of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
So, to answer your question, and as simply as I’m able: What I wanted to reveal was my lack of conviction. Let me put it this way. I don’t believe in God. How’s that for a lack of conviction! And I don’t believe God is love. Raised Roman Catholic, I’m agnostic. I’m a heretic. I believe that God, if God exists, is truth. The closest I can ever get to any God is my belief in the truth. And not my truth, but the truth, a greater truth, whatever the hell that is!
I think we’ve done a real disservice to the truth by trying, and failing, to democratize it. As JFK said, “Truth is a tyrant—the only tyrant to whom we can give allegiance.” If we all have our own truth, there is no truth. What we all do have is our own story. That is not the same thing as the truth. Not even close, most of the time.
Put another way: I think we’ve gotten too sentimental about love, and at the cost of the truth. This problem probably started 2,024 years ago, thereabouts, with John in Corinthians, where God is love, and the Beatles only made it worse, because I think truth, not love, is all we need. Love is gravy.
I believe a person can get through life without love. It might not be a good life, or warm or happy, but such a life can still be seen through to its end. I think our prisons are filled with such people, people who don’t, or can’t, know love. And sociopaths probably fall under this category. But I don’t think you can get through life without truth, not with your sanity intact. And liars drive us mad.
Truth holds it all together—without truth, I don’t think you can have real love—and when we lose our grip on the truth, on facts, on the verifiable nature of science and history and math even, when it all gets called into question by an ideology, any ideology, religious or political, on the left or the right, be it election outcomes or the merits of standardized testing, and then that calling-into-question is amplified by technology, be it the invention of an alphabet or movable type, the internet or social media or AI, well, that’s when—to paraphrase Didion cribbing from W. B. Yeats—things fall apart. Then, the liars take over. Because their lies cause us to call into question even those of us working so desperately to maintain the truth. Desperation can look like dishonesty.
I say in the book that the world doesn’t end with bang or a whimper. The world ends with a liar. That’s when the center cannot hold, and anarchy is loosed upon the world. And then comes that killer Yeatsian kicker, so very damning: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Not to veer into politics here, but is there anyone more passionately intense, and anyone more full of it, than Trump? So I guess I wanted the book to reveal a little bit of this truth, as I’ve learned it the hard way, that the truth matters above all else, even if my understanding is so very subjective. But remember—never trust a memoirist!