Published in 2020
240 pages
Nicola Maye Goldberg is a graduate of Bard College, where she received the Mary McCarthy Prize. Her work has appeared in the Winter Tangerine Review, the Quietus, Queen Mob’s Tea House, and elsewhere. She is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at Columbia University.
What is this book about?
On a cold day in 1997, student Sara Morgan was killed in the woods surrounding her liberal arts college in upstate New York. Her boyfriend, Blake Campbell, confessed, his plea of temporary insanity raising more questions than it answered.
In the wake of his acquittal, the case comes to haunt a strange and surprising network of community members, from the young woman who discovers Sara’s body to the junior reporter who senses its connection to convicted local serial killer John Logan. Others are looking for retribution or explanation: Sara’s half sister, stifled by her family’s bereft silence about Blake, poses as a babysitter and seeks out her own form of justice, while the teenager Sara used to babysit starts writing to Logan in prison.
A propulsive, taut tale of voyeurism and obsession, Nothing Can Hurt You dares to examine gendered violence not as an anomaly, but as the very core of everyday life. Tracing the concentric circles of violence rippling out from Sara’s murder, Nicola Maye Goldberg masterfully conducts an unforgettable chorus of disparate voices.
