Eternal Graffiti: A Novel

"I don't know if this is a confession or a purge, a scream or a lullaby," begins twenty-seven-year-old Owen Kilroy's journal, in which he writes about the remarkable women-friends and lovers-who've come and gone and who have shaped his life, as well as the many varieties of heartbreak he's experienced.

Owen revisits himself as a seventeen-year-old guitar player, songwriter, and drug dealer in a small, fictional California desert town. He relives being arrested, violently, by half the town's...