Eternal Graffiti

“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...