All My Friends are Going to be Strangers

Danny Deck is a promising younger writer whose nearly fatal mistake is to cut himself off from his roots. He drifts from his native Texas to California and back, falls in love, looks for ties that will bind him to people and places.

What saves Danny is his discovery that his true country is the borderland -- "a thin strip between the country of the normal and the country of the strange." He finds his home is not entirely in Texas or Hollywood, but partially in both. Indeed, Danny sounds something like his creator.

"Acute, elegiac, funny and dangerously tender...indelible people and brilliant set piece scenes." (Time)