‘And Every Day Was Overcast’ is an illustrated novel by photographer and writer Paul Kwiatkowski. The book, available in paper form, digital form and as unique iPad edition (with accompanying soundtrack), is an autobiographical and exhilarating pursuit of the author’s adolescence in the gritty suburban South Florida of the 1990s.

Nights were disorderly, days were filled with drugs and endless trips leading nowhere. Kwiatkowski gathers his memories into a tapestry of images and words set in a bleak America of the past. It’s the story of an awkward and horny teenager who’s inarticulate in anxious situations, with whom many readers will connect due to the universality of anxiety, rebellion, curiosity about sex, and trying to be cool while knowing you’re not. Even if you weren’t spending your teen days in a drug-fuelled daze.

Kwiatkowski’s illustrated novel is innovative, yet impossible to categorize. Containing about 50 pages of text and 230 of photos, this ‘book of photography’ ranges from nostalgic to bizarre and often disturbing, yet sublime. It contains the fragmented memories of an adolescent teenager who used to trip on acid every day for a year, percolated through the interpretations of a now mature man. The narrative could be seen as a collection of snapshots, almost inevitable for the Tumblr age, mixing fact and fiction, biography and urban legend, original photography and found photography, a photograph of a pornographic photograph on the cover of a home-made mixtape, a handwritten note in the script of a teenage girl, etc..

Behind the teenage routine of getting high and getting laid lies a dark undertone: a somber static caused by AIDS hysteria, bullies, loneliness in a not-so-sunny Florida. As the narrator says, “My roots were steeped in shallow earth, easily extracted from amorphous terrain – swamps and beaches, neither land nor water.” These are feelings not unknown to teenagers, but in the state of Florida it’s a physical reality.

‘And Every Day Was Overcast’ is our new favourite NSFW coffee table book.

Find it at www.andeverydaywasovercast.com and at Black Balloon Publishing.