After Sparrow L. Patterson finished writing the first version of her debut novel, she threw it away. “That was really hard for me,” she says, “because it was done, but it wasn’t right.” It didn’t accomplish her plan to “immortalize somebody and heal.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Synthetic Bi Products, which was published by Brooklyn-based Akashic Books last fall, is a coming-of-age story told from the perspective of Orleigh, a bisexual 18-year-old who lives in west suburban Geneva in the early 1990s. Orleigh is promiscuous, manipulates her mother and friends, steals, uses cocaine, and generally finds suburban life boring. She’s also a talented painter who’s painfully aware of her own shortcomings and those of her friends. “Most of the people I knew were mall rats,” Orleigh says in one passage. “They had no lives, no real friends, no loyalties to anyone or anything. They cared mainly about sex, liquor, and cars….All I could think was how the mall-rat mentality was getting inside me like flesh-eating bacteria munching away at my brain.”
After graduating from Geneva High School, she earned bachelor’s degrees in English and psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997 and then moved to Chicago. For two years, she was a member of the Hodgepodge Art Movement, a now-defunct group that produced and sold paintings to benefit shelters for battered women. Patterson chipped in artwork and read poetry at the group’s openings.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Robert Drea.
