Author Sparrow Patterson read from her first published novel at Food For Thought Books in Amherst last Thursday.

The book, Synthetic Bi Products, follows the strange travels of a sixteen-year-old bisexual girl, Orleigh, on a cross-country quest for identity.

According to a review by fellow author Kate Christiansen, Patterson’s book depicts “a Midwestern suburban wasteland of Gen-Y anomie, dead-end jobs, petty crime, sex and drugs, until [Orleigh] is saved by the transformative power of love.”

Christiansen also called it “an affecting, fresh first novel.”

Patterson said that though she is nearly 30, she set out to capture the experiences of twenty-somethings in her novel, and has tried to keep the readings she has done all over the country youthful and fun.

“Usually we play games. We’ll hold mock auctions of weird Polaroids,” she said. “But tonight I have to be ‘a serious author’.”

Still, those gathered at Food For Thought received free T-shirts, bumper stickers, and autographs from the author. One of the T-shirts had “failure” printed on its black background in stark white letters. Patterson said she thought the T-shirt captured the irreverence of the so-called “Generation Y” as well as its redefinition of cultural norms.

“It’s perfect, isn’t it?” she said. “Very smart-assed.”

Joan Barberich, Publicity Coordinator for Food For Thought, said she felt that Patterson’s book was one of the first to capture the most recent generation of youth.

Another Food For Thought co-owner, Shana, said she agreed.

“Twenty pages into it, I was like, okay, that’s me and that’s my best friend. I think it’s representative of the generation which has just come to pass – like a weird indulgent journey into my own past.”

Before reading a short passage, Patterson said that the process of publishing the book had been “terribly difficult.”

“In the beginning I still wasn’t very serious about sending out a lot of copies because I didn’t expect it to be published,” she explained. “There’s a lot of sex in it and it’s very ripe sex. I can be very graphic, and I was worried the publishers wouldn’t want it because of some of its content.”

Patterson said that she found out about publisher Akashic Books “one day when I was reading Jane magazine on the subway.” She said that the magazine told of another Akashic publication, The F– Up, by Arthur Nersesian.

“I thought, well, if they’d publish that, then maybe they’d look at mine,” Patterson said. “I sent them the first 25 pages, and they got back to me and said, ‘if the rest of it is as good as that, then we want it.’ I’m lucky I read about them.”

Still, Patterson said, being accepted by a publisher was far from the finish line.

“Let just say this if you look at the back of the book, I was 28 when they began working with me on it, and now I’m almost 30, and it’s just now coming out,” she said.

Now that the book has been released, Patterson said she has mixed feelings about reading it in front of an audience.

“Before I do a reading, I usually ask, do you want sex, drugs, or rock and roll?” she said, adding that her book has plenty of all three. “People tend to like the sex, so I always read the sex.

“Oh, no, I’m blushing,” she joked after reading a graphic scene in which Orleigh is seduced by both a man and a woman. “It’s hard to read sometimes. Sometimes it’s boring – like, okay, here we go again – or sometimes it’s hard to even get the words out because it’s very personal.”

Patterson said that the main character of the book was personally based, but said she didn’t want to discuss whether all of the experiences she has are autobiographical.

“I did write the book for myself, as a healing process,” she said. “But I get annoyed with journalists asking the same questions. Who cares if she’s me?”

Some familiar questions were still asked of Patterson, including what her parents and childhood were like. Patterson said that the first six or seven years of her life “were lived in the back of a VW bus while my parents followed the [Grateful] Dead around.”

After that phase ended, Patterson said that her family settled briefly in San Francisco and Colorado before finally establishing a more permanent residence in a suburb of Chicago. This last, Patterson said, was the inspiration for the novel’s Geneva, Ill., which she called “more crap in the middle of a cornfield.”

Patterson will be undertaking her own cross-country journey to promote the book.

“Like Orleigh, I’m flighty,” she joked.

Ultimately, Patterson said, she wants the audience of her book to concentrate on the more tender, serious aspects of the book rather than its somewhat unorthodox plot.

“It’s not all smut,” she said. “It does have its moments, but it’s got a story to it – a sad story.”