Patrick Strickland came of age in Plano in the ’90s. But not the Plano of popular imagination, the city of big-spending California transplants and upscale consumerism at The Shops at Legacy and The Boardwalk at Granite Park.
Instead, the reporter turned fiction writer — a former wrestler at Plano East Senior High and the son of a single, bartender mom — lived on the other side of town, where the struggle bus stopped several times a day.
“I know Plano has this reputation as being a pretty affluent place, but for most of my time coming up, it was just me and my mom… and that wasn’t really my personal experience,” he recalled recently in a phone interview. “And I had a lot of friends kind of like that, too. And later when I was in high school, and then shortly after I finished high school, I felt like I had a lot of friends overdose or die.”…