Excerpt: Bachelorx: a Nonbinary Memoir by Skylar Lyralen Kaye
- Archaeolibrarian
- 6 hours ago
- 5 min read
Book Details:
Book Title: Bachelorx: a Nonbinary Memoir
Author and Publisher: Skylar Lyralen Kaye
Cover Artist: 100 Covers
Release Date: April 1, 2026
Pairing: Nonbinary protagonist/lesbian and trans love interests
Tense/POV: present tense/alternating POV.
Genres: Literary memoir with graphic and autofiction elements
Tropes: Friends to lovers
Themes: Coming out, Dating and sex, search for love, queer divorce, neurodiversity
Heat Rating: 3 flames
Length: 319 pages
It is a standalone book.
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#Literary #Memoir with #Graphic and #Autofiction elements
When nonbinary Orpheus leaves their much-loved asexual partner Tobi after 35 years, they have never dated sober, never had a casual girlfriend and never had sober sex. At the age of sixty-two, they’re good at marriage and not at anything casual.
They’ve been living out and proud not only as nonbinary, but also as plural, filming a queer web series.
They’re completely unprepared for middle aged lesbians and their complicated desires. Romance, flirting, love-bombing, control, seduction, desire roll into Orpheus’ life and wake up every possible opinion among their many vocal and vulnerable personalities.
Their very painful history gets woken up in all their inner people, too.
As teenager personalities revel in the “queer prom that never was,” as Orpheus experiences a first kiss with a much younger trans person and then goes on to make out with a woman who confesses trauma in between flicks of her tongue, as child personalities run for cover and the wise inner yoga teacher Kaye warns that none of them are ready to date, Orpheus dog paddles through the waves of dysfunctional urge-to-merge dating.
Then two friends die and their landlord sells their building. Their now ex Tobi totals their car and breaks their own back.
Will a Eurydice appear, Orpheus wonders, as they search the apps.
Then she does, with a lump in her breast, heart problems, a live-in mother, disabled son and a need for a partner who will hold on, listen and take care of her no matter what comes, as they touch in a rush of a second adolescent joy.
At week six, Eurydice’s at passion. At week seven, she’s talking about adding an addition to her house.
And Orpheus, who will say that they’re plural but won’t show it, who resists commitment only in their silences, goes to every medical appointment, every work occasion, every family party, as their personalities argue about whether to stay, whether to go, whether anything could possibly be right with this woman they can’t get enough of touching.
Every hero must journey to Hades. In the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, innocence is sacrificed to experience. Life walks in when you open the door. No matter your age or circumstances.
Style
Worth noting that Bachelorx contains both graphic elements and fictional/mythopoetic elements. It’s intentionally outside the box, aiming for a true representation of neurodiversity while including comedy.
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available in #KindleUnlimited,
Chapter 1: Becoming Everything
The child Orpheus comes forward in a memory of sunlight. Walking the long line of the green painted two by fours that top posts connecting a chain link fence, they follow its border behind the suburban homes of their Ohio neighborhood. They balance easily, their 1960’s striped t-shirt warmed by the light. Around them insects and birds raise voices for them to listen. They never fall. Held to the earth by tentacles of energy they send to every living being, they ask Gaia to become one with all life, just for a while, just until the pain eases and they can rise alone into a liminal sky, turning poems into songs.
Not boy, not girl, not feminine, not masculine, not straight, not cisgender, not singular, not a member of any tribe that will lay claim to them, Orpheus learns early to become everything.
*
That pandemic spring, I slump over my computer late into the evening with colleagues in California, figuring out how to get actors to film themselves while crew observes on Zoom. Outside the window, the moon hovers over treetops and telephone poles. At the far end of the street the commuter rails screeches by, empty of people. Staring forward into the computer screen, I compare lighting between sets in San Francisco and Pottstown, Pennsylvania. My director of photography assesses eyelines as I give notes to actors before calling for one last take to wrap the day. A multicolored collage of queer bodies appears on the screen as close Zoom. Androgynous nonbinary bodies like mine, trans masc like my spouse, cisgender women, old, young, BIPOC, full-bodied, thin, allo and asexual, appear with a background of pink, people like the ones I interviewed and whose stories I tell.
I stagger into the bedroom. Pull off my jeans and fall onto the bed in boxer shorts. My spouse Tobi stands near the entrance to the kitchen, tapping a foot on the floor, a stained green button down over their full belly. They stare, deep-set brown eyes burning toward me, toes pointed out, just a little bowlegged.
“Five minutes, Orpheus,” they say. “You could at least give me five minutes.”
“I have to sleep.”
“Then in the morning.”
“I have to work. You know I have to work.”
“Get up five minutes early.”
“I can’t. I’m too tired.”
They stomp into the kitchen, bang some cabinets. I cover my head with a pillow.
The next day, Tobi, now wearing a stained brown shirt—their ability to spill food on themself still confounds me after three decades—turns on the Biden-Trump debate at full volume. Stomping over the hardwood floors into the bedroom, I grab the clicker from where it lies on the bed.
“Everyone on Zoom can hear you.” I turn the television off.
They grab the clicker and turn it back on.
I turn it off.
They turn it on.
I turn it off.
“Watch on your computer or somewhere else,” I tell them. “I am WORKING!”
Abandonment issues meet workaholic artist.
Two days later, Tobi leaves to stay in an Airbnb so I can work in peace. Sleep in peace. Not be triggered.
They stay away for a month.
When they come home, I bring up polyamory.
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Skylar Lyralen Kaye, fae/they is a queer, neurodivergent, social justice and award-winning writer as well as a lifelong activist. They have a BA in English from the University of Arizona and an MFA in Theater fromSarah Lawrence College.
Kaye was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Fiction in 1997 and was a finalist for the 2005 Massachusetts Cultural Council of thebArts Awards in Playwriting. They have published in literary journals such as Calyx, Persona, Phoebe, Girlfriends, Happy Magazine and the anthology Out of the Ordinary, Children of LGT Parents as well having published the novella Priest Kid and most recently the novel Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky.
Skye has had multiple theatrical productions of their plays as well as performing as a solo artist and running the theater company Another Country Productions. Their most recent awards include the 2021 NE Film Star Award as well as 13 film festival awards for the web series Assigned Female at Birth. In 2018 they won Best in Fringe at the San Francisco Fringe for the one person show My Preferred Pronoun Is We, in 2017 the Moth Story Slam and in 2018 the Boston Story Slam.
Some other awards include: the 2015 Meryl Streep Writers Lab for Screenwriters and the 2002 Stanley and Eleanor Lipkin Prize in Playwriting.
Author Links
Tour hosted by: Gay Book Promotions
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