Nonbinary Life

An Autotheory

By: Marquis Bey

Narrated by: Savannah Beckford

Bloomsbury presents Nonbinary Life: An Autotheory by Marquis Bey, read by Savannah Beckford

Nonbinary Life is an invitation to imagine the possibilities of life outside of gender.

To write, to think, to imagine, to agitate, and to love without regard for gender is to lead a non-binary life. In this genre-defying work of autotheory, Marquis Bey proposes a radical refusal: to relinquish gender as a framework we carry - for ourselves and for others - and to embrace modes of being that exist outside of its grasp.

Spanning questions of pronouns, masculinity, love, family, language, and even the Redwood National Forest, Nonbinary Life blends memoir and theory to provide a philosophical meditation on what it means to live beyond the binary©2026 Marquis Bey (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Critic reviews

When Marquis Bey pronounces the word nonbinary, it rhymes simultaneously with abolition, utopia, nope, and why not? Rather than launching a counterpolemic to characterizations of the nonbinary as a positionality without a politics, Bey disengages from those agonistics to imagine a freedom beyond the carcerality of gender.

Marquis Bey’s Non-Binary Life is a lovely and poetic personal meditation on living non-binary in a way-too-binary world—on race and class and burner genders, on the real cost of telling gender truths, and of sometimes just saying 'Sorry, but no' to gender.