We can't examine what we can't name.
Someone tells you they're demisexual. Or sapiosexual. Or that their partner is their "zucchini." You nod?and quietly wonder what any of it actually means for a first date, a boundary, a life built together. A Binary Banquet is the novel that answers, not with a glossary, but with people you come to love.
On a university campus, a year-long program in human sexuality and relationship diversity gathers an unlikely cohort of students and faculty. Guided by Sophie, a facilitator whose steady refrain is "you're not broken," they meet week after week to learn a vocabulary most of us were never taught?attraction types, attachment styles, the many shapes a committed relationship can take?and, in the process, to understand themselves and each other.
Lily believes something is wrong with her because attraction arrives slowly, until she discovers the word demisexual and a partner patient enough to move at her pace. Owen has endured thirty failed dates before realizing he connects mind-first, and finds his match in Mia, who meets him there. Brooke stops apologizing for being "too much" and finds someone who actually wants her intensity. Graham, an MBA student certain he needs none of this, slowly dismantles the patterns he's hidden behind for decades. Natalie learns that the deepest, most committed love in her life isn't romantic at all. Diana and Henry, both widowed, rediscover desire and tenderness later than they ever expected, navigating grief and renewal in the same breath. Around the table sit dominants and submissives, the asexual and the allosexual, blended families and platonic life partners?each story a different angle on the same human questions: How do I name what I feel? How do I ask for what I need? Who are my people?
This is not a book about struggle and tragedy. It's about joy, recognition, and the quiet courage of living?and loving?authentically. Difference here isn't a problem to be solved but a spectrum to be explored, and the workshop becomes less a classroom than a place where people finally feel seen. There are missteps and breakups, hard conversations and slow repairs?but underneath it all runs a current of hope. As the formal sessions end, what remains is something sturdier than any syllabus: a chosen family, the people who know us and stay anyway.
The second book in The Academic Feast Series?following Around A Table?A Binary Banquet stands fully on its own, while rewarding readers who began at the first book's table. It pairs the emotional pull of interwoven love stories with the clarity of a thoughtful, compassionate guide, including a reader's appendix of characters, terms, and quick-reference concepts for anyone who wants to go deeper or simply find the word that fits. A foreword by Associate Professor Carolyn Allen, MSS, MA, PhD, grounds the fiction in decades of clinical and academic insight, drawing on attachment theory, cognitive restructuring, and the everyday work of helping people make sense of their own lives.
For readers exploring their own identity, trying to understand someone they love, or simply curious about the full range of human connection?there's a seat at this table for you.
