Dear Friends
Welcome to my first Substack newsletter, and my memoir, Frighten the Horses, which is due out with Roxane Gay Books on September 17th!
This is where you’ll find everything you need to know about news and reviews, book tours, speaking events, and all the other fun stuff that comes with launching a book into the world. I will also be publishing essays, thoughts and musings as they come to me, mostly on gender identity, sexual orientation, feminism and social hierarchies, so if any of these are your bag, this is the place for you.
Details of my book tour will be coming shortly, but I wanted to start by sharing some of the blurbs and advance reviews the memoir has received, which will probably give you a better idea of what’s in store than any elevator pitch I can come up with. Some of them are from writers I’ve idolized for years and never dreamed would even read the book, let alone blurb it, so I’ve been pinching myself a bit lately. I don’t want to write anything naff (British, slang: uncool) about dreams coming true, but, you know, maybe sometimes they do.
I am very much looking forward to share this book with you. More soon!
Love, Oliver
Blurbs:
I often think that the entire purpose of a human life is to see if we can somehow get FREE—if we can escape from the rules, expectations, and limitations of our families and our cultures in order to live an entirely different existence than the one that was assigned to us at birth. Frighten the Horses is the inspiring true story of one man's extraordinary journey of escape from the wrong marriage, the wrong gender, the wrong life, in order to become who he was always meant to be. This book is as sharp as razors, but it also pulses with a passionate, desperate, human urgency for truth and liberation. I am deeply grateful to have read it, and my hope is that Oliver's story will free many others, as well.
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls
In this exquisite memoir of a trans-man, an upper middle-class Englishwoman gives up her country, her status, her wealth, her marriage, her new lesbian identity (and partner) in order to release and achieve her true male self. Oliver Radclyffe would be a major writer no matter what subject he embraced. That he has explored the mysteries of class, gender, and nationality makes Frighten the Horses a heart-felt, cant-free book of universal interest.
Edmund White, author of The Humble Lover
Frighten the Horses is an extraordinary, richly detailed account of self-realization elevated by Radclyffe's natural storytelling. Oliver Radclyffe writes with both bracing clarity and exquisite tenderness, for his family, his community, and his former self. The result is a powerful, absolutely necessary, and utterly engaging memoir that cannot be put down and will not be forgotten. Frighten the Horses is a gift, to all of us, and should be on every reading list.
Lauren Hough, author of Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing
Wise, generous, and fierce, Frighten the Horses is about more than a change of gender; it’s about the perilous process of accepting the self, in all its gnarly, glorious complexity. Oliver Radclyffe finds more than manhood on his inspiring journey; what he finds, in the end, is his humanity.
Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She’s Not There
This easy-to-read, almost jocular memoir is a tribute to how much the trans trajectory has been transformed by the existence of queer bookstores, lesbian and transmasc books, LGBT centers and their accompanying support groups. And how all of this labor to create infrastructure has succeeded in making transition so much more possible, not only for trans people, but for their parents, children, friends and even ex-husbands. This hopeful retelling of one life, from the post-transition perspective, makes trans a more viable possibility and documents this historical moment of opportunity and resource.
Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show
For Oliver Radclyffe, trans becoming is as much about finding himself as it is an awakening to the many gendered narratives that conspire to keep him trapped. Brimming with wry wit, radical candor, and vulnerability, Frighten the Horses is a fearless exploration of the liberation that comes from unwinding the narratives that we don’t choose but so often define us, and the beautiful new futures that exist on the horizon of our imaginations—if we are only willing to risk everything to open our eyes, and really, really look.
Thomas Page McBee, author of Amateur
Oliver Radclyffe’s Frighten the Horses is an intimate, deeply absorbing journey into the heart of what makes a life. It isn’t wealth or marriage, a prototypical family or whatever else society expects, but the quest for one’s own unique happiness. Radclyffe’s is not merely a memoir about being trans; it’s a memoir about how to find the kindest life in an often cruel world.
Meredith Talusan, author of Fairest
A tremendously warm, moving and oh, so Britishly droll account of Radclyffe's tortured and giddy journey to peel back his layers and embody the person he was truly meant to be. Anyone who's struggled with breaking from their own chains and daring to know themselves fully—whether gender-related or otherwise—will find comfort and fellowship in these pages. And hopefully those who have struggled or resisted understanding of what it means to be transgender will have their minds and hearts open, if they only give Radclyffe's incredibly charming and poignant memoir a chance.
Tim Murphy, author of Christadora
A blazingly tender memoir of blooming late, changing sex, and choosing joy. Oliver Radclyffe is a compulsively likeable narrator of his life, recounting a winding path toward manhood with valiant wit and vulnerability. No matter how many people hurt or desert him during his transition, Radclyffe continues to move toward love, care, and possibility. Radclyffe’s perspective as a parent is infinitely capacious, detailing the many ways he has been transformed by his four curious, big-hearted children, whose wishes matter just as much as his own. I have no doubt Radclyffe’s life story will remind countless others that it is never too late to live as yourself, without fear. Frighten the Horses is nothing less than a celebration of life.
Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches
With his profound gift of a memoir, Frighten the Horses, Radclyffe permits the reader to witness a human chiseling away at obfuscation to reveal the yearned-for self. We feel the visceral bewilderment of living in the wrong body, and the evolving surety that comes through every step of transition. An account of becoming. A statement of arrival. A generous act of service to all who are making the same journey, or who yearn to.
Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of Real American
As we follow Oliver deeper into himself, we access a wellspring of quenching trans joy. I wanted to remain in Radclyffe’s pages, to submerge myself a little longer in such tenderness, humor, and courage.
Alice Carriere, author of Everything Nothing Someone
The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read.
Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw
Reviews:
Radclyffe reflects on coming out as trans after starting a family in this intimate personal history. Born to wealthy parents in England, Radclyffe lived an early life marked by stability and privilege. But by adolescence, he harbored crushes on girls and dreamed of himself as a boy, growing “terrified of making a false move, of doing or saying something that would reveal me to be different.” After finishing school, Radclyffe tended bar and joined a motorcycle club as their only woman-presenting member. Depressed and aimless in his 30s, Radclyffe grasped at security by marrying the handsome, wealthy Charles. The pair had four children and eventually relocated to Connecticut, where Charles chased professional success and Radclyffe was relegated to the domestic sphere. Confronted by worrisome physiological symptoms stemming from years of self-repression, Radclyffe first accepted that he was gay, then that he was transgender, and found peace through friends in New York City, a countercultural bookstore in the East Village, and queer affinity groups like the Late Bloomers. Radclyffe’s moving devotion to his children lends the resonant coming-out narrative additional weight. Bolstered by poetic prose and offhanded candor, this story of late-in-life self-acceptance deserves a wide audience.
Publishers Weekly
This book is consistently frank, vulnerable, perspicacious, and insightful, covering an impressive variety of aspects of the transgender experience in intimate, lyrical language and dry, compassionate humor. The author’s analysis of privilege is particularly refreshing, as is his description of transitioning as a parent. A stunning memoir about discovering one’s identity late in life.
Kirkus Reviews, starred review