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Writerscast with David Milk
This is flat out a remarkable story told by a remarkable person. We live in a time when people are so often simply categorized into identities, as if the naming of a version of self somehow explains who a person is.
Los Angeles Review of Books
Humorous and heartwarming, Frighten the Horses covers Radclyffe’s two late in life coming out experiences, a story that unfurls in the wake of his moving from London to the Connecticut suburbs and raising four children–all while trying to figure himself out.
theSkimm’
I recently saw Oliver Radclyffe in conversation with Roxane Gay at a literary festival. I was so taken with his charisma and intelligence that I added his debut memoir to my Goodreads TBR right there at the event.
Autostraddle
In a moment in our culture where people are so quick to hide or deny these details about their past selves, Radclyffe’s honesty and vulnerability in these particular moments helps show that the process of becoming isn’t limited to what we learn about our own inner lives and desires. It’s also about what we’ve refused to see by denying ourselves for so long. While this is enough to set Frighten the Horses apart, Radclyffe’s reflections on parenthood — and on the gendered and non-gendered dimensions of motherhood, especially — help bring his work to another level entirely.
The New York Times
Enjoyable to read and well written… Radclyffe writes movingly about parenting as the emotional risks of every step he takes toward affirming his maleness… [A]s a testament to midlife transition—especially in a time when so much of the cultural conversation around gender rights focuses on young people—Radclyffe’s memoir offers a valuable alternate narrative to the loss and pain that queer history has too often insisted on.
BookPage
Frighten the Horses is warm, moving and most importantly, inspiring for anyone who needs a reminder that it’s never too late to be one’s authentic self.
Kirkus Interview
Radclyffe examines the constraints that class, gender, cultural scripts, and heterosexual marriage placed on his pre-transition self—and the world as we know it.
Oprah Daily
It’s the voice that makes this memoir stand out. This is a writer who can capture any moment with a dazzling, insightful, at times musical phrase.
Library Journal
Radclyffe’s riveting, moving memoir about his journey of self-discovery is a page-turner that reads like a novel.
Shelf Awareness
An arrestingly forthright and open account of self-realization, a portrait of a transgender experience that is beautiful, honest, and raw.
Booklist
Sincere and searching… There’s great power in Radclyffe’s vulnerable and generous portrayal of his trans experience, throughout which there are more dimmer-switch dawnings than flashes of light, and readers will be grateful for it.
Kirkus Reviews
This book is consistently frank, vulnerable, perspicacious, and insightful, covering ain impressive variety of aspects of hte transgender experience in intimate, lyrical language and dry, compassionate humor. The author’s analysis of privilege is particuarly refreshing. A stunning memoir about discovering one’s identity late in life.
Publishers Weekly
Radclyffe’s moving devotion to his children (“I didn’t so much guide them as encourage them to guide themselves”) 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.
MS. Magazine
Adult Human Male
In this short monograph, Oliver Radclyffe makes imperative and impassioned arguments for understanding the broad fluidity of sex and gender, especially in embodied and humanist terms as opposed to theoretical or ideological ones. Let this pointed and readable tome whet your appetite for Radclyffe’s full-length memoir coming in 2024.