This is the story of how my book cover came to be, which is not only a story that includes Oliver Jeffers but also turns out to be a slightly Oliver-Jeffers-ish story.
(Side note: I did not (NOT) name myself after Oliver Jeffers. Or at least, not consciously.)
Many years ago, when my children were but wee bairns, the hours between 6 am and 6 pm were lawless, uncontrolled, anarchistic mayhem. There were four of them and only one of me, and they were all very young at the same time having all been born within three and a half years of each other, and anyone who’s ever had kids will have some idea of what this was like. Anyone who hasn’t… well… may you forever remain in ignorant bliss.
At 6 pm every day I got all four kids upstairs and into the bath, and from then on it was all soap and bubbles and running up and down the hallway playing superheroes to get dry, and then finally the best time of day when my baby-anarchists turned into four exhausted, sweet-smelling lambs, curled up under the covers, waiting for their bedtime stories.
I say stories (plural) because we’d usually get through four or five books a night. In those days, kid’s picture books were pretty much almost all I read, so they needed to be good ones. This was how we found Oliver Jeffers.
Oliver’s first book, How to Catch a Star, came out a few months before my first son was born, so there was never a time in my children’s life when there wasn’t an Oliver Jeffers book lying somewhere around the house. Between 2005 and 2015, when I reluctantly had to admit my children had outgrown picture books, we bought every book he published.
Disappearing into the magical, whimsical dream world of his illustrations every evening was our escape. As a family, we were going through a lot of changes, and many of them were very painful for my kids. If I could have waved a magic wand and made it all go away I would have, but I couldn’t. We weren’t living in that sort of story.
Luckily, Oliver Jeffers didn’t write those kinds of stories either. The characters in his books experienced fear, loss, and hopelessness, but it was their sense of curiosity and adventure that drove them forward, and it was always through some sort of collaborative teamwork that they managed to make it through. Whether it was helping a lost penguin, rescuing a stranded martian, releasing a bottled-up heart, indulging a passion for paper airplanes, or learning to read books rather than eat them, each story was a subtle reminder that the best way forward was to ask for help, trust in the power of friendship, and accept the small acts of kindness offered by those around you.
Book illustrations by Oliver Jeffers; featured with the artist’s permission
When I was writing Frighten the Horses I occasionally daydreamed about what it would be like if someone actually published my story. Given that I had no formal education in creative writing, no MFA, and no contacts in the publishing industry, this seemed like an elaborate dream, but while I was elaborately dreaming, why not go all the way? Someone once told me it would help during the long years of writing and re-writing to have a picture of the final product in mind, and so my final product naturally had a cover illustrated by Oliver Jeffers.
Someone once told me it would help during the long years of writing and re-writing to have a picture of the final product in mind, and so my final product naturally had a cover illustrated by Oliver Jeffers.
After the first part of my dream had come true—when the book had been acquired by Grove, edited by Roxane Gay, and had moved into production—I got an email from Roxane asking me if I had any thoughts about the cover. I assumed this was a formality since I’d been told with good authority that the author usually doesn’t get much say in the matter, particularly if he’s an unknown writer and the book is a debut. But I figured since she’d asked, I might as well give her an honest answer, however embarrassingly self-indulgent it might seem. When I didn’t hear anything back, I assumed the art department was going to ignore my suggestion and just produce whatever they wanted, which was fine by me since I was pretty sure the team at Grove knew what they were doing.
About a month later, I got an email update from Roxane, in which she casually mentioned that she’d “contracted Oliver Jeffers” for the cover.
For a moment I couldn’t work out whether the “r” in that word was a typo. Had she contacted Oliver Jeffers, or contracted him? Tentatively I reached out and asked. When she told me it was the latter, I nearly fell off my chair.
It turned out that Roxane knew Oliver. When she asked him if he’d be interested in doing the cover, Oliver politely declined, saying he was too busy with his own work to take on anything for anybody else. Roxane suggested he at least read the book before making a decision. Oliver continued to resist, putting it off like it was “forgotten homework,” until on a delayed international flight he reluctantly pulled it out of his bag. “Before the seatbelt sign had been switched off,” he wrote to me afterward, “I was hooked.”
I’m not going to repeat the rest of what he said because I’m bashful and it’s private, but I will share that he finished by saying, “Many, many things may have changed for you, but one thing is clear: you’ve always been a writer.”
Reader, I wept.
If you had told me when I first started falling in love with Oliver’s illustrations twenty years ago that I would have ended up with a cover as gorgeous as this, I would never have believed you. The minute he sent it through I emailed it to my best friend, and when she called me back moments later, all we could do was laugh. Really, it seemed like the only sane response to how utterly, preposterously perfect it was: just to laugh and laugh and laugh. The horse hoofs, the motorbike, the trans colors, the Louboutin shoe! Who could pick up this book and not want to know what the hell was going on inside its pages? What other picture could so accurately and engagingly introduce the story of my life?
Which leads us to why I think this story has such an Oliver Jeffers ending. His books don’t have morals, but they do have messages, and if there’s anything I’ve learned while working towards the publication of Frighten the Horses, it’s to overcome my fear of asking people for favors. Creating a book is an intensely collaborative process, and I’ve been frankly astonished by how many people have been willing to get involved or offer help when asked.
It’s also the message of the memoir itself. My children and I would never have made it through without leaning on the people who were there for us when we needed them, and without accepting help from all the therapists, support centers, peer groups, and resources that queer people have worked so hard to build so that people like us would have somewhere to turn. We couldn’t have done it alone, and I’m very glad we didn’t have to.
What I’ve come to believe through it all is that the most valuable human trait is kindness, which is something I may have first started to learn all those years ago, tucked up under the covers with my children, reading Oliver Jeffers books.
Oliver Radclyffe is part of the new wave of transgender writers unafraid to address the complex nuances of transition, examining the places where gender identity, sexual orientation, feminist allegiance, social class, and family history overlap. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and Them. His monograph, Adult Human Male, was published by Unbound Edition in 2023. His memoir, Frighten the Horses is out now with Roxane Gay Books.
Listen to Debbie Millman’s conversation with Oliver Jeffers on Design Matters.