Niko Stratis is an award-winning writer from Toronto by way of the Yukon, where she spent years working as a journeyman glazier before coming out as trans in her thirties and being forced to abandon her previous line of work. Her writing has appeared in publications like Catapult, Spin, Paste and more. Shes a Cancer, and a former smoker.
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Description
- Far away from dry land, and its bitter memories
- Bitter melodies, turning your orbit around
- The whole world will be listening now
- Got to be something better than in the middle
- Why the hell are you so sad?
- If I could be who you wanted, all the time
- See you in heaven if you make the list
- He might be a father but he sure aint a dad
- Last night I dreamt Id forgotten my name
- Take my hand and help me not to shake
- Play with matches if you think you need to play with matches
- I cant think of floorboards anymore
- Im ready for both of us now
- Want to change my clothes, my hair, my face
- Pick up the pieces and go home
- Its the mercy I cant take
- Were all supposed to try
- I wanna see it when you find out what comets, stars, and moons are all about
- I never thought about love when I thought about home
- If the dead just go on living, well theres nothing left to fear
Songs can build rooms for us to collapse into when theres nowhere else to go, and songs can bore openings into new universes where we can finally bloom. The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman is a piercing memoir of trans adolescence and young womanhood amid rural Canadas beauty and desolation, and a riveting study of the ways in which music can both tie generations together and cocoon us through difficult becomings. Niko Stratiss expansive, emotive storytelling draws fresh electricity from songs that may well already hold a place in your (or your dads) personal pantheon. What a joy it is to hear them anew through her ears. If youve ever felt a song look right through you before you could see yourself, this book is for you.
-Sasha Geffen, author of Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary
A book that sits beautifully with the bloodiness and bones of a working-class trans life. A wonderfully queer love letter to artists and musicians and all those who have had to bare their souls just to carve out a life in a world that has no place for them. A lesson on how to write yourself alive.
-Carvell Wallace, bestselling author of Another Word for Love: A Memoir
The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman is a book sturdy as a brick house and tender as Wilco’s “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart,” which is to say that Niko Stratis has written herself—and us all—a place in which to freely and truly live.
-Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
Niko Stratis’s scintillating personal essay collection…[is a] confessional, clear-eyed book [that] blends cerebral music criticism with candid memoir elements…The book is a heartfelt tribute to the tenderness of dad rock and caring fathers, intertwining high-minded rock criticism with personal stories…A transcendent personal essay collection…[this book] crescendo[s] to sonorous heights.
-Foreword Reviews (Starred)
Many people could produce essays on the songs in their lives that saved them, but Stratiss well-practiced skill at writing on music, memory, and emotion gives this memoir a piercing and poetic quality that will move most readers.
-Library Journal
It’s helpful to have a trans culture upon which to draw, but many of us had to figure ourselves out with whatever culture was at hand. That’s the premise of The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman. It’s great that there are so many trans books coming out, but to nobody’s surprise its trans women who came from money and/or had a formal education who mostly get to write them. Transition can kick a transsexual out of the nest in the tree of class privileges, but it still helps to have been there before plunging earthward. Like her father, Stratis worked in glass factories and other manual trades, and found the thread of a life through music...I’m not particularly fond of ‘dad rock,’ but Stratis shows us how so many of these songs, mostly by men, have an emotional openness and expansiveness that’s not so common in pop music anymore.
-e-flux
Stratis contemplates gender, sense of self, and transitions of many kinds alongside the music that shaped her…With chapters centered around classic and unexpected dad rock from Radiohead and R.E.M. to Sheryl Crow and Waxahatchee, [this book is] a moving reflection on how music can help us find our truest selves.
-BookRiots "Our Queerest Shelves"
[This] beautifully written...[book] artfully combines personal reflection with wider cultural critique. Like much of Stratis writing, music is the throughline—this time the oft maligned genre of dad rock—to explore themes of gender, queerness, sobriety and belonging. But to me, some of the most interesting parts of this memoir are the reflections on class in Canada, a topic that I don’t think Canadian media touches on enough.
-Friday Things
[This] stirring collection focused on the music that inspired the author to embrace her trans identity...is a poignant ode to musicʼs power to change lives.
-Publishers Weekly
Stratis effortlessly blends memoir and music history to tell the story of growing up transgender in the Canadian Yukon in the 1980s and ’90s, using songs by artists like Wilco, Sheryl Crow, The Wallflowers, and R.E.M. as a mirror for her own feelings during defining moments…She goes on to redefine what the term ‘dad rock’ means to her, casting off its negative associations and showing how music became a lifeline for her. Fans of books like Laura Jane Graces Kill Me Loudly will enjoy Stratis’ honest reflections on the lifesaving power of music.
-Booklist
I’m not arguing that organizing the story around a number of ‘dad rock’ songs lightens the narrative, but it give readers, especially readers who might not share a lot of experiences with Niko, an entrance point…Even when I didn’t know the songs, the writing about them is strong enough that they still work as the entrance point into the narrative. Though obviously the goal is to evoke her life through the songs, she is also able to evoke the songs with her prose, which also speaks to the strength of the collection.
-Yesterday Today Tomorrow Forever
Never did I think I would be read so thoroughly by an essay collection featuring all of the sad man music I hold so dear to my heart, or by the simple description of saying a person looks like they’re very into Pavement. This collection is tenderhearted and open, written in straightforward yet staggering prose and as someone who came into themselves listening to several of these same acts, I can’t help but adore this collection and rush to put it in the hands of everyone I know.
-The Southern Bookseller Review
Stratis’s memoir offers a bold vision for tenderness, healing and hope...[It] will be a balm for anyone who has felt at odds with their circumstances and found a way to survive them through music...The brilliance of this book rests in how it makes space for kids like young Stratis to feel seen...[especially at] a time when we’re seeing increasing hostilities towards trans people...The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman demonstrates how critically engaging with music offers us a path towards understanding each other better by making space for the pop culture that offers a window to our souls. In a political context that can and will erode the soul, this book is a welcome reminder of how music can change your life.
-The Tyee
Music has the power...to reveal truths about yourself before you even recognize them. Thats one aspect of culture writer Niko Stratis debut book, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman.
-CBC
Niko is exactly the person whose memoir in songs I would want to read and Im delighted to tell you that it didnt disappoint; its a lovingly constructed mixtape about the importance of music within a personal quest to understand who you really are, or what youre meant to be.
-The Maris Review
What’s moving and important here could have been in a work that centers around pretty much any genre, it’s just that the reality of Stratis’s life means it has to be dad rock. This is a book about how we grow up with, live entwined around, and learn from art, even to the extent that many of us can say that art had some part in saving our lives...Each chapter interweaves discussion on [one] song and its place in the artist’s work and career with the events from her own life most relevant to her relationship with the song. Sometimes the emphasis even shifts on a sentence-by-sentence basis in a way that gives both the narrative and the analysis a sense of propulsion...You finish The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman feeling like you know the author, even if her pains and tribulations aren’t yours; and if you are also someone who understands your self, world, and relationships through music, you can recognize just how vitally dad rock did those things for her.
-dusted
Stratis’s writing is as lyrical and potent as the songs she writes about…It will bother some that her transition doesn’t really appear until late in the book, but as a later-in-life queer myself, I loved getting to read about the complexity that made her who she is, even if it’s not a pat narrative. This is the core of Stratis’s work: she reflects on the stuff of life that is messy and complicated, and—like our favourite musicians—she makes art of it.
-Xtra Magazine
Its not difficult to imagine the authors honest but sympathetic treatment of her main character as a kind of literary dad rock of its own; she lets her younger self fuck up plenty, but she always guides the story forward through moments of grace delivered via headphones, truck speakers, and workshop boomboxes.
-GQ
Stratis’s book invites further exploration of the connection between queer and specifically trans people and a genre that is canonically understood by the general public as an area of cisheteronormative art.
-The Flytrap
For the reader who can’t live without music...[this is] the story of being trans, searching for your place in the world, and finding it in a certain comfortable genre of music.
-Out SFL
I cant recommend [Stratiss book] enough…Shes such a gifted storyteller and a very insightful, empathetic, delightful person, and all of that comes through in her very—and generously—personal coming-of-self book…To be admitted to a front row seat of her personal trajectory (tied to dad rock, of all genres) is a gift unto itself.
-CBC
[In The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman] one of the internet’s foremost commentators on the relationship between gender and music uses this much-maligned music label to explore questions of desire and transition.
-Electric Literature
For the reader who can’t live without music...[this book is a] story of being trans, searching for your place in the world, and finding it in a certain comfortable genre of music.
-Qnotes Carolinas
This is music writing at its best, and personal essay writing at its best.
-Parnassus Books Blog: Musing
Stratis expertly mixes her own story with the stories of these songs and how those two things intertwine, along the way carving out her own definition of Dad Rock that speaks to who she is, who her own dad is, and how life can be shaped and guided by the music we love.
-The Music Book Podcast
The book reads as part memoir, part playlist, part musical history; a reflection on how music can hold memories even when they begin to fade...[This] is an intricate look at gender, identity, and growing up, shaped by what gets lost to time just as much as what remains.
-Paste Magazine
Breaking free from the traditional transition memoir, this unique and engrossing collection of essays takes us to the Yukon Territory of Canada and the interiors of old trucks and blue collar work sites...In her book, Stratis invites readers to be taken over by the dad rock that we may have once rolled our eyes at or worse, overlooked.
-The Rumpus
For that road trip where the car is packed with old mixtapes featuring Built to Spill, Wilco and Radiohead...Evocative, empathetic and often funny, Toronto culture writer Niko Stratis’s first book is a memoir about how music can be a balm and a catalyst for a person struggling to find their way in the world.
-The Tyee
Like a singer-songwriter performing her own work on stage, Niko Stratis really HAD to be the narrator of her own memoir. In a gentle voice tinged with strength, humor, and vulnerability, she shares stories as a kind of soundtrack of my life, weaving commentary on popular music with her experiences as a trans woman...Like any good mixtape, this production includes stories that are both metaphorical anthems and ballads, with Stratiss tone adapting as she reveals her personal triumphs and struggles.
-AudioFile Magazine
As much music criticism as memoir, Dad Rock invites queer readings of REM and paints a tender portrait of a genre (which, as she notes, is French for gender) in flux.
-Chatelaine
Blurring the lines between rock criticism and memoir, Niko Stratis writes about how the emotional fearlessness of noted dad rock artists like Wilco, R.E.M. and Bruce Springsteen helped Stratis navigate her own coming out as a trans woman.
-Exclaim!
This is music writing at its best, and personal essay writing at its best...Buy this for your college kid, your friend who makes the best playlists or your friend who needs a push to start writing that essay collection.
-Musing
Stratis uses ‘dad rock’ as a foundation to explore her journey toward realizing her trans identity…This collection of essays underlines music’s ability to help us locate our identities, fostering an understanding of the self that makes life not only easier but more fulfilling.
-Paste
This book absolutely wrecked me. It shook me to my core...This is both a memoir of transformation and restoration, as Stratis chronicles in unsparing detail the jaw-dropping lengths she goes through to discover who she really is. The writing is incisive, the emotions are raw, and the music is spectacular. Through it all, it’s an exploration of gender and identity in pursuit of belonging, and any fan of introspective music writing needs to read it.
-Treble Zine
The incisive essays in the book examine how Stratis discovered a sense of queer and trans identity and belonging by way of listening to "emotionally available" artists.
-CBC Books
The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman is a book for this moment when we’re re-evaluating algorithmic curation and rediscovering the human connections in our playlists... It is an expertly curated collection...While it’s true that no one notices the DJ when she’s doing her job right, this book spotlights the DJ in Stratis for the reasons-why in every song...Stratis’s prose folds in on itself, knowing it can’t approach the songs head-on for the memories and emotions they hold...It’s an honest account of gender dysphoria as it may be—not the beauty of life but the incongruity of living...This collection is for anyone who has ever felt so deeply about a record that they base a whole era of their life around it. If you’ve ever felt so frustrated at language’s inadequacy to capture everything a song can mean, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman will remind you why you tried to write that blog or start that zine in the first place. This book is a moving tribute to Stratis’s father and the music of her upbringing.
-Miramichi Reader
-Sasha Geffen, author of Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary
A book that sits beautifully with the bloodiness and bones of a working-class trans life. A wonderfully queer love letter to artists and musicians and all those who have had to bare their souls just to carve out a life in a world that has no place for them. A lesson on how to write yourself alive.
-Carvell Wallace, bestselling author of Another Word for Love: A Memoir
The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman is a book sturdy as a brick house and tender as Wilco’s “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart,” which is to say that Niko Stratis has written herself—and us all—a place in which to freely and truly live.
-Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
Niko Stratis’s scintillating personal essay collection…[is a] confessional, clear-eyed book [that] blends cerebral music criticism with candid memoir elements…The book is a heartfelt tribute to the tenderness of dad rock and caring fathers, intertwining high-minded rock criticism with personal stories…A transcendent personal essay collection…[this book] crescendo[s] to sonorous heights.
-Foreword Reviews (Starred)
Many people could produce essays on the songs in their lives that saved them, but Stratiss well-practiced skill at writing on music, memory, and emotion gives this memoir a piercing and poetic quality that will move most readers.
-Library Journal
It’s helpful to have a trans culture upon which to draw, but many of us had to figure ourselves out with whatever culture was at hand. That’s the premise of The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman. It’s great that there are so many trans books coming out, but to nobody’s surprise its trans women who came from money and/or had a formal education who mostly get to write them. Transition can kick a transsexual out of the nest in the tree of class privileges, but it still helps to have been there before plunging earthward. Like her father, Stratis worked in glass factories and other manual trades, and found the thread of a life through music...I’m not particularly fond of ‘dad rock,’ but Stratis shows us how so many of these songs, mostly by men, have an emotional openness and expansiveness that’s not so common in pop music anymore.
-e-flux
Stratis contemplates gender, sense of self, and transitions of many kinds alongside the music that shaped her…With chapters centered around classic and unexpected dad rock from Radiohead and R.E.M. to Sheryl Crow and Waxahatchee, [this book is] a moving reflection on how music can help us find our truest selves.
-BookRiots "Our Queerest Shelves"
[This] beautifully written...[book] artfully combines personal reflection with wider cultural critique. Like much of Stratis writing, music is the throughline—this time the oft maligned genre of dad rock—to explore themes of gender, queerness, sobriety and belonging. But to me, some of the most interesting parts of this memoir are the reflections on class in Canada, a topic that I don’t think Canadian media touches on enough.
-Friday Things
[This] stirring collection focused on the music that inspired the author to embrace her trans identity...is a poignant ode to musicʼs power to change lives.
-Publishers Weekly
Stratis effortlessly blends memoir and music history to tell the story of growing up transgender in the Canadian Yukon in the 1980s and ’90s, using songs by artists like Wilco, Sheryl Crow, The Wallflowers, and R.E.M. as a mirror for her own feelings during defining moments…She goes on to redefine what the term ‘dad rock’ means to her, casting off its negative associations and showing how music became a lifeline for her. Fans of books like Laura Jane Graces Kill Me Loudly will enjoy Stratis’ honest reflections on the lifesaving power of music.
-Booklist
I’m not arguing that organizing the story around a number of ‘dad rock’ songs lightens the narrative, but it give readers, especially readers who might not share a lot of experiences with Niko, an entrance point…Even when I didn’t know the songs, the writing about them is strong enough that they still work as the entrance point into the narrative. Though obviously the goal is to evoke her life through the songs, she is also able to evoke the songs with her prose, which also speaks to the strength of the collection.
-Yesterday Today Tomorrow Forever
Never did I think I would be read so thoroughly by an essay collection featuring all of the sad man music I hold so dear to my heart, or by the simple description of saying a person looks like they’re very into Pavement. This collection is tenderhearted and open, written in straightforward yet staggering prose and as someone who came into themselves listening to several of these same acts, I can’t help but adore this collection and rush to put it in the hands of everyone I know.
-The Southern Bookseller Review
Stratis’s memoir offers a bold vision for tenderness, healing and hope...[It] will be a balm for anyone who has felt at odds with their circumstances and found a way to survive them through music...The brilliance of this book rests in how it makes space for kids like young Stratis to feel seen...[especially at] a time when we’re seeing increasing hostilities towards trans people...The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman demonstrates how critically engaging with music offers us a path towards understanding each other better by making space for the pop culture that offers a window to our souls. In a political context that can and will erode the soul, this book is a welcome reminder of how music can change your life.
-The Tyee
Music has the power...to reveal truths about yourself before you even recognize them. Thats one aspect of culture writer Niko Stratis debut book, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman.
-CBC
Niko is exactly the person whose memoir in songs I would want to read and Im delighted to tell you that it didnt disappoint; its a lovingly constructed mixtape about the importance of music within a personal quest to understand who you really are, or what youre meant to be.
-The Maris Review
What’s moving and important here could have been in a work that centers around pretty much any genre, it’s just that the reality of Stratis’s life means it has to be dad rock. This is a book about how we grow up with, live entwined around, and learn from art, even to the extent that many of us can say that art had some part in saving our lives...Each chapter interweaves discussion on [one] song and its place in the artist’s work and career with the events from her own life most relevant to her relationship with the song. Sometimes the emphasis even shifts on a sentence-by-sentence basis in a way that gives both the narrative and the analysis a sense of propulsion...You finish The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman feeling like you know the author, even if her pains and tribulations aren’t yours; and if you are also someone who understands your self, world, and relationships through music, you can recognize just how vitally dad rock did those things for her.
-dusted
Stratis’s writing is as lyrical and potent as the songs she writes about…It will bother some that her transition doesn’t really appear until late in the book, but as a later-in-life queer myself, I loved getting to read about the complexity that made her who she is, even if it’s not a pat narrative. This is the core of Stratis’s work: she reflects on the stuff of life that is messy and complicated, and—like our favourite musicians—she makes art of it.
-Xtra Magazine
Its not difficult to imagine the authors honest but sympathetic treatment of her main character as a kind of literary dad rock of its own; she lets her younger self fuck up plenty, but she always guides the story forward through moments of grace delivered via headphones, truck speakers, and workshop boomboxes.
-GQ
Stratis’s book invites further exploration of the connection between queer and specifically trans people and a genre that is canonically understood by the general public as an area of cisheteronormative art.
-The Flytrap
For the reader who can’t live without music...[this is] the story of being trans, searching for your place in the world, and finding it in a certain comfortable genre of music.
-Out SFL
I cant recommend [Stratiss book] enough…Shes such a gifted storyteller and a very insightful, empathetic, delightful person, and all of that comes through in her very—and generously—personal coming-of-self book…To be admitted to a front row seat of her personal trajectory (tied to dad rock, of all genres) is a gift unto itself.
-CBC
[In The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman] one of the internet’s foremost commentators on the relationship between gender and music uses this much-maligned music label to explore questions of desire and transition.
-Electric Literature
For the reader who can’t live without music...[this book is a] story of being trans, searching for your place in the world, and finding it in a certain comfortable genre of music.
-Qnotes Carolinas
This is music writing at its best, and personal essay writing at its best.
-Parnassus Books Blog: Musing
Stratis expertly mixes her own story with the stories of these songs and how those two things intertwine, along the way carving out her own definition of Dad Rock that speaks to who she is, who her own dad is, and how life can be shaped and guided by the music we love.
-The Music Book Podcast
The book reads as part memoir, part playlist, part musical history; a reflection on how music can hold memories even when they begin to fade...[This] is an intricate look at gender, identity, and growing up, shaped by what gets lost to time just as much as what remains.
-Paste Magazine
Breaking free from the traditional transition memoir, this unique and engrossing collection of essays takes us to the Yukon Territory of Canada and the interiors of old trucks and blue collar work sites...In her book, Stratis invites readers to be taken over by the dad rock that we may have once rolled our eyes at or worse, overlooked.
-The Rumpus
For that road trip where the car is packed with old mixtapes featuring Built to Spill, Wilco and Radiohead...Evocative, empathetic and often funny, Toronto culture writer Niko Stratis’s first book is a memoir about how music can be a balm and a catalyst for a person struggling to find their way in the world.
-The Tyee
Like a singer-songwriter performing her own work on stage, Niko Stratis really HAD to be the narrator of her own memoir. In a gentle voice tinged with strength, humor, and vulnerability, she shares stories as a kind of soundtrack of my life, weaving commentary on popular music with her experiences as a trans woman...Like any good mixtape, this production includes stories that are both metaphorical anthems and ballads, with Stratiss tone adapting as she reveals her personal triumphs and struggles.
-AudioFile Magazine
As much music criticism as memoir, Dad Rock invites queer readings of REM and paints a tender portrait of a genre (which, as she notes, is French for gender) in flux.
-Chatelaine
Blurring the lines between rock criticism and memoir, Niko Stratis writes about how the emotional fearlessness of noted dad rock artists like Wilco, R.E.M. and Bruce Springsteen helped Stratis navigate her own coming out as a trans woman.
-Exclaim!
This is music writing at its best, and personal essay writing at its best...Buy this for your college kid, your friend who makes the best playlists or your friend who needs a push to start writing that essay collection.
-Musing
Stratis uses ‘dad rock’ as a foundation to explore her journey toward realizing her trans identity…This collection of essays underlines music’s ability to help us locate our identities, fostering an understanding of the self that makes life not only easier but more fulfilling.
-Paste
This book absolutely wrecked me. It shook me to my core...This is both a memoir of transformation and restoration, as Stratis chronicles in unsparing detail the jaw-dropping lengths she goes through to discover who she really is. The writing is incisive, the emotions are raw, and the music is spectacular. Through it all, it’s an exploration of gender and identity in pursuit of belonging, and any fan of introspective music writing needs to read it.
-Treble Zine
The incisive essays in the book examine how Stratis discovered a sense of queer and trans identity and belonging by way of listening to "emotionally available" artists.
-CBC Books
The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman is a book for this moment when we’re re-evaluating algorithmic curation and rediscovering the human connections in our playlists... It is an expertly curated collection...While it’s true that no one notices the DJ when she’s doing her job right, this book spotlights the DJ in Stratis for the reasons-why in every song...Stratis’s prose folds in on itself, knowing it can’t approach the songs head-on for the memories and emotions they hold...It’s an honest account of gender dysphoria as it may be—not the beauty of life but the incongruity of living...This collection is for anyone who has ever felt so deeply about a record that they base a whole era of their life around it. If you’ve ever felt so frustrated at language’s inadequacy to capture everything a song can mean, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman will remind you why you tried to write that blog or start that zine in the first place. This book is a moving tribute to Stratis’s father and the music of her upbringing.
-Miramichi Reader