The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman

Author: Niko Stratis Series: American Music Series

Hardcover

A memoir-in-essays on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us.

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Summary

A memoir-in-essays on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us.

Description

A memoir-in-essays on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us.

When Wilco’s 2007 album Sky Blue Sky was infamously criticized as “dad rock,” Niko Stratis was a twenty-five-year-old closeted trans woman working in her dad’s glass shop in the Yukon Territory. As she sought escape from her hypermasculine environment, Stratis found an unlikely lifeline amid dad rock’s emotionally open and honest music. Listening to dad rock, Stratis could access worlds beyond her own and imagine a path forward.

In taut, searing essays rendered in propulsive and unguarded prose, Stratis delves into the emotional core of bands like Wilco and The National, telling her story through the dad rock that accompanied her along the way. She found footing in Michael Stipe’s allusions to queer longing, Radiohead’s embrace of unknowability, and Bruce Springsteen’s very trans desire to “change my clothes my hair my face”-and she found in artists like Neko Case and Sharon Van Etten that the label transcends gender. A love letter to the music that saves us and a tribute to dads like Stratis’s own who embody the tenderness at the genre’s heart, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman rejoices in music unafraid to bare its soul.

Critic Reviews

Songs can build rooms for us to collapse into when there's 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 Canada's 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 Stratis's expansive, emotive storytelling draws fresh electricity from songs that may well already hold a place in your (or your dad's) personal pantheon. What a joy it is to hear them anew through her ears. If you've 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 Stratis's 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. (BookRiot's "Our Queerest Shelves")

About the Author

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. She’s a Cancer, and a former smoker.