Niko Stratis - The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman

2025, English, Niko Stratis,

Full title: "The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman" by Niko Stratis.

The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis is a book about survival disguised as a book about music, or maybe the other way around. It begins from a place that feels both deeply specific and immediately familiar, a glass shop in the Yukon Territory, a young person sealed inside a hypermasculine world of labor, routine, and unspoken rules, and a radio or CD player quietly offering a way out. When Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky was dismissed in 2007 as dad rock, Stratis was twenty five, closeted, and working for her father, surrounded by expectations about manhood that felt as rigid as the materials she cut and installed every day. What the culture mocked as soft, middle aged, and emotionally indulgent became, for her, a lifeline. Dad rock was not an embarrassment, it was permission to feel.

 

The book unfolds as a memoir in essays, but it reads like a mixtape assembled with care and urgency. Each piece circles a band, a song, or an album, and then widens into a meditation on gender, class, work, longing, and the slow, often painful process of becoming oneself. Stratis writes in prose that is taut and propulsive, unguarded without being careless, and marked by a rare emotional clarity. She does not use music as a clever framing device, she treats it as an active force that shaped her inner life when very little else allowed her that freedom. In listening to Wilco, The National, R.E.M., Radiohead, and Bruce Springsteen, she found emotional vocabularies that did not demand certainty or toughness, only honesty.

 

One of the book’s great achievements is the way it reframes dad rock itself. Rather than defending the genre on nostalgic or ironic grounds, Stratis reveals its emotional core, its tenderness, its willingness to sit with doubt and vulnerability. Michael Stipe’s lyrics become a quiet education in queer longing, full of coded desire and unresolved ache. Radiohead’s refusal to explain themselves offers solace to someone who cannot yet explain herself. Springsteen’s hunger for transformation, his yearning to change clothes, hair, face, resonates as something unmistakably trans, a desire not for escape but for alignment. These readings never feel forced, they feel lived in, shaped by years of listening in isolation and holding onto scraps of recognition wherever they could be found. The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman is also deeply rooted in class and labor. Stratis writes movingly about working-class life, about the dignity and damage of physical work, about fathers and daughters bound together by necessity and love even when language fails them. Her dad is not a caricature or a symbol, he is a presence shaped by tenderness as much as by silence. The book becomes, in part, a tribute to fathers like his, men whose emotional openness often found its outlet through music rather than conversation. Dad rock, in this sense, is not just music made by men of a certain age, it is music that allows care, grief, and love to exist without apology.

 

What makes the book especially powerful is its refusal to romanticize suffering or delay. Stratis came out as a trans woman in her late thirties, and the essays do not frame this as a triumphant reveal so much as a necessary reckoning. There is loss here, including the loss of a career she was forced to abandon, and there is anger at a world that made survival so contingent and so slow. Yet there is also joy, particularly in the moments where the label dad rock stretches and dissolves, making room for artists like Neko Case and Sharon Van Etten. In their work, Stratis finds proof that emotional directness transcends gender, and that the things dismissed as soft or earnest are often the things that save us. Critics have rightly praised the book as a queer love letter, a working-class memoir, and a testament to the power of art to keep people alive. Carvell Wallace describes it as a lesson in how to write yourself alive, and that feels exactly right. Sasha Geffen highlights its ability to show how songs can both cocoon us and open new universes, while Rachel Yoder likens the book to a space sturdy enough to live in. These are not blurbs that exaggerate, they recognize the book’s central achievement, which is to make room, emotional and imaginative room, for people who were told there was no place for them.

 

Stratis’s own life and career lend further weight to the book. After spending close to two decades as a journeyman glazier in the Yukon, she emerged as a vital cultural writer in her forties, bringing with her a perspective shaped by labor, isolation, and hard-earned self-knowledge. Her essays for outlets like Spin, Xtra, and Paste Magazine, as well as her widely read Catapult column Everyone Is Gay, have consistently explored the intersections of music, gender, and desire with wit and generosity. Her newsletter Anxiety Shark continues this work, using music as a way to process sobriety, fear, and growth. The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman feels like a culmination of these threads, distilled into a form that is both intimate and expansive. Ultimately, the book is not really about defending dad rock or reclaiming a maligned genre. It is about what happens when art meets someone at exactly the right moment, and offers them a mirror instead of a rulebook. It is about how emotional honesty can travel across generations, genres, and genders, and how music can hold a person together until they are ready to step into their own life. In rejoicing in music unafraid to bare its soul, Niko Stratis has written a memoir that does the same, and in doing so, she gives readers permission to listen more closely to the songs that shaped them, and to the selves those songs were quietly trying to bring into being.

Available via Amazon

Photo via nikostratis.com