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.
