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Joel Pinckney : jpinckney@utpress.utexas.edu
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.
Praise for The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman
“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
“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
“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 is exactly the person whose memoir in songs I would want to read and I'm delighted to tell you that it didn't disappoint; it's a lovingly constructed mixtape about the importance of music within a personal quest to understand who you really are, or what you're meant to be.”
-Maris Kreizman, The Maris Review
“A transcendent personal essay collection”
“a poignant ode to music’s power to change lives”