While the title of Toronto-via-Yukon writer Niko Stratis’s memoir might be tongue-in-cheek, her story is anything but – as the author wrestled with her gender identity growing up in a hypermasculine environment in the nineties, music proved to be her lifeline.
By turns tough and tender, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman takes readers through Stratis’s youth in Whitehorse, where she spent two decades working as a glazier – like her father before her – before coming out as a trans woman in her late 30s and establishing a career as an essayist with a knack for sharply observed personal narratives that draw on a lifelong passion for music. Stratis has compiled the songs that serve as the thread tying her book together into a playlist, on Apple Music and Spotify.
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Amid some anxiety about releasing a debut book with a U.S. publisher and embarking on her first promotional tour during a crackdown on transgender rights and increased anti-trans rhetoric, Stratis spoke to The Globe and Mail about how telling her own story meant drawing on the songs that saved her.
As a fellow music writer – albeit one who resolutely never writes in the first person – I’m curious how you first came to music writing and how you marry criticism and memoir.
I was flying somewhere, and I stopped at a bookstore before I left and grabbed Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest and read it on the plane, and I remember thinking, “Oh, so you can write about music in this way that’s incredibly beautiful.” And it kind of broke my brain in this perfect way. As I got more into writing essays, I was always thinking about Hanif’s book.
And then amazingly, the very series I wrote my book for is published by the same press. Editor Jessica Hopper messaged me and asked if I had an idea for a book for the series – I really didn’t, but right away when the title came to me, I realized I could build something around that concept.
You offer up some deeply personal stories in the book. How did you decide just how much you wanted to share with the reader?
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With some of it, the story isn’t really mine to tell – so where it’s not fully my story, I didn’t want to make it about me, but those [narratives] really did deeply affect me or impact me in some way. Even with my family, when I sent them the book, it was the first time I got really panicky about it: “I didn’t ask them if this was okay.”
But I mostly just tried to figure out what I wanted the narrative of the book to be, and then I chose what I thought were the most compelling ideas and memories that I could thread together to tell the story I wanted to tell.
I could have easily made the book four times as long – I think I was initially afraid of a lot of my memories, but those things happened a long time ago and I’ve sort of defanged them over the years. And now that I’m less afraid of them, maybe now is the time to process this stuff out loud in a way that hopefully is helpful for other people.
“Dad rock” seems to have become a bit of a catch-all genre that often gets a bad rap for being maybe a little too heart-on-sleeve – how do you define it?
I’ve been kind of cagey about answering this question – I very pointedly in the book don’t outright say, “This is what I think” – and I do want to divorce it from gender, because I want to have a conversation around how there are different sides to what might fall into this genre.
The term was first coined by a writer in reference to the band Wilco. And when I started writing this book, I thought, “Why are we using ‘dad rock’ as a pejorative?” Because I don’t think it is.
So I started working from that place of, “How do I take this on and show it the love and deference I think it deserves?” And it’s hard, because I think even when people see the book title, they think of it as this funny thing – and it is! – but I think it’s great that people who are getting older and have been through a lot have survived long enough to be making a damned rock record.
“I could have easily made the book four times as long – I think I was initially afraid of a lot of my memories…” says Stratis.Chloe Ellingson/The Globe and Mail
It’s lovely that a book about dad rock is also, in many ways, an ode to your own dad.
I gave my parents the book, and I don’t think my dad has even read it – when my mom started reading it, my dad asked her, “Well, how is it?” And my mom said, “You come across really well in here.” And she told me he was surprised to hear that. [Laughs]
My dad’s a really private person – he keeps his feelings close to his chest. Last year when he turned 70, for his gift, I printed out and framed the first page of the book where I’m writing about his truck. And my partner got this great photo of him looking at it – and, as she said, “Okay, that really got him.”
How do you feel like your relationship with dad rock has changed over the years, especially now that you’re in a different place than when the music you write about in the book first impacted you so strongly?
I once got asked to take part in a roundtable about trans women and their relationship with dad rock, and I thought, “I didn’t realize this was a thing – now I want to have, like, a doctorate in this, because I feel like I’ve stumbled upon something here.” [Laughs]
I’ve become so protective of it because it’s a thing that’s unfairly maligned, and I think there’s a lot of beauty there. And I hope everyone just accepts it into their own heart by finding their own definition of what it means to them.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
