Thirty-two gigabytes used to be more storage than you would ever need. It feels like a quaint number by comparison to the terabyte-boasting solid state drives on the market now – never mind the music streaming platforms we’ve been normalized to accept. We’ve ditched the one-time purchase from the weirdo at HMV for the ad-free subscription and seemingly boundless catalog.
But once again, as vinyl before it, a growing number of enthusiasts are retuning to an older standard. New cassette tape players like the FiiO CP13 and even classic click wheel iPod clones have been grabbing the attention of people who are sick of their subscription renewals and precarious access. There was a time when we felt like we owned our copies and enjoyed our interactions with the bald baddie in the blue flannel at the used record store, damn it. Niko Stratis’s The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman is a book for this moment when we’re re-evaluating algorithmic curation and rediscovering the human connections in our playlists.
The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman collects stories from Stratis’s life pre-transition, a life locked in lore-worthy alcoholism and boy failure. It is an expertly curated collection, as any discerning house party DJ can produce. While it’s true that no one notices the DJ when she’s doing her job right, this book spotlights the DJ in Stratis for the reasons-why in every song. Chapters take their titles from song lyrics at the core of each chapter, and songs come up dogmatically, often diegetic in the narrative. Almost every chapter has its own soundtrack you can listen along with if you take the extra steps to source them as you read.
No need to source them — Jamie made a playlist!
Stratis’s prose folds in on itself, knowing it can’t approach the songs head-on for the memories and emotions they hold. The difference between memories and stories from the past prefaces the chapter on R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon.” Here Stratis reads like pairs’ figure skating – the dual threads of her lifelong aquaphobia and love for Automatic for the People caressing, then twisting away in a dance of hiding and uncovering life’s secrets. Just as Stratis builds her analysis, calling Automatic for the People “a masterwork of lush arrangements… a record of secrets, dead ends, and doubling back” (95), she pivots to her fear of going underwater, doubling back on a story of nearly drowning at birth and picking back up at failing her swimming lessons. In this way she reminds us about the subtexts we all carry in our lives’ deeds – that there are reasons for the ways we are, embedded in our household objects.
These dual threads wind closer and closer in the sway of a tire swing, when in the space of progressively shorter paragraphs, she recounts flying through the air, naked and unafraid of her body and the water, with micro-observations about R.E.M. vocalist Michael Stipe’s lyrics and life. If you start listening to the song “The Great Beyond” when it shows up in the chapter, it further accents the powerful crescendo of this story, the chorus exploding over the sound of people screaming in the book. You will feel your heart in your throat, forgetting for a moment the author is obviously alive enough to write, yet still gripped by the danger and the crossfade euphoria of it all. Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz could never.
There are some sections that feel a bit anemic. “Take My Hand and Help Me Not to Shake,” an essay about Stratis starting her own business, is a bit unsatisfying. Here these disparate threads of addiction, anger, loneliness, starting a new chapter in life, and Sharon Van Etten’s talents as a singer-songwriter just don’t coalesce. The lyrics laden in the title are misattributed to “You’re Alright” but the song is actually called “We Are Fine,” a song which doesn’t come up at all in the essay. It feels unsatisfying, and I bet somehow Stratis could have found a way to wring heart-wrenching insight from the minutia of revolving door repair or another corner of her life to bolster the chapter. You can feel the conceit straining to make room for a tale that feels unfinished in an otherwise brilliant book. But what brilliant album is without its flaws? Even All Things Must Pass has “It’s Johnny’s Birthday.”
If you start listening to the song “The Great Beyond” when it shows up in the chapter, it further accents the powerful crescendo of this story, the chorus exploding over the sound of people screaming in the book. You will feel your heart in your throat, forgetting for a moment the author is obviously alive enough to write, yet still gripped by the danger and the crossfade euphoria of it all.
But it’s the transfeminine materiality of it all where this book really shines. At her core, before she’s able to realize her transition, Stratis’s mixtapes act as a tether to a life she can barely stand. If you have lived this reality, you know the little ways we leave notes to our dormant selves. A song and a memory can be all that keeps you from the bridge railing or the trigger. It’s an honest account of gender dysphoria as it may be – not the beauty of life but the incongruity of living. A certain unidentifiable something that makes the cis men around you sense you’re not really one of them. Stratis supplies a chilling demonstration of living closeted and stealth. For transfeminine readers, you may find a shared traumatic experience. For cisgender readers, you will find something so much truer than a culture war. But don’t let the gender politics of it all scare you off. This collection is for anyone who has ever felt so deeply about a record that they base a whole era of their life around it. If you’ve ever felt so frustrated at language’s inadequacy to capture everything a song can mean, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman will remind you why you tried to write that blog or start that zine in the first place. This book is a moving tribute to Stratis’s father and the music of her upbringing. If nothing else, come for the Radiohead chapter with MuchMusic’s Big Shiny Tunes in it.
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.
Publisher: University of Texas Press (May 6, 2025)
Hardcover 8.5″ x 5.5″ | 240 pages
ISBN: 9781477331484
Jamie Kitts (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Wolastoqiyik People. She is the author of the chapbook Girl Dinner (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2024) and a co-author of All Things to Keep You Here (with Egg Poets, Qwerty Homerow, 2023). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Malahat Review, Augur, new words, Plenitude, Yolk, PRISM International, and elsewhere. She is the Managing Editor and Homerow Chapbook Series Editor of Qwerty Magazine, and she is also the Editor-in-Chief of Gridlock Lit. Author photo by Jessica Webber
