The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman
Niko Stratis
Bok · Engelsk · 2025
| Omfang | 249 s.
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| Opplysninger | 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.. - Review 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 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 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 It’s helpful to have a trans culture upon which to draw, but many of us had to figure ourselves out with whatever culture was at hand. That’s the premise of The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman. It’s great that there are so many trans books coming out, but to nobody’s surprise its trans women who came from money and/or had a formal education who mostly get to write them. Transition can kick a transsexual out of the nest in the tree of class privileges, but it still helps to have been there before plunging earthward. Like her father, Stratis worked in glass factories and other manual trades, and found the thread of a life through music...I’m not particularly fond of ‘dad rock,’ but Stratis shows us how so many of these songs, mostly by men, have an emotional openness and expansiveness that’s not so common in pop music anymore. ― e-flux Published On: 2025-01-08 Stratis contemplates gender, sense of self, and transitions of many kinds alongside the music that shaped her…With chapters centered around classic and unexpected 'dad rock' from Radiohead and R.E.M. to Sheryl Crow and Waxahatchee, [this book is] a moving reflection on how music can help us find our truest selves. ― BookRiot's "Our Queerest Shelves" Published On: 2025-02-05 About the Author 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.. - Review 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 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 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 Stratis’s scintillating personal essay collection…[is a] confessional, clear-eyed book [that] blends cerebral music criticism with candid memoir elements…The book is a heartfelt tribute to the tenderness of dad rock and caring fathers, intertwining high-minded rock criticism with personal stories…A transcendent personal essay collection…[this book] crescendo[s] to sonorous heights. ― Foreword Reviews (Starred) Published On: 2025-05-01 Many people could produce essays on the songs in their lives that saved them, but Stratis's well-practiced skill at writing on music, memory, and emotion gives this memoir a piercing and poetic quality that will move most readers. ― Library Journal Published On: 2025-04-01 It’s helpful to have a trans culture upon which to draw, but many of us had to figure ourselves out with whatever culture was at hand. That’s the premise of The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman. It’s great that there are so many trans books coming out, but to nobody’s surprise its trans women who came from money and/or had a formal education who mostly get to write them. Transition can kick a transsexual out of the nest in the tree of class privileges, but it still helps to have been there before plunging earthward. Like her father, Stratis worked in glass factories and other manual trades, and found the thread of a life through music...I’m not particularly fond of ‘dad rock,’ but Stratis shows us how so many of these songs, mostly by men, have an emotional openness and expansiveness that’s not so common in pop music anymore. ― e-flux Published On: 2025-01-08 Stratis contemplates gender, sense of self, and transitions of many kinds alongside the music that shaped her…With chapters centered around classic and unexpected 'dad rock' from Radiohead and R.E.M. to Sheryl Crow and Waxahatchee, [this book is] a moving reflection on how music can help us find our truest selves. ― BookRiot's "Our Queerest Shelves" Published On: 2025-02-05 [This] beautifully written...[book] artfully combines personal reflection with wider cultural critique. Like much of Stratis' writing, music is the throughline—this time the oft maligned genre of dad rock—to explore themes of gender, queerness, sobriety and belonging. But to me, some of the most interesting parts of this memoir are the reflections on class in Canada, a topic that I don’t think Canadian media touches on enough. ― Friday Things Published On: 2025-04-11 [This] stirring collection focused on the music that inspired the author to embrace her trans identity...is a poignant ode to musicʼs power to change lives. ― Publishers Weekly Published On: 2025-05-01 Stratis effortlessly blends memoir and music history to tell the story of growing up transgender in the Canadian Yukon in the 1980s and ’90s, using songs by artists like Wilco, Sheryl Crow, The Wallflowers, and R.E.M. as a mirror for her own feelings during defining moments…She goes on to redefine what the term ‘dad rock’ means to her, casting off its negative associations and showing how music became a lifeline for her. Fans of books like Laura Jane Grace's Kill Me Loudly will enjoy Stratis’ honest reflections on the lifesaving power of music. ― Booklist Published On: 2025-05-01 I’m not arguing that organizing the story around a number of ‘dad rock’ songs lightens the narrative, but it give readers, especially readers who might not share a lot of experiences with Niko, an entrance point…Even when I didn’t know the songs, the writing about them is strong enough that they still work as the entrance point into the narrative. Though obviously the goal is to evoke her life through the songs, she is also able to evoke the songs with her prose, which also speaks to the strength of the collection. ― Yesterday Today Tomorrow Forever Published On: 2025-04-22 Never did I think I would be read so thoroughly by an essay collection featuring all of the sad man music I hold so dear to my heart, or by the simple description of saying a person looks like they’re very into Pavement. This collection is tenderhearted and open, written in straightforward yet staggering prose and as someone who came into themselves listening to several of these same acts, I can’t help but adore this collection and rush to put it in the hands of everyone I know. ― The Southern Bookseller Review Published On: 2025-04-24 Stratis’s memoir offers a bold vision for tenderness, healing and hope...[It] will be a balm for anyone who has felt at odds with their circumstances and found a way to survive them through music...The brilliance of this book rests in how it makes space for kids like young Stratis to feel seen...[especially at] a time when we’re seeing increasing hostilities towards trans people...The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman demonstrates how critically engaging with music offers us a path towards understanding each other better by making space for the pop culture that offers a window to our souls. In a political context that can and will erode the soul, this book is a welcome reminder of how music can change your life. ― The Tyee Published On: 2025-04-28 Music has the power...to reveal truths about yourself before you even recognize them. That's one aspect of culture writer Niko Stratis' debut book, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman. ― CBC Published On: 2025-05-06 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. ― The Maris Review Published On: 2025-05-06 What’s moving and important here could have been in a work that centers around pretty much any genre, it’s just that the reality of Stratis’s life means it has to be dad rock. This is a book about how we grow up with, live entwined around, and learn from art, even to the extent that many of us can say that art had some part in saving our lives...Each chapter interweaves discussion on [one] song and its place in the artist’s work and career with the events from her own life most relevant to her relationship with the song. Sometimes the emphasis even shifts on a sentence-by-sentence basis in a way that gives both the narrative and the analysis a sense of propulsion...You finish The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman feeling like you know the author, even if her pains and tribulations aren’t yours; and if you are also someone who understands your self, world, and relationships through music, you can recognize just how vitally dad rock did those things for her. ― dusted Published On: 2025-05-07 Stratis’s writing is as lyrical and potent as the songs she writes about…It will bother some that her transition doesn’t really appear until late in the book, but as a later-in-life queer myself, I loved getting to read about the complexity that made her who she is, even if it’s not a pat narrative. This is the core of Stratis’s work: she reflects on the stuff of life that is messy and complicated, and—like our favourite musicians—she makes art of it. ― Xtra Magazine Published On: 2025-05-05 It's not difficult to imagine the author's honest but sympathetic treatment of her main character as a kind of literary dad rock of its own; she lets her younger self fuck up plenty, but she always guides the story forward through moments of grace delivered via headphones, truck speakers, and workshop boomboxes. ― GQ Published On: 2025-05-14 Stratis’s book invites further exploration of the connection between queer and specifically trans people and a genre that is canonically understood by the general public as an area of cisheteronormative art. ― The Flytrap Published On: 2025-05-20 For the reader who can’t live without music...[this is] the story of being trans, searching for your place in the world, and finding it in a certain comfortable genre of music. ― Out SFL Published On: 2025-05-27 I can't recommend [Stratis's book] enough…She's such a gifted storyteller and a very insightful, empathetic, delightful person, and all of that comes through in her very—and generously—personal coming-of-self book…To be admitted to a front row seat of her personal trajectory (tied to dad rock, of all genres) is a gift unto itself. ― CBC Published On: 2025-06-12 [In The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman] one of the internet’s foremost commentators on the relationship between gender and music uses this much-maligned music label to explore questions of desire and transition. ― Electric Literature Published On: 2025-06-13 For the reader who can’t live without music...[this book is a] story of being trans, searching for your place in the world, and finding it in a certain comfortable genre of music. ― Qnotes Carolinas Published On: 2025-06-06 This is music writing at its best, and personal essay writing at its best. ― Parnassus Books Blog: Musing Published On: 2025-06-12 Stratis expertly mixes her own story with the stories of these songs and how those two things intertwine, along the way carving out her own definition of Dad Rock that speaks to who she is, who her own dad is, and how life can be shaped and guided by the music we love. ― The Music Book Podcast Published On: 2025-05-27 The book reads as part memoir, part playlist, part musical history; a reflection on how music can hold memories even when they begin to fade...[This] is an intricate look at gender, identity, and growing up, shaped by what gets lost to time just as much as what remains. ― Paste Magazine Published On: 2025-06-25 Breaking free from the traditional transition memoir, this unique and engrossing collection of essays takes us to the Yukon Territory of Canada and the interiors of old trucks and blue collar work sites...In her book, Stratis invites readers to be taken over by the dad rock that we may have once rolled our eyes at or worse, overlooked. ― The Rumpus Published On: 2025-06-25 For that road trip where the car is packed with old mixtapes featuring Built to Spill, Wilco and Radiohead...Evocative, empathetic and often funny, Toronto culture writer Niko Stratis’s first book is a memoir about how music can be a balm and a catalyst for a person struggling to find their way in the world. ― The Tyee Published On: 2025-06-27 Like a singer-songwriter performing her own work on stage, Niko Stratis really HAD to be the narrator of her own memoir. In a gentle voice tinged with strength, humor, and vulnerability, she shares stories as a kind of 'soundtrack of my life,' weaving commentary on popular music with her experiences as a trans woman...Like any good mixtape, this production includes stories that are both metaphorical anthems and ballads, with Stratis's tone adapting as she reveals her personal triumphs and struggles. ― AudioFile Magazine Published On: 2025-07-31 As much music criticism as memoir, Dad Rock invites queer readings of REM and paints a tender portrait of a genre (which, as she notes, is French for 'gender') in flux. ― Chatelaine Published On: 2025-10-29 Blurring the lines between rock criticism and memoir, Niko Stratis writes about how the emotional fearlessness of noted dad rock artists like Wilco, R.E.M. and Bruce Springsteen helped Stratis navigate her own coming out as a trans woman. ― Exclaim! Published On: 2025-12-04 This is music writing at its best, and personal essay writing at its best...Buy this for your college kid, your friend who makes the best playlists or your friend who needs a push to start writing that essay collection. ― Musing Published On: 2025-12-03
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| Emner | |
| Dewey | |
| ISBN | 9781477331484 : 350 N.kr.
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| Hylleplass | 781.64092 STR
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