Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman

In The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, Niko Stratis crafts a memoir-in-essays that defies expectations and defangs clichés, about genre, identity, and family. Framing each chapter around a pivotal rock song, Stratis curates a personal mixtape that explores how emotionally honest “dad rock," from Wilco and The National to Radiohead and Neko Case, became the soundtrack to her transformation from a closeted trans youth in the Yukon to a confident woman in her 30s.

With lyrical, incisive prose, she channels the music’s evolving emotional textures, its compassion, regret, and resilience, as mirrors for her own journey through addiction, labor, queerness, and desire. Eschewing tidy genre labels, Stratis redefines “dad rock” as a gentle pedagogy, music spun from lived mistakes, offering consolation, insight, and tether to self.

The result is a tender, defiant tribute: a work that merges music criticism with memoir, class consciousness with queer revelation, and generational comfort with radical self-discovery. By the final track, she isn’t just paying homage to the music that shaped her. She’s reshaped our understanding of what it means to be parented, to parent ourselves, and to become whole. The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman is a small masterpiece, bighearted, boundary-busting, and profoundly liberating.