On a mellow Saturday afternoon, I talked to Niko Stratis over Zoom about her new memoir, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman (University of Texas Press, 2025). 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.
I was first introduced to Stratis’ work through her essay on “The Unsung Queerness of Green Day” a piece of writing that has stuck with not only for its premise but as an example of what a piece of writing can look like when its author truly lets herself be taken over by music. In The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, Stratis invites readers to be taken over by the dad rock that we may have once rolled our eyes at or worse, overlooked.
After coming out as trans in her thirties, Stratis’ debut is as mature and insightful as she is sitting comfortably across from me on Zoom, a music studio in the background. We talk about class, our love of coffee, the need to be always busy and the capitalist system at the root of all three. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Rumpus: This is your debut. Why did you decide to do it under the framework of dad rock?
Niko Stratis: I kind of had it as a joke. I was extremely fortunate because I had been thinking about what I wanted to do, I really wanted to write a book. I’ve been writing cultural essays online and I really wanted to do a book.
Jessica Hopper at the American Music Series reached out to me and said, “Hey, would you pitch something on the series?” The first time I ever knew about the series was the same, I think as a lot of people’s entry, a Hanif Abdurraqib book about A Tribe Called Quest, called Go Ahead in the Rain. That book blew my mind on what music writing could be. So, I always had that in the back of my head. I had the title of “the dad rock that made me a woman” because I thought it was funny. It’s a great title. So, I wrote an essay about The National because I was, like, “The National is a dad rock band, right?” I was thinking about Wilco as the modern parlance of it, and I kind of was approaching it as a joke. A lot of the stuff that I’ve really liked writing about has been pieces of culture that people will sort of look at as a joke or a weird or a stupid thing, and then try to find some way that I can bring some heart into these things that I actually really legitimately loved. I wrote about Jackass for Bitch a number of years ago, and it was that idea of like, “What’s the thing that on the outside looks really dumb, that on the inside I could try to make something more?” Dad rock sort of felt like that to me, and it was a nice challenge to be like, “So what does this actually really mean? And how am I creating a framework for what I think dad rock is?”
Rumpus: Can you define dad rock for our readers?
Stratis: You know, what’s so funny is, a couple people have asked me this now, and I was like, “When I wrote the book, I was intentionally vague about it.” I’ve developed my own framework for what I want dad rock to be. To me, it is a genre that is about people. I’m trying to approach it with very loose terms to not give away all my secrets, but a genre where the person who is making the music is not telling you what to do but is imparting some knowledge they have learned based on mistakes that they themselves have made. So, it is taking time that you have hurt or been hurt or damaged yourself in some way and are now some point down, further down the road, where you’re yelling those lessons back and being like, “Hey, don’t stumble where I stumbled, or look where I fell. Try to avoid that, if you can.” It’s about trying to teach without being overbearing.
Rumpus: That is so interesting because in our culture, a lot of times dad’s love comes through, as an urgent, kind of like, “Don’t do what I did.” Whereas mom’s love can seem more controlled and easy, like they know what they are doing. Parenting from a dad feels like there is this anxiety behind it from that lived experience that comes out in bursts. But I only have one parent so I get both from my mom.
Stratis: I have a bunch of sticky notes that I was writing to myself, and I was really working on the book in earnest, and now it just sort of looks like the Zodiac Killer. One of them just says “Moms can be dads too.” Because I firmly believe that a decision I made right away, when I started building the structure of the book, was that I wanted to divorce dad rock from gender and genre entirely.
Rumpus: In a lot of the book, especially in the intro, you’re talking about dad rock in the context of your own dad.
Stratis: Yeah, it kind of surprised me, I wasn’t expecting to write about my dad at all. My dad is a big part of my life and my dad is still alive, I worked with my dad for a long time when I worked in construction, well before I transitioned. I sort of thought that I would open it talking about this, like the truck that my dad used to have, but then I also had, I inherited it from him, and the tapes and all that stuff. And then I thought that would kind of be it for my dad. And a thing that I discovered writing the book was how much dad had kind of informed a lot of the movements I’ve made, and a lot of things that I didn’t really see his influence in until I really started thinking about them very closely.
Rumpus: I wrote in my notes that this book is a love letter to your dad, which is interesting, because you also, in the intro you directly address him and apologize, knowing that writing about him is going to make him uncomfortable.
Stratis: I still feel bad about it. I don’t know if he’s actually read the book. I asked my mom what she thought, and she said, “I was reading it, and your dad was asking me about it. I told him that he comes across fairly well in the book, and he was surprised.”
Rumpus: How was that for you? It’s always interesting trying to be honest about one’s parents on the page, but also when they are alive, knowing that this could lead to another conversation.
Stratis: My parents both don’t like to talk about themselves, so in me talking about them, I sort of feel like I’m telling tales out of school. My mom is a lot more of a sociable person than my dad, but my mom is chronically ill. I write about this in the book too, my mom has been sick since the nineties, and so a lot of her life has been spent in and out of hospitals. So, writing about my mom’s health, I was like, “Am I telling stories that are mine to tell?” Every time I put information about my dad: “I wonder if he is going to be pissed off about this?” I never did ask them about it, and then when they were like, “When are we going to get a copy of the book?” I was like, “Oh, fuck, I should have talked to them more about the fact that they were going to be in it.” I was asking them questions trying to verify facts here and there. But I think they didn’t realize that I was really going to put them in, because my mom always made that joke that moms do: If you’re writing a book and they know they’re going to be in it, well, just be nice.
Rumpus: Another thing that I noticed, not only in this book, but in your other writing that I really appreciate, is you’re very honest about class. I think sometimes in essay collections people either hide class signifiers, or they’ll lean into it to the point that I feel like it’s kind of exploitative, where I feel like you’re just very honest.
Stratis: I think about that stuff a lot. Actually, it’s one of the reasons why a lot of the book is centered around work and jobs and labor. A couple people have asked, “Why do you write so much about work?” It’s because I worked. I’ve worked every day of my life since I was thirteen years old. I grew up not extremely well off, very blue collar. I was a third-generation trades worker. All that stuff was very informative to me, and its become more important to me as I’ve gotten older. I don’t come from money or a lot of access or a lot of those things.
It’s important to me to make those things feel real in a way, and it’s really hard to do it—like I never want to lean too hard into it, but I also don’t want to shy away from it. Once on Twitter, I was writing about watching The Bear, and I was said, something about how I’d really love to see a show like this set for other skilled trades that aren’t cooking, which is a skilled trade. But people sort of give it this gravitas. I worked in glass for a decade and a half. I could tell a lot of really interesting, beautiful, sad, fucked up stories in a world of labor like that, people don’t see it that way. I tweeted something about it, and somebody quoted me, and replied that people that fix toilets don’t lead interesting lives. That idea has followed me around. I’m like, “Okay, but they do actually.” I really want to prove that people that come from the places that I do, can tell interesting stories, and they have interesting lives. I’m trying to lean into honoring this place that I come from. I come from blue collar lower middle class people. And I think it’s just important to talk about that, a lot of people don’t, and I think a lot of people are scared to talk about it, especially in literary scenes. Especially because so many people have money, or family connections. It is hard to break into this industry and not have those things. I don’t have any of those things. When I started writing I knew like five people. Now I know like ten people, it is a very hard industry to break into. I think if people were more honest about that, it is an industry that is easier if you’re a certain class of person. I also have a lot of weird stories from working with my hands for as long as I did, so I’m telling them. I have met some of the worst people in my entire life doing these jobs. But I’ve also met some of the most interesting, weird people that have beautiful stories, or wild tales to tell.
Rumpus: Another thing that was just close to my heart, and I noticed throughout the book, is you write a lot about coffee.
Stratis: Yeah, I was surprised I didn’t write about smoking as much as I did, because I was trying to quit at the time. Coffee, funny—talking about my dad again, because, my dad in the glass shop that we worked in together, he had a very particular coffee setup that was just his, and we didn’t drink his coffee. He had his own, but my dad was very particular about it. I started drinking coffee when I was pretty young. I was thirteen, I started drinking coffee around the same time I started drinking alcohol, and then I quit drinking and quit doing drugs and quit doing everything else. Coffee is kind of all I have left. So now we’re leaning into it, yeah, and I just love it, you know? It’s been such a big part of my life for so long, and working in trades, it’s a thing that helps you survive. Because I would work five or six days in a row sometimes, and when you do physical labor without a lot of sleep for, you know, almost a week, coffee is your best friend.
Rumpus: Throughout the book you also talk about alcoholism and periods of heavy drinking, which always lead to memory gaps. How is the process for you?
Stratis: Painful at times, because there’s some stuff you kind of start to slowly remember that was painstakingly locked away by virtue of drinking for as long as I did. It kind of helped, even with the process of putting the book together. I had initially made a really long playlist of songs and artists and whatnot. And then slowly, I would take the dog for a walk at four thirty in the morning and listen to all these songs. I would wait to see if they didn’t conjure any memories at all, then they just weren’t gonna work. I have to sit with them or check in. I would ask my sister if she had any memory of a thing, or I’d ask my mom. My mom’s memory is not always the most reliable, either, but I would just sort of ask around and try to piece together enough that I could start putting the memory back together in my head. Some stuff I knew I had, and I had just always sort of been avoiding.
That’s one of those things that happens when you quit drinking. Sometimes all the things that you were avoiding don’t go away. Now you just have to learn to deal with them without the benefit of washing everything away. So, a lot of it was kind of just processing over time and sort of choosing very selectively, “What things am I going to drag back to the surface here, and what am I going to do with them once they’re there?” Yeah, it’s not always an easy process. I will say the book feels honest. Sometimes I’m not fully able to remember things as clearly as I want. I think this is the same for a lot of people’s memories, regardless of their relationship with memory loss. Sometimes, you think you remember something so clearly, and it’s maybe not really the way that it happened, but at a certain point it almost doesn’t really matter more than it does. You ask, what has your memory been telling you for years that this is what happened? Sometimes, maybe that’s enough.
Rumpus: Despite its musical elements, this book is very much a transition memoir. When you set out to write this book, was it your intention to add to the genre?
Stratis: I kind of tried to avoid it at first, to be honest. I never wanted to fully write a transition memoir, just because, for the most part, that book has been done. There are only so many ways you can do a transition memoir. I wanted to approach it from enough different angles that it wasn’t just about that.
I will often say that transitioning and getting sober have been, at least for me, very parallel lines. These things that you embark upon, or that you accept—that you think will be the thing that heals all your problems, when, in actual fact, it is just a thing that you do that no longer hides the problems from you, and that you actually have to start dealing with shit. So when I started working on it, I thought, “Sure, it’s a transition book, but it’s also about addiction and sobriety, and it’s about labor, and it’s about death, and it’s about all these other ideas, and it’s about class in its own way.” I wanted the water to be muddy enough that it wasn’t just transition. I think it’s a weird canon of books to be in. I know especially within the trans community, there is that idea of how do you do a memoir as a trans person and not immediately have it be a trans memoir? I’m not sure I pulled it off, but I really tried.
Author Photo Credit: Alysha Haugen