Having made her way from journeyman glazier to beloved music writer, with a gender transition in the middle, Niko Stratis has a story to tell. In her debut memoir-in-essays, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, Stratis creates a mixtape (literally, each chapter is a song title) of reflections on family, music, substance abuse and—above all—survival. Stratis begins with a story of listening to the Waterboys in her dad’s truck, but throughout the book we see how, in addition to her relationship to her father, many other things shaped her: work colleagues, partners, the melancholy of the Yukon and particular song lyrics that got her from booze in a bathtub to where she is now. What makes real dad rock, for Stratis, is less about what a male parent listened to and more about the soundtrack to transformative moments in life. Dad rock is the music that rears us, the music that helps us figure ourselves out. In Stratis’s life, that included everything from Bruce Springsteen to HAIM, Sheryl Crow to the National, and R.E.M. to Neko Case. Stratis’s writing is as lyrical and potent as the songs she writes about; in that sense, the book is a master class in form mirroring content.

It will bother some that her transition doesn’t really appear until late in the book (Stratis tells me that’s already been mentioned by some early readers), 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.