We Don't Talk Enough About Class in This Country
By sTACY LEE KONG
Image: Shutterstock
Long-time readers of Friday Things will recognize today’s interview subject: award-winning culture writer and newly-minted author (of the beautifully written The Dad Rock That Made Me A Woman) Niko Stratis. A couple of years ago, she wrote a guest post for FT on how Twitter changed fandom, which explored the ways social media amplified stan culture through the lens of her own experience as a music writer. Now, we’re talking about her debut collection of essays, which, in classic Niko fashion, artfully combines personal reflection with wider cultural critique. Like much of her 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. So, I chatted with Niko about that, as well as her approach to memoir writing, the songs she didn’t write about and what it’s like to be a trans writer about to embark on a U.S. book tour at this particular moment.
I’m always really curious about the practical side of memoir writing. Because how you remember something is not necessarily how someone else remembers it, or even how it happened, right? But you have the power to tell it the way you want to, because you’re the writer. How did you navigate that?
The hard thing about writing and memory is they're not always perfect. Like, you kind of can’t trust your own memory, right? A fact is a fact. You can research a fact, you can check it, you can make sure you're right. But a memory is a memory, and your memories are only as good as you remember them. In fact, I was talking to my mom about this because I was like, ‘I'm not worried about it, necessarily, but I'm writing about things as I remember them.’ And she's like, ‘Well, that's all you can do.’ And I draw attention to this in book; sometimes I will refer to it as ‘this is how I remember it,’ because I don't usually know everything 100%. I know the story that I've told myself. Sometimes that's enough.
When you told me you were writing this book and that it would be about music, I was like, ‘Yeah, that makes perfect sense.’ But I didn’t totally anticipate dad rock as the framing mechanism. What made you settle on that genre?
Jessica Hopper, the series editor of The American Music Series at the University of Texas Press had reached out and said, You should pitch a book for the series. I had known the series because I had read Hanif Abdurraqib’s book about A Tribe Called Quest, and I really liked it. Initially, I had a different idea for a book, but when I pitched her that, she was like, ‘Yeah, this doesn't really work.’ So we got on a Zoom call and talked for an hour, and I landed on this idea of, what if I take a single band and tell a personal story through it? I thought I could do it through The National, but she was like, I think it needs to be more than that. Then I started thinking about them as this band that is considered to be quote, unquote ‘dad rock’ and the title just kind of came to me. I remember saying it out loud and thinking it was funny.
I started loosely thinking about what I consider dad rock to be, because it's often used as a pejorative, and I don't like it being used that way. And then I started thinking about dads, and I started thinking about my dad, and I was like, Well, my dad didn't really listen to ‘dad rock.’ He would make these mixtapes that had, like, Sade on them. And as I started thinking through that, it became more heartfelt. My relationship to the idea of what I thought dad rock changed because I was challenging it. I had to figure out what I would consider a dad rock band to be, and how to divorce that from gender. Because I want that to be the hook: yes, the title is funny, but how do we take a funny, stupid thing earnestly? Which is the thing I like to do a lot.
Each essay in the book references a particular song, from Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy” to “I Wish I Was the Moon” by Neko Case. How did you decide which ones to include?
I made a really big playlist, and then I went on a lot of walks and I listened to the songs. I needed just songs to spark a memory. The opening essay is a song by The Waterboys called “The Fisherman's Blues,” and when I listen to that song, I am back in this place of like, okay, the living room [of our house] is different. It hasn't been renovated yet. My dad's stereo is still there. He's asleep on the green pillow that he used to have. And I'm like, ‘Okay, I can use this.’ I can write through that picture that's in my head.
Are there songs that you wanted to use but couldn’t, for whatever reason? And if so, which ones?
Yes. I didn’t put anything by Paul Simon, even though he was a really big influence in my house. I wanted to put Sade in there. I actually had a whole essay that I took out about one of my favourite bands, Granddaddy. They’re an electro-pop band from Modesto, California. I had written this essay about a time I rolled my van on the highway, which was one of three near-death experiences I took out of the book.
Three is a trend, Niko. But like, not a great one!
Three is a lot. It’s a by-product of working in labour. The work I did was really dangerous, and I tried to allude to the danger of it and kind of downplay that same time. But the essay just didn't fit for the flow of the book, so we took it out.
Do you have a favourite essay? I don't know if it’s even possible for you to choose, but I have a favourite, and I want to know if you have one, too.
I really like the R.E.M. one.
I like that one too. But I really love the Springsteen one, where you write about what led you to come out as trans. I think because it was about you making a choice. There are so many parts of the book that were really honest and vulnerable and important reflections on things that had happened to you, or times where it seemed like you didn't have a choice, but in this essay, it was like, ‘No, I'm actually going to choose to be true to myself, even though it's ‘late’ to the world.’
That’s funny, because it’s sad! But a lot of them are.
A lot of them are. I think that I'm kind of a cheerful sad person. I love laughing and having a good time, but I also always love a sad song. I love a good cry. So I think there's something in sad stories that, like, speak to my heart. But also, this essay felt like the Niko I recognize the most. Not because of the sadness, but because it’s about the moment when you took the first steps to actually be the person I’d meet years later… And somewhat related to that, I did want to talk a little bit about what it’s like to not just write, but also promote this book in our current social and political moment.
Oh, is something going on?
Yes, I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of things are happening that are potentially relevant to your interests. Seriously though—were you thinking about the rampant transphobia that we’re increasingly seeing in media, politics, culture, etc., as you were writing?
I mean, fortunately, I was writing it in a slightly better time. Like, all of this stuff always sort of lingered in the background, but it wasn't as heightened as it is right now. We definitely weren't in a weird trade war with America where the president is constantly making jokes that are not jokes about taking over our country. And who could have forecast that right when this book was going to come out, America would be doing its level best to criminalize being trans.
I struggle with a lot of this, because some of it is fake—you don't need the government to tell you can be trans. But a lot of the stuff is unfortunately real. This has a lot of very real consequences for a lot of people. It makes it hard to get a passport, hard to get medication, hard to do X, Y, Z. I'm extremely fortunate that all of my legal documents have been changed for a while. I'm safe in a lot of ways. I'm also unsafe in a lot of ways, but I choose not to let myself be held back by the things that might be unsafe, because everything could be unsafe. Being here is unsafe. Walking here was unsafe.
I know a few people that are not going to do the events they had planned in America, and I totally understand that. But for me, I have to, because this is my debut. I need to build a career, and this is kind of how I do it, unfortunately. But I also want to do it. It's good to connect with people. There are places [where I’m booked to read] that are excited to have me come. I'm doing all the things that I could do to make sure that I'm safe, because that's important, and it’s stressful because at any given point they could potentially make it illegal for me to cross the border. I don't know. It's a weird time, but it's also always going to be a weird time.
It’s interesting that we’re talking about you being a trans person, promoting a creative project about your lived experience, at this particular time—but your transition isn’t actually that prominent in the book.
I always bristled at the idea of it being a transition memoir, because it’s really not. As I was writing it, I was like, Yeah, I'll transition in the book, but it's not a trans memoir. It is easy to brand it that way, and a lot of it is about a relationship with gender, for sure. But it’s also about labour and death and all of these other ideas. I wrote it for a university press, so you do a peer review process and one of the one of the notes I got back from the peer reviewer was, ‘I'm surprised the transition came so late in the book.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I'm surprised it came so late in life.’ I was in my 30s. I can’t put my 30s in the front of the fucking book! And it’s not really the point. It’s the least interesting thing in my mind.
What did your dad think of the book?
He hasn't read it yet. He has read the first page. My dad turned 70 last year, and [my fiancée] Lysh and I went back home for his birthday, and I framed the first page of the book and gave it to him because it's about him. My dad's not as like an emotional guy, but Lysh has this photo of him looking at it, and she's like, ‘You can tell he was really excited.’ But I'm really nervous about my parents reading it, even though they come across as nice.
It makes sense to have some anxiety around that, though. I also think they come across as great, but you also wrote about things that they may not have known about, or understood how they affected you, so when they read it, there might be some heavy feelings. What do you hope readers who are not your parents will take away from The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, though?
Understanding. I know I joke a lot about how I didn't graduate from high school, I don't have an education, all of those things, but I like writing about where I came from and I want people to be able to see those worlds and give them more humanity. I remember when I was watching the last season of The Bear, which I have not actually finished yet, and I tweeted that I would really love to have a story like this that's set in the world of manual labour. Somebody quoted me and said plumbers don't have interesting lives, or something like that. And that really pissed me off. I think about it every day. My dad, and people like my dad, have interesting lives. But when I was working as a manual labourer, people would never say, I can't wait for your book. The minute I stopped doing that work and started being like, ‘I'm a writer,’ people were saying, ‘I can't wait to see what you do.’ But when I was building stuff with my bare hands no one gave a fuck about my stories. No one cared what I had to say. No one thought I was smart.
You know the trope I hate? It's a Gilmore Girls thing—I'm glad I finally got to bring this up—when Rory meets Jess, he's the bad boy. He's troubled, but he's always got a big, thick book in his back pocket. I hate this trope where, in order to give someone humanity, you need to know that they can read. I think that's fucking bullshit. He should be able to come from a poor family, or have to work, or drop out of school because he wants to work to have money. All of those things are enough to give him humanity. But we always need to do this thing where we connect people to the world of higher education in order to believe they're worthy of attention. This is the reason why I dwelled more on work than I did on transition, because I think that labour is an interesting backdrop. I've worked my whole life. My dad worked his whole life. His dad worked his whole life. That's the world I know. I don't come from rich people. I come from working people.
A trans person that I know has been reading the book and texting me to tell me that she sees herself in a lot of it, and she feels seen from it. I really love that, and I really want that to come through, and I want people to think about transness. And I want people to think that tranness can come from places that we don't expect. I was a very masculine person in a very masculine world, and I still wanted these things. I didn't grow up in an era when people like me were represented as anything other than dead bodies and jokes, so I want people to understand that people like me can come from those places, but also I want people to see the places that I came from as being worthy of their time.
The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman debuts on May 5, but you can pre-order now.
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