As a 13-year-old aspiring writer, Sam Sussman spent most of his time in junior high scribbling poetry in the back of class. He was bullied a lot, set apart in his town in upstate New York by being shy, bookish and Jewish, and living in the sticks with a bohemian single mother.
One day a teacher took him aside.
“You really look like this musician,” the teacher said, pointing to a photograph on a desktop computer. “Some say he’s a poet.”
It was Bob Dylan. Sam rummaged around that night on LimeWire, which in the early 2000s was a popular site for pirated music, and downloaded “Love Minus Zero,” a track from Dylan’s 1965 album “Bringing It All Back Home.” He was stunned. He downloaded more songs from other albums, and burned them onto a CD, which he would play on headphones during rides to and from school.
“I thought it was majestic,” he recalled. “I remember listening on the bus just thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re allowed to do anything in a poem. You can put Shakespeare in the alley. You can put him in pointed shoes and bells,’ ” he went on, paraphrasing “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.”
Two years into Sam’s Dylan phase, a longtime boyfriend of his mother’s took note of his musical passion.
Your mother knew that guy, the boyfriend said — a moment Sussman recounts in “Boy From the North Country,” a soon-to-be-published novel based on his life, with a character named Evan serving as his stand-in. It was like learning that his mother had met Batman. Dylan seemed more myth than flesh.
Initially, Fran Sussman shrugged off questions from her son, who’d grown up thinking that his father was the civil rights attorney she’d divorced when he was a toddler. That changed one day in 2006 as she was driving Sam home from a session with a therapist. He was listening to Dylan on headphones and she interrupted, struggling to reach her sullen 15-year-old son.
She told a riveting tale. She’d met Dylan in a painting class in 1974, on the 11th floor of Carnegie Hall. She was 20 and an aspiring actor. He was 33, married and famous, searching for inspiration after releasing some disappointing albums. When fellow students were asked to appraise a canvas Dylan had painted, everyone else gushed. Fran told him the colors were harsh and uninviting.
That’s when their relationship began. It lasted for about a year, with Dylan visiting her rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper East Side, composing the songs that would become “Blood on the Tracks,” his landmark from 1975. She was a muse and a sounding board. She broke it off when she realized, as she told Sam, that Dylan could more easily give her love songs than love.
To Sam, who is now 35, this all belonged in a Stunning Facts About Mom file, because the tale long predated his arrival. Then she added a detail that sent him reeling: She and Dylan had briefly rekindled their affair, in 1990. Sam could do the math. It was an exhilarating idea, that his biological father was his artistic hero, not to mention an era-shaping virtuoso of words and melodies. The thought somehow eased his sense of dislocation. It made the world feel different.
It also filled him with yearning.
“Nothing I’m going to say can capture what that emotion felt like, what that possibility felt like at that point in my life,” Sussman recalled. “I remember being a teenager and it being late at night and standing at my window, listening to his music, and just thinking, can I actually just walk down to the garage, get in my mom’s car and drive west, and just try to find him?”
Sussman was sitting in an armchair one recent afternoon in the same Upper East Side apartment where his mother lived and where her affair with Dylan began. (It remained in the family when she left the city in 1985, relocating to Goshen, N.Y., where Sam grew up.) He has a classic rocker’s nimbus of kinky, shoulder-length hair over a face that has, for years, inspired total strangers to utter some version of “You really look like Bob Dylan.” (His own take: “Dylan is not my fashion icon. I don’t look in the mirror and think about him.”)
He speaks with an accent so unplaceable that his friends do impressions of it — a pensive, deep-bass mash up of everyone he’s ever met, apparently, with the languid pace of a Southern drawl.
He will talk for three hours, in his comfy, under-decorated apartment stuffed with books (Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf), his own somewhat primitive paintings and a collection of vinyl records (Nina Simone, Leonard Cohen). He’ll pause only to make stovetop espresso, to which he adds churned butter. (“I rely on these things,” he said.) When sifting through ideas, his eyes narrow to slits, an expression that would look like rage on someone lacking his openness and ease. He’s earnest in a way that seems lifted from an age before irony.
“When I met him at 17, he was almost relentlessly curious about people,” said Tom Fuchs, a longtime friend from Goshen, about 60 miles northwest of Manhattan. “Within days, he was asking me questions about myself, about my parents, about my upbringing, about what I valued, these deeply intimate questions. And at first I thought it was somehow specific to me, and then very soon after, I realized that’s just how he interacted with people.”
Sussman attended Swarthmore College and then got a scholarship to Oxford University, where he earned a master’s degree in international studies. He then founded Extend, a nonprofit that offers educational programming to promote coexistence among Israelis and Palestinians. He splits his time between Goshen and Manhattan, where he has a circle of devoted friends. Most of them didn’t learn about his possible link to Dylan until he published an essay on the topic in Harper’s, in 2021. That includes Oskar Eustis, who runs the Public Theater, whom he met at a wedding five years ago.
“We just started talking, and I think we talked for four hours,” said Eustis in a phone interview. “I haven’t met many people of his generation so passionate about social justice, about art, philosophy. I made a new friend that night and it was a wonderful event for me.”
Sussman has already written two novels, neither published. His comfort with the medium is one reason his first hardback will land in the fiction section, even though little has been changed in the story besides names and dates — Dylan is the only person who doesn’t get a pseudonym — and publishers told him a memoir would sell more copies.
“Samuel Beckett has this great line,” Sussman said. “‘You have to find the form that fits the mess.’”
The mess of “Boy” centers on Sam’s stand-in, Evan. After seeing Dylan’s image on that school computer, Evan reads up about the singer and Dylan soon seems like not just an epochal talent, but a road map. Robert Zimmerman had been raised a Jew in rural Minnesota and at 19, according to his self-styled legend, he’d hopped a train to Manhattan and dazzled the world with little more than a guitar and his verses.
In his bedroom, Evan can hear a freight train running through the Hudson Valley. Life as a writer in New York City suddenly seems thrillingly possible.
Sussman would make it to Manhattan, as well as London, Berlin, Tel Aviv and many other cities. In 2017, he returned to Goshen. His mother — named June in the novel — had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. He accompanied her to chemotherapy treatments and doctor visits, while she filled in details of her life.
It included many traumas, some of them inflicted by men, a few of them abusive, others simply unavailable. Dylan fell into the latter category. (Representatives for the singer didn’t answer a request for comment on the book.)
“Boy From the North Country” hums to a unique emotional register when Sussman rolls back time, to 1974, and essentially hands the story to his mother. We’re reading Sam’s memories of his mother’s memories, but the result feels so authentic that the novel works as a character study of an elusive genius.
Dylan here is romantic and spectral, eager to help the Fran figure learn her lines in a play, but vanishing when the fragment of a song comes to mind. In a blurb, the recently deceased Dylanologist David Yaffe called the novel “a monumental event for anyone who cares about Dylan.”
But if “Boy” is about trying to bond with a parent, the parent in question is not Dylan but June/Fran, who emerges as a luminous force of love and wisdom. Sussman’s mother practiced holistic health for 25 years, offering counsel on mental and physical health, building a devoted group of patients. Many of them would turn up at her funeral when she died in 2017 at age 63.
Ultimately, she leaves her son unilluminated about key questions. Like, is Dylan his father? Was Dylan the guy whom Sussman faintly remembers visiting him and his mother in Goshen, when he was about 4 or 5, briefly lifting him off the ground and looking into his eyes?
“Her silence and her protectiveness were not toward the answer, but toward the question,” Sussman said. “She thought the wrong question in my life was his place, and her determination was that she should live her life and achieve, and I should live my life and that it shouldn’t be defined by him.”
There were years when Sussman would look at photographs of Dylan and ache for his presence, or imagine connecting with Dylan’s kids. That’s over. His mother had a mantra of sorts. “You are loved, you are protected, you are free,” she would tell her son. “You have everything you need.”
He didn’t really grasp what she meant. He does now.
“My journey in the book is relinquishing a fixation with a man that I don’t know, and coming into a depth of appreciation for the woman who raised me, who gave me everything that I value in myself,” he said. “And now the way I feel is, I am loved, I am protected, I am free. I have everything I need.”
Video camera operator: Andrew Price
David Segal is a business reporter for The Times, based in New York.
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