Sam Sussman says his 2025 novel is ‘deeply concerned with the experience of transferring life into art.’Sam Sussman/Supplied
New York writer Sam Sussman’s autobiographical novel Boy from the North Country is about a son’s grief over the loss of his mother.
Fran Sussman was a holistic practitioner and onetime actress who had a relationship in 1974 with Bob Dylan. It’s possible she is referenced in his 1975 song Tangled Up in Blue: “She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe.”
The relationship didn’t last long, but there was a brief romantic reunion in 1990. Sam Sussman was born nine months later. His parents divorced when he was two.
His mother died of cancer in 2017. In 2021, Sussman wrote an article for Harper’s Magazine in which he raised the possibility that Dylan is his father. The 2025 novel, now out in paperback, mines the same subject matter.
The author and his mother, Fran Sussman, in the early 1990s.Supplied
I spoke with Sussman in the very same walk-up on East 78th Street in Manhattan where his mother read poetry to Dylan. The small apartment is still in the family.
Is he Dylan’s son? He doesn’t know − and doesn’t seem driven to find out. If anyone asks, Sussman will say that he is his mother’s son.
The Globe and Mail sat down with him ahead of his Thursday appearance at Toronto’s Leah Posluns Theatre in conversation with Erica Ehm.
You wrote your novel while living in the two places where the story takes place: this apartment and the farm in upstate New York where you were raised. Did that affect the process?
It was a majestic experience. It really makes you feel the power of places. The way that they hold our memories, hold parts of ourselves.
How emotional was it, writing about your late mother?
I knew I would write this story. It was a question of being ready. Sometimes you read a book written about grief, you feel it was written right after the event. I needed time to reflect. This book is deeply concerned with the experience of transferring life into art.
Are you referring to your mother’s experiences, when she was an actress earlier in her life?
Yes. And Dylan’s. And mine. In the story, my mother is trying to understand what it means to take her own experiences and transforming that into playing Hedda Gabler. And Dylan is trying to understand what it means to take the personal crisis he is going through and then transform that into what would become the album Blood on the Tracks.
Dylan said the album’s first song, Tangled Up in Blue, took him 10 years to live and two years to write.
That’s it. The character who I gave my middle name, Evan, is trying to understand what it means to take everything that had been painful and complex in his life and transform that into a book.
Can you talk about the blending of fact and fiction, and you and Evan?
For me, because these themes run so deep, I wanted it to be clear that my project was not reciting the factual lived experience of my life. People imagine that fiction is invented and truth is given, but I think it’s a little more complicated. There’s something about our choice to make meaning out of the experiences of our lives. And that choice is where our literature comes from.
Why is this book a novel and not a memoir?
Beckett has a great line that says you have to find a form that accommodates the mess. If I’m going to have integrity in telling the story on which at the end the centrepiece is my mother, then I’m going to choose a form that isn’t willing to confirm or deny the facticity that I know everyone will ask. Because I’m saying there is something larger than that.
How have the Dylan fanatics reacted to your story?
I had a Dylan scholar go to all sorts of lengths to get into this apartment, including turning up in the neighbourhood, happening across me on the street asking to see the apartment. The answer was no. I get all the weird messages that you would imagine. But for me, that’s incidental.
How so?
The emotional and spiritual narrative of the book is moving from a youthful fixation with a man I’ve never met into a depth of appreciation for a mother who raised me and who gave me what is good and what I value within myself.
Have you heard from Dylan?
No. If he has notes, I’ll read them. But there are no guarantees on any edits.