With his tight curls and sharp features, Sam Sussman looks a lot like Bob Dylan — a resemblance that gained significance when Sussman was 15.
Driving with his stepfather, Luke, Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” came on the radio, and Luke told him: “There’s a lyric in there about your mother. They used to know each other in her early New York days.”
“Boy from the North Country” (Penguin Press) is Sussman’s auto-fiction novel about his relationship with his mother, and the question of whether he is actually Dylan’s son.
As Sussman eventually found out, his mother, Fran — called June in the novel — spent a year in the mid-1970s in a situationship with the music legend.
The pair were not exactly dating and definitely not exclusive, but became emotionally and artistically intimate over time.
They connected after meeting in a beginner’s painting class where June was the only student with the courage to criticize Dylan’s art, telling him that the shades of blue in one of his paintings were “so remote from one another it was hard to feel any intimacy.”
(In the book, Sussman tells the story of their relationship in June’s voice, as she had told it to him in real life.)
Dylan started arriving, unexpected, at her Yorkville apartment at all hours of the night. The pair would smoke and talk about life, with Dylan dropping conversations mid-sentence if an idea for a new
lyric popped into his head.
June recalls lighting her stove and handing Dylan a pipe that had been sitting on a poetry book, then reading to him from the book. This scene is depicted in Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” from his “Highway 61 Revisited” album.
“He was completely taken by [the poetry],” Sussman, who currently lives in the apartment where all this took place, told The Post. “Then at a certain point he played her ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ and he sang that lyric to [Fran]. That’s her most definitive appearance in his lyrics.”
In the book, June recalls a time when she and Dylan were cuddling on her floor.
“Dylan drew me nearer and whispered, ‘June, if I had the stars from the darkest night I’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss.’”
The line was from Dylan’s song “Boots of Spanish Leather,” and it was an important moment in the
relationship for June.
“I heard the sentence in its familiar rhythm,” Sussman writes, as June. “He’d taken that sentence right from his own song and tried to place it in my heart. It wasn’t for me. It was from him to himself.”
After a late-night phone call when Dylan played her what was clearly a love song to his wife, Sara, June realized they were done. She ghosted him from there.
But the pair reconnected briefly in the early 1990s — around nine months before Sussman was born. June was married at the time to the man Sussman knows as his father. They divorced when Sussman was two years old.
Years later — but before he learned all this — Sussman felt a kinship with Dylan’s music and life.
“I felt certain parallels,” Sussman, who grew up in Goshen, New York, told The Post. “I was this young Jewish kid growing up in a rural part of America, longing to go where there was a larger culture.”
An aspiring poet, Sussman, 34, was deeply affected by learning that Dylan might be his father.
“There was a thrill that I could have a connection to him,” Sussman said. “But there was also a thought that I didn’t understand a significant part of the story of my own life.”
He tried addressing this with his mother over the years, but June wouldn’t discuss it directly. To this day, Sussman does not seem to know if Dylan is his father, and June — who died of cancer in 2017 at age
63 — might not have known for sure either.
His mother’s hesitation to address the topic caused Sussman frustration. But over time, he realized that giving Dylan prominence as a parent could have, in his mother’s eyes, minimized her own role in his life.
“[Dylan] wasn’t part of our lives,” Sussman said. “I am her son. That’s the center of my relationship to myself. And that’s enough.”
Still, he added that learning about his mother’s relationship with Dylan gave him a deeper sense of who his mother was.
“My determination to know more about him led me much closer to her,” Sussman explained, “and that’s the story I was trying to tell.”
At this point, he has no need for a definitive answer about his parentage — and said that if he met Dylan today, he’d most welcome the chance to ask for the singer’s own memories of June.
So does Sussman believe that Bob Dylan is his father?
“I’m my mother’s son,” he said. “That’s where the story ends.”
