When Sam Sussman stood in the doorway of his mother’s farmhouse in upstate New York one summer evening, nothing could have prepared him for what she had concealed. A blue dress hung from her gaunt shoulders. Her auburn hair was now fragile and gray. Just 24 hours earlier she had told him she had cancer and asked him to come home.
Exactly eight years to the day after his mother, Fran Sussman, died in 2017 at 63, Sam Sussman, 34, is preparing for a tour of his debut novel, “Boy From the North Country,” to be published on Sept. 16. Told through Evan, his stand-in, the novel weaves two timelines: his mother’s bohemian New York years—acting classes, rehearsals, and a relationship with Bob Dylan as he shaped “Blood on the Tracks”—and the son’s adolescence in upstate Goshen, where grief, longing, late-night conversations with his dying mother, and resentment collided. In one crucial scene, Evan presses his mother about Dylan and hears that their reconnection happened “the spring before you were born,” a revelation that reshapes his sense of self without resolving it.
They had briefly rekindled in 1990, just before Evan was born. That timing gave the question its sharpest edge: the possibility was real, but so was the ambiguity. Later, he admits that to know for certain “that I was or was not Dylan’s son would make me other than I was.” That refusal of closure becomes the novel’s ethic: the paternity question gives the story its charge, but the heart of the book is Fran’s endurance, her counsel that “nothing in this life is holier than love,” and the son’s unbridled grief during the process of his mother’s death. In the book, Sussman cares far less about whether he is Dylan’s biological son than understanding his mother as she died.
Sussman wrote much of it at two tables central to the story: the kitchen in the family’s Yorkville apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and the house in Goshen, N.Y., where he grew up without a television, surrounded by woods and books. “For me, the last eight years has been an attempt to transform myself more into who she was,” he said. “That feels like a profound circle.”
Each year during the week of his mother’s death, he goes offline and returns to Goshen to paint and write—a ritual he began the year after she died. He started writing the book in 2021. He also writes his mother a letter every Sunday. “Grief transforms you,” he said. “I don’t have a choice about whether I’m changed, but I do have control over how I transform.” Another line he carries: “We’re here to take the pieces of the universe we’ve been given and burnish them with love, and return them in better shape than we received them.”
In the Dylan White Room
Sussman drove up to Woodstock from Goshen one hot August afternoon. He wore a navy blue button up and blue jeans. “I’m a simple man,” he told me. His voice is deep, dulcet, and sometimes droning. We’re conversing in the Dylan White Room, The Overlook’s office above the old Café Espresso in Woodstock, where, in 1964 Bob Dylan used the space as a workroom, writing songs and liner notes for “Another Side of Bob Dylan.” The scuffed floorboards, narrow windows, and photos on the walls give the sense that language has been hammered into shape here before. I worry that it’s off-putting for Sussman. He shrugged at the connections, smiled, and took in the room that is adorned with photos of Dylan.
Whether Sussman is Dylan’s forgotten or unknown son is beside the point to him. He sort-of resembles Dylan. He shares a similar complexion and the same dark curls, though Sussman’s are tighter. “I didn’t write the book for him. I wrote the book for my mother. I wrote the book for anyone who’s lost a loved one,” he said. “If he wants to read it, I’d be more than open to his thoughts, but I didn’t write the book for him.”
He is clear about what the book attempts. “Literature is the creation of meaning and significance out of the symbols and motifs of our lives,” he told me. Fiction, not memoir, gave him room for uncertainty.
Why not write it as memoir? In an email, Sussman clarified: “I wrote this as a novel because I am a novelist, just as a painter makes sense of her life experiences by painting. My artistic ambition was for “Boy From the North Country” to stand as a work of art that is greater than the life experiences from which I drew.”
The friends who carried him
Tom Fuchs, a clinical neuroscientist at Amsterdam University Medical Center, has known Sussman since they were teenagers. “At 17 years old or so, he was asking me really in-depth questions about my family and my history and my values—that’s just his character.”
The night Fran died, Sussman called Fuchs. “In that moment, he just needed somebody who loved him to experience his grief. All I needed to do was be there.”
In the months after, Fuchs listened more than he spoke. “It was the first time since I’d known him when he wasn’t asking questions. One of the ways I supported him was by being the receiver of his grief” They took quiet trips—to Assateague, a barrier island off of Maryland, to Woodstock—“just enjoying summer evenings,” Fuchs said. “I’m overwhelmingly proud. Sam has taken his grief and his love for his mother and reformed it into this sort of extravagantly beautiful edifice to her incredible-ness.”
Altair Brandon-Salmon, an art historian at Stanford University, met Sussman a decade ago at Oxford, where Sussman completed his master’s degree in international studies. Their friendship is anchored in close reading. “It’s one of those actually very intimate things to do, to read a friend’s work; we can both sort of be extremely honest with one another about what’s working, what’s not working, and not feel like one has to dance around one’s feedback.” He remembers the abrupt call during graduate school when Sussman paused his studies to be with his mother. As illness narrowed the world, Sussman withdrew into Goshen and talked about the landscape’s new power over him. Brandon-Salmon sees the novel as a reclamation: “It pierces the veil of ignorance we all have about the life our parents lead before we’re born. It’s an act of fiction that is also an act of reclamation, recreating the world his mother lived through.”
The unanswered question—and what matters more
The unresolved paternity question is not a loose end to be tied; it is part of the book’s architecture—what ambiguity does to a young writer’s imagination, and how longing is finally placed. What endures is Fran’s voice—her counsel and the way it keeps surfacing in his life. “A few weeks ago, I found myself being very kind to someone,” he said. “And I thought, this is my mother’s kindness living through me.”
Back in the Dylan White Room, afternoon light slid across the wall where, six decades ago, another writer once paced and scratched lyrics into coherence. Sussman looked around and let the coincidence rest. “Although all of us die,” he said, “there is something larger than death: the love between the living and the dead.”
“Grief is the photographic negative of love.”
Sam Sussman will be in conversation with the novelist James Lasdun in Woodstock on September 20 at 7 p.m. at Mountain View Studio. The event is sponsored by The Golden Notebook.
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.