Boy from the North Country: Sam Sussman’s Overly Cautious Autofiction
By Paul Haney
If you write a novel, readers will want to know which parts of your story are true; a memoir, which parts are made up. Sam Sussman’s Boy from the North Country—an “auto-fictional novel,” according to its publisher, Penguin finds itself with a foot in both camps. What’s real? What’s made up? What are readers to believe?
Based on an essay-length “memoir” titled “The Silent Type: On (possibly) being Bob Dylan’s son” published in Harper’s Magazine,[1] this book-length expansion raises questions about fiction’s ability to tell a story that is purportedly true. That “true” story involves a critically ill mother sharing profound philosophies of healing and love, an absent father who may or may not be Bob Dylan, and an aspiring novelist protagonist ever wondering what portion of his literary ambition, along with his uncanny resemblance to the hyper-literate rockstar, comes from Dylan’s own genes.
Quite a dream for a young writer to embrace, and not without reason. Between the Harper’s “memoir,” the novel itself, and Sussman’s own comments after the book’s publication in September 2025, the prospect of his being Dylan’s son seems entirely plausible. That plausibility comes without DNA evidence, or any statement from the Dylan camp, or verification from his mother, Fran Sussman, who died in 2017 without, it seems, ever confirming or denying her son’s suspicions. His claims are all we have, yet Dylan’s child or not, Sussman isn’t stumping for restitution. He’s been made whole, he claims, by his mother’s lessons of healing through love. Rather than a forensic account of Sussman’s parentage, then, Boy from the North Country stands as a tender depiction of a mother-son relationship as he comes home to care for her through cancer treatments.
It’s a moving book, melding complex family dynamics with contemplations of art and creativity. By writing his story as fiction yet telling everyone it’s true, however, Sussman in effect blurs the lines between imagination and reality. For that reason, I can’t help but wonder if Sussman’s choice to write autofiction may have done a disservice to his story, his readers, and his claims of “(possibly) being Bob Dylan’s son.”
Autofiction
“You have to find the form that fits the mess,” Sussman told David Segal, paraphrasing Samuel Beckett[2] in a September 2025 New York Times profile titled “Is That Bob Dylan in the Mirror?” The form Sussman landed on for Boy from the North Country, apparently, lay rooted in autofiction. A “Summary” embedded in the book’s copyright page reads, “An auto-fictional novel about the courage and resilience of motherhood as well as a window into the life of Bob Dylan at a peak moment of his creative output.” Interestingly, “auto-fictional” here is both hyphenated and adjectival, doubly downplayed as an appendage to “novel.” It’s a conspicuous choice of genre, twice removed, it seems, from the reality it seeks to portray.
Part autobiography, part fiction, according to Stephen Carlick on Penguin’s “What Is Autofiction?” webpage, the autofiction subgenre “was coined in the late 1970s by French novelist Serge Doubrovsky, to describe his novel Fils.” Doubrovsky pursued “a work of ‘fiction, of events and facts strictly real’” (Carlick). In the ensuing decades, by projecting fictional elements onto their life stories, authors have better coped with their more difficult experiences by transforming them. Famous examples include Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle series; Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; and Annie Ernaux’s The Years. Jack Kerouac might’ve called these “true-story novels,” a phrase he coined and practiced with the Duluoz Legend: On The Road, The Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, and many more. Along with other so-called singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell (Blue), Carly Simon (“You’re So Vain”), and James Taylor (“Fire and Rain”), Dylan himself may have worked in the genre with such autofictional songs as “Day of the Locusts,” “Sara,” and “Idiot Wind.” Long before Dylan, and Kerouac, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past may have been “the first work of autofiction” (Carlick). Fittingly, Sussman regularly harkens back to Proust, both in the novel through the fictionalized voice of Norman Raeben—modernist painter and Dylan’s actual mid-70s painting teacher—and through interviews he’s given and articles he’s written to help market this release.
A list of authors and musicians like the one above sets a high bar, and though talented, Sussman hasn’t quite reached the stylistic heights of Knausgård, Vuong, and Ernaux, let alone Dylan, Kerouac, and Proust. A week after that initial New York Times profile, book critic Dwight Garner followed up with his own review, calling Sussman’s writing “florid, therapized and sentimental. It is radically un-Dylanesque.” Continuing his assessment, Garner writes, “[Sussman’s] novel is bereft of drama and close observation. Almost everything in it is rounded off and softened, like pebbles on a shore. If not for the Dylan angle, we wouldn’t be talking about it at all.” This criticism feels excessive, especially since the Dylan angle is, after all, inextricable from the book, its characters, and their desires. Garner’s hypothetical version of this novel bereft of Dylan remains impossible to grasp, and once readers invest in the heartfelt encounters between mother and son that propel the novel we do have, their reward is the first-hand experience of that caretaking drama, especially when the mother has left so much unsaid. All the while, the possibility of the mother’s death works like a ticking clock on her sharing the information Sussman’s stand-in, Evan, needs to know about his father. On this front, even if sentimental, the book works well. One still wonders, however, why Sussman chose to hide behind Evan to begin with.
By resorting to autofiction, Sussman effectively disowns this story which he has elsewhere professed to be true. Evan, the novel’s first-person protagonist, happens to be Sam Sussman’s real middle name. His mom, Fran in real life, is now June, a summer sunshine figure who radiates positivity even through her battle with cancer, and in the wake of multiple non-Dylan-related sexual traumas in her past. A sister mentioned in the Harper’s “memoir” never appears in the novel, so one wonders where she disappeared to during Fran/June’s chemotherapy treatments. One wonders, too, about the reliability of Fran/June’s account of painting classes with Norman Raeben, who “paced and painted and talked in a rolling monologue that seemed to have begun in the Russian shtetl where he was born” (97). Similarly, one questions intriguing new details about how Dylan came to write “Tangled Up in Blue,” his immersion in Petrarch sparked by a book from Fran/June’s shelf, and Dylan soon “talking about how Petrarch stood between everything significant, touching God with one hand and man with the other, the past with one hand and the future with the other” (137). After Dylan finally plays her the song that places that “Italian poet” in the 13th century, June informs him that “‘Petrarch lived in the fourteenth century’.” Dylan’ response? A simple, “‘Oh, right!’” (149), though he never did make that correction. One might even doubt Sam/Evan’s own memory of Dylan scooping him up off the couch as a little boy, recalling, “In his embrace was the warmth of the fire. With a longing I could not explain I wanted him to stay with my mother and me” (47). All of these incidents and more coalesce in a fictional soup, the important story Sussman and his mother have to tell blending in with the broth.
Memoir
While the novel Boy from the North Country might make one wonder where truth ends and fantasy begins, at least Sussman’s original writing on the topic of his parentage stands on sure footing. The 2021 Harper’s “memoir” begins in 1974, with Sussman placing his mother, an aspiring actor, and Dylan together in the painting class of “the eccentric Ukrainian-Jewish artist Norman Raeben” (since Ukraine was part of the U.S.S.R. until its collapse in 1991, Raeben could’ve been a “Ukrainian Jew” born in a “Russian shtetl”). Leveraging his fame as a tool for courtship, Dylan soon asks Sussman’s mother to host a party at her Upper East Side apartment. At the end of the night, after the last guest leaves, he hangs around to seduce her. The couple begin quote-unquote “dating” and, by the third paragraph, Sussman spills the goods: that evocative fifth verse from “Tangled Up in Blue,” the one where “She lit a burner on the stove,” procured “a pipe,” and “opened up a book of poems … by an Italian poet / from the thirteenth century”—yeah, that really happened. “She” was his mom, nearly two decades before he was born. That is, as much as a character from a set of lyrics can be any one person, as opposed to a literary figure representing any and all people, a point Sussman readily concedes by the end of his piece. When he and his mom attend a Dylan concert in Bethel Woods, New York[3] and Dylan performs “Tangled Up in Blue,” the two burst into laughter, then tears. They understand that Dylan’s “infamously mutating lyrics … must have become about almost anything other than the young actress in the East 70s walk-up.”
To believe Sussman’s Harper’s piece is to believe Sussman’s mother. This leap of faith is made more possible because of the genre label, even if our information comes third-hand, via Sussman, via his mom, who died of cancer in 2017. And whether or not this “Tangled Up in Blue” claim or any other claim is verifiably “true,” we must at least believe that he believes it, or that he would tell us if he didn’t. Such is the contract of nonfiction: authors provide a good faith version of the truth as they understand it, and readers regard their writing as at least a version of the truth. As Vivian Gornick writes in her classic text, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative,
The poet, the novelist, the memoirist—all must convince the reader they have some wisdom, and are writing as honestly as possible to arrive at what they know. To the bargain, the writer of personal narrative must also persuade the reader that the narrator is reliable. (14)
When authors prove unreliable—when they break that contract—readers feel misled, and scandal ensues: think John D’Agata, whose “lyric essay” failed Harper’s fact-checking, which must’ve taken the same rigorous look at Sussman’s work; James Frey, who received a public scolding from Oprah; Margaret B. Jones, who was a fake persona that fell apart as soon as she went on book tour. Each of these writers took liberties the genre hasn’t traditionally afforded, like changing key details, making up new episodes, and inventing entire histories. In short, they were all dishonest, forsaking whatever wisdom they may have brought to the bargain.
A seeming exception to this nonfiction agreement, of course, is Dylan’s own memoir, Chronicles, Volume One. It’s a memoir and not an autobiography because it strives to make sense of a few discrete eras of the author’s life, rather than accounting for his life as a whole. It’s nonfiction because it deals ostensibly with what’s real, though anyone consulting the book for an accurate timeline of events would be sorely disappointed. Its wisdom derives from Dylan extracting meaning from experience, discovering what he already knows. Its honesty lies in its fidelity to Dylan’s own mind, the associative leaps, the quickly sketched characters like “gaunt and battle-scarred” Ray Gooch (26) and “cool as pie” Chloe Kiel (102) from New York City in the early 60s, or Sun Pie who “repaired boats in a trussed-up backyard” (204) outside New Orleans in the late 80s. Except that these characters all appear to be fabrications from Dylan’s own mind. They fill in the gaps between major, well-known players like Daniel Lanois and Archibald MacLeish, but even Dylan’s interactions with MacLeish in Chronicles appear grossly embellished against details from theater producer Stuart Ostrow’s own 2005 memoir.[4] The most we can say is that Dylan’s memoir reflects Dylan’s experience of his own life, even when he recycles other people’s words.[5] In this way, Chronicles challenges our understanding of the memoir genre: its conventions, its relationship to the truth, and all the apparent multitudes the genre may contain.
Above all, we call Chronicles a memoir because Dylan and his publisher marketed it as such. And yet, in speaking of the book’s origins to Mikal Gilmore of Rolling Stone in 2001, Dylan said, “I guess I call it novelistic writing.” But it’s real, or real enough, so it’s not exactly a novel, even if novelistic, meaning character-driven, alive with detail, and episodic. Dylan went on:
It’s a biography. It’s biographical, in every sense of the word. But there’s more to it than that, because I’m a public figure, and so I can mention all kinds of things that have been written about already, but I bring a different resonance to it. My story on myself would have to be more interesting than anybody else that could look at it from the outside. Right?
Except that, for it to be a biography, Dylan would’ve needed to have written the book about a public figure other than himself. Or a third-person biographer would’ve needed to write the story of his life, such as Michael Gray, Robert Shelton, or Howard Sounes. The National Book Critics Circle did name Chronicles a finalist for Biography/Autobiography in 2004, and in the intervening years began to separate biography and autobiography in their annual awards. In this case, “autobiography” serves as a catch-all, it seems, for what we understand “autobiography” to mean—a comprehensive account of one’s own life—and memoirs. Within this model, Chronicles remains a memoir because, even with its borrowings and confabulations, its focus remains on exploring distinct realms of memory for larger truths.
Truth in written texts is a notoriously slippery concept, and memory itself a fallible tool. All the same, memoirists who don’t possess Dylan’s ability to market his hallucinations as figments of reality do well to lay out the facts as they understand them. Sussman’s Harper’s “memoir” fits the bill, accounting for his mother’s holistic health work, his rocky relationships with the men she dated throughout his youth, and the frequent, unbidden comparisons of his looks to Dylan’s. Through it all, Sussman contemplates what it might mean for a storyteller like himself to be made of the same DNA as one of the most significant artists of our time. That Dylan and Sussman’s mom supposedly rekindled their romance nine months before Sussman was born seems to seal the deal, and yet—thankfully, judiciously—the weight of evidence linking him to Dylan isn’t the main point. As with the novel, Sussman’s mother’s love wins the day. Her catchphrase-of-sorts, “We are here … to take the pieces of the universe we have been given, burnish them with love, and return them in better shape than we received them,” provides the guiding theme. In the final lines, Sussman concludes, “I am never sure how being Bob Dylan’s child would help me come closer to beauty or truth. But I know the infinite gifts of being my mother’s son.”
The thoughtfulness of Sussman’s Harper’s “memoir” preempts the inevitable chorus of naysayers who would accuse him of opportunism. He navigates the tricky straits of possibly being Dylan’s son with writerly aplomb. In its earnestness, the essay asks for nothing more than an audience to serve as witness to Sussman’s lived story. As an added benefit—and perhaps proof of concept—Sussman also provides new information about how Dylan composed Blood on the Tracks, particularly “Tangled Up in Blue.” The “memoir” label makes this graceful landing possible, creating the conditions for the author to stand by his words. No wonder Sussman got a book out of the deal. In his expansion, though, by fictionalizing his story, Sussman chose to forfeit the credibility that goes with the memoir genre, and it’s hard to say why.
Every facet of the Harper’s “memoir,” from the “Tangled Up in Blue” anecdote, to the mom’s series of boyfriends, to the Dylan concert in Bethel Woods appears at length in the novel, though, as befits a work of autofiction, Sussman takes liberties with timelines and details. That Dylan concert, for instance, while occurring years before Fran’s battle with cancer, in the book becomes a major plot point where Evan pushes his curiosity. After an ecstatic reaction to “Tangled Up in Blue,” June, in a dip between her weekly chemotherapy treatments, is too depleted to stay for the rest of the show. Sussman writes, “My mother touched my arm. I could see the pain in her eyes. She didn’t need to say anything” (199). With Dylan’s voice still rattling through the venue, amid the mother-and-son’s arduous trek to the car, Sussman adds, “I hated my selfish need to know the truth” (199). Even so, in the car ride home, Evan poses the question directly to his mom: “I am twenty-six. I have every right to know” (200). Rather than answer, June keeps her silence while “[t]ears glistened on her cheek” (200).
Readers of this autofiction might not find Evan’s need to know the truth selfish at all. The question of his father remains relevant, especially when his father might be Bob Dylan, and especially when he himself claims of Dylan’s music, “His songs had given me a way to feel and live” (20). In this moment, though, with his mother in anguish, readers might understand Evan’s self-blame. He feels as if he’s hounding his mother, who wants to enjoy what might be the last days she has alive with her son. A few days later, while June is at the doctor’s office in Manhattan receiving another chemotherapy treatment, she tells Evan how, presumably in the early 90s,
Dylan called. He was going through a difficult period, said he’d lost his sight again. Raeben was dead by then. I was in an unhappy marriage with Simon. I wanted to be borne back to that earlier time in my life. Dylan and I started seeing one another and it was like old times. It went on that way for years. (218)
This is new information for Evan, who exclaims, “It went on that way for years? You told me you saw him once.” (218). But June shuts him down, seeming to anticipate where his thoughts are going. “Please listen to what I’m saying, Evan. Please” (218). This plea from June to listen recurs each time Evan gets too close to the truth, allowing her to either change the subject or interject some bromide about “find[ing] the unexpected joy in the way things are” (225). How frustrating this is for the reader, for the novel’s putative hero, June, to be so skilled at redirection. And how fascinating, too, to watch Evan attempt to balance his responsibility as a caretaking child with the enforced ignorance his mother has cast upon him.
In these emotional dynamics lie the makings of a compelling memoir, one where the author comes to terms with the past and helps the reader understand more precisely what it felt like to live within that bind. The autofiction version, though, makes plot points out of this rich emotional matrix. And it isn’t that the plot doesn’t work, but more to the point, that the takeaways could’ve been so much greater within the context of nonfiction.
Caution
“Completely unusable,” said Fabio Fantuzzi, a leading Norman Raeben scholar who has written at length about the painter’s influence on Dylan.[6] Fantuzzi was comparing Sussman’s novel to another book, The Creative Path by Caroline Schlam,[7] in that they both embellish experience for narrative effect, rendering their accounts void for scholarly research. I got Fantuzzi on the phone while writing this piece, because Boy from the North Country brings to life moments from Raeben’s painting studio, which Dylan began to frequent in early 1974. Fran Sussman was in attendance, too, Fantuzzi says: “I know that for a fact.” Painting, for Fran Sussman, at the behest of her coach Stella Adler, was a way of improving her acting. According to Fantuzzi, she was less invested in painting than she was in connecting with Dylan. “She was not really attending all that much,” Fantuzzi told me, “but when she figured out Dylan was there, she ended up hooking up with him.”
In Sussman’s novel, however, June expounds on Raeben’s artistic philosophies, ranges over which artists he admires (Chagall) and which he detests (Warhol), and even details how he slops brown paint across canvases of students whose uninspired work offends him. She seems to be a regular in the class who happens to be there when “The door opened and an unshaven man with shaggy hair wandered into the studio” (101). Sussman writes this passage through June’s own perspective: “He wore dirty jeans and a rumpled shirt and looked like he’d slept the night in Central Park. I couldn’t say where I knew him from” (101). The man, of course, is Dylan, and though imagined, these scenes do feel informed at least by research and firsthand knowledge.
Unimpressed with whatever fame Dylan may have garnered in music, Raeben eventually turns his critical eye on Dylan’s attempts at art. In the studio, when the class critiques Dylan’s painting of a fish, Raeben lays in: “‘You are imagining without seeing,’ he declared. ‘You want to transform a fish into a feeling? Fine. We are all here to transform objects into feelings. First you must see the object. Here I do not see a fish but only your imagination of a fish’” (106). As with everything else in this book, this recreated scene, with the class of painters gathered around Dylan’s easel, seems entirely plausible. Fantuzzi even cites “at least two or three occasions where Raeben picked on Dylan directly.” Fantuzzi has interviewed Sussman before, for research purposes, and finds Sussman “fairly knowledgeable about the core aspects of Raeben’s ideas.”[8] To Sussman’s credit, this knowledge about Raeben breathes life into June’s narrated scenes. Had he been transparent with readers about how he knows what he knows—what his mother said, what came through research, what he imagined—readers would at least know where they stand. His wisdom, plus honesty, could’ve bestowed reliability.
That said, June’s ability to narrate scenes in the narrative at all is actually a strength of the autofiction form. Since she’s no longer alive to stand by her words, we’ll never know how Fran might’ve told the story, or if she ever would’ve. Still, three times during the novel Sussman shifts from Evan’s into June’s first-person perspective. All three times occur while June is sitting for chemotherapy, with Evan listening. Whether Sussman is aware of the significance of June’s habit of knitting while she holds forth—spinning a yarn, as it were, or knitting together a text—is unclear. But the monologues themselves are totally absorbing, as even Garner admits, writing, “June’s segments constitute a novella of their own and are easily the best thing in the book.” The chapter where Dylan composes Blood on the Tracks finds Dylan coming and going from June’s apartment, driven by a frenetic energy, sometimes staying several nights in a row, other times disappearing for more than a week. During one of his absences, June peeks into his infamous Red Notebook, now housed at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. In it, she finds “half-formed sketches, fragments of stanzas jotted at odd angles, lines of poetry written over one another, every bit of handwriting illegible (144). Meanwhile, June has gotten a break in her acting career, playing the title character in an underground production of the Henrik Ibsen play, Hedda Gabler. This chapter culminates with two creative forces, June and Dylan, both harnessing Raeben’s artistic philosophies to reach new heights in their work, even if one remains an obscure performance and the other changes the course of American music.
After weeks of creative anguish, Dylan calls from Minnesota where he’s re-recording the album. His rationale? “‘Too much blood, too little tracks. Every word is too damn raw. Nobody wants to listen to that kind of anguish. You can’t make art out of seppuku’” (151). Where do these words come from? Are they Fran Sussman’s testimony? Paraphrased from jottings left behind? Utter fictional invention? And after finally pulling off the virtuoso performance of Hedda Gabler she’d been striving for, June relays, “I felt Raeben and Dylan, too, heard him saying art could become more real than life, and I understood” (153). The process of creation compels change in June and Dylan alike, who affect the world around them with their art. On the whole, though, the weaving together of June’s past and Evan’s coming-of-age, all together with the troubadour trickster figure of Dylan flitting through, outpaces what this auto-fictional novel purports to hold.
Readers of literary fiction will wonder what Dylan is doing here, and Dylan fans will be distracted by the mother-son relationship. The question becomes one of audience, and no matter its targeted demographic, the novel’s muddled treatment of the real holds it back in the end. And it’s not like Sussman wasn’t advised about this point. That original New York Times profile touches on Sussman’s Dylanesque looks, the apartment he still lives in that remained in the family since his mom hosted Dylan there so many times in the 70s, and the topic shift Sussman attempts from Dylan’s potential forgotten son to purveyor of his mother’s wisdom. “Sussman has already written two novels, neither published,” writes profiler David Segal. “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.” Writing in the fictional mode, even though Sussman’s first two novels have yet to sell, seems a matter of comfort for the youngish writer. But one wonders, too, if heading off Dylan’s ire factored into his choice of genre.
Throughout the novel, Sussman avoids copyright issues by omitting lyrical quotes, though the spare Dylan allusion inevitably slips in through an unattributed “every step of the way” (Sussman’s italics 9), or a “series of dreams” (22), or an “Early one morning I lay in bed, sun shining” (177). While sketching the Dylan concert in Bethel Woods, Sussman even skirts copyright by misquoting a Dylan lyric: “Dylan sang that you can’t lose with a winning hand” (196). In another moment, Sussman describes how “Dylan strode across the stage gasping that truths are lies and lies are truths” (199). And while he professes on a November 5, 2025 appearance on the Word in Your Ear podcast that “I’m not a Dylanologist … I’m not a historian of Dylan,” readers might think otherwise when the novel turns to inevitable musings about Dylan the timeless troubadour:
He was singing lyrics that spoke to Homer, Shakespeare, Whitman, Ginsberg. He could transform himself into whatever he wanted to be. He came straight out of American folk, a boy on a freight train moving through the night, a student of Guthrie, Seeger, Hank Williams. He was a Roman king descended from Ovid, Virgil, Horace. He was a Greek satyr, half man and half beast. (191)
This litany continues through Robert Johnson, T.S. Eliot, the bible, and more. The voice of this analysis sounds less like a young man collecting observations at a concert and more like an intellectual who’s been reading and thinking about the topic of Bob Dylan since he discovered him as a teen. “He refused interviews, turned away from celebrity, gossip, nonsense, commentary,” the narrator Evan continues. “The art was deep inside himself and only that was worth pursuing” (191). So while Sussman props up the fictional Evan as a means of working through his real sense of abandonment and dismay—“Everything that I know about myself might be other than I think, that’s not a pleasant experience,” the real Sussman tells the Word in Your Ear hosts—he still dedicates a number of auto-fictional paragraphs to the Dylan mythos. And to hear Sussman talk about Dylan’s artistic dissatisfaction in the early 70s is to realize the closeted Dylanologist ever lurking beneath the surface.
Sussman is capable, that is, of writing fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and more. According to Fantuzzi, Sussman claims to possess ephemera from Dylan’s romance with his mother that could not only help corroborate his story, but help further the field of Dylan studies. As for this book, he could’ve published June’s monologues as a novella, as Garner suggested, and formed the rest into a memoir. As long as he stuck to the truth, Dylan couldn’t have stopped him. Of the Harper’s “memoir,” Sussman told the Word in Your Ears hosts, “[Dylan’s people] asked to see the piece in advance. And [they] came back and said, ‘No changes requested. No comments in the piece.’ You know, of course, I won’t say too much, but they had every right to object to anything that they thought was not a faithful account.” Which is to imply, the Dylan people must’ve felt the Harper’s “memoir” was a faithful account. All the same, when expanding into the book, Sussman still covered his tracks by fictionalizing his story. He may have made this choice for the sake of art—the sake of form, in the name of Beckett and Proust, Kerouac and Knausgård. At the same time, Sussman chose caution, which, to quote Garner again, is radically un-Dylanesque.
Unfortunately, caution is all we can proceed with concerning Boy from the North Country. Whereas the Harper’s “memoir” promised a meaty new set of details for Dylan studies to sift through, all couched in an engaging personal narrative, this work of autofiction removes itself from the scholarly conversation surrounding Dylan’s work in books and magazines and journals like the Dylan Review. We’ll reference this book as a compelling-yet-dubious tale of what might’ve taken place between Bob Dylan and Fran Sussman under the tutelage of Norman Raeben. We’ll allude to that Sussman guy who might possibly be Dylan’s unacknowledged son, but we won’t run too far with the claims laid out in Boy from the North Country, no matter how many rhetorical backflips its author performs. Until Sussman consents to that nonfiction contract at length and shows us what he’s holding, we’ll be left wondering what to believe.
Works Cited
Carlick, Stephen. “A Guide to Autofiction.” Penguin Books, 19 Nov. 2025,
http://www.penguin.co.uk/discover/articles/what-is-autofiction-genre-books
Fantuzzi, Fabio. Interview with Paul Haney. Facebook Messenger telephone call, January 25, 2026.
Garner, Dwight. “Bob Dylan Might Be His Dad. But the Star of His Book Is His Mom.”
The New York Times, 10 Sept. 2025, http://www.nytimes.com/
Gilmore, Mikal. “People of the Year: Bob Dylan: An Oscar, a Sixtieth Birthday and the Year’s Best Album.”
Rolling Stone, 6 Dec. 2001, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/people-of-the-year-bob-dylan-2-202777/
Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
Segal, David. “Is That Bob Dylan in the Mirror?” The New York Times, 4 Sept. 2025, http://www.nytimes.com/.
Sussman, Sam. Boy from the North Country. Penguin, 2025.
—. “The Silent Type: On (possibly) being Bob Dylan’s son.” Harper’s Magazine, May 2021, harpers.org/archive/2021/05/the-silent-type-on-possibly-being-bob-dylans-son/.
Word in Your Ear. “‘Bob Dylan Is My Father’—and Why Sam Sussman Is Convinced It’s True.”
Word In Your Ear, episode 836, 5 Nov. 2025. Acast, shows.acast.com/word-in-your-ear-2/episodes/word-podcast-836-sam-sussman.
[1] Sussman, Sam. “The Silent Type: On (possible) being Bob Dylan’s son.” Harper’s Magazine, May 2021. https://harpers.org/archive/2021/05/the-silent-type-on-possibly-being-bob-dylans-son/
[2] The quote appears in Steal like an Artist by Austin Kleon (Workman Publishing Group, 2012), whose website links to the blog Rick on Theater, which references Tom F. Driver’s interview with “Beckett by the Madeleine” in Columbia University Forum 4 (Summer 1961): 21-25. In its original: “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artists now.”
[3] Presumably they attended this concert on August 11, 2011.
[4] In his essay “Oh Mercy: Bob Dylan, Chronicles, and the Mysterious Hand Injury” (Medium, September 2, 2019), Fred Bals charts these discrepancies and more while referring the Ostrow memoir, Present at the Creation: Leaping in the Dark and Going Against the Grain (Applause, 2005).
[5] As Scott Warmuth has so diligently shown.
[6] From The Village Trip website: Fabio Fantuzzi is a scholar, a music critic, and a songwriter. He is also a Marie-Curie Fellow at Columbia University and Ca’ Foscari University, directing the project POYESIS, which studies artist Norman Raeben and his influence on various leading artists, including Stella Adler and Bob Dylan. He co-edited the book Bob Dylan and the Arts (ESL, 2020).
[7] Schlam, Caroline. The Creative Path: A View from the Studio on the Making of Art. Allworth Press, 2018.
[8] More of Sussman’s Raeben insights appear in another nonfiction piece, an article he wrote for Forward titled “Bob Dylan, my mother, and the unknown painter behind Blood on the Tracks: Dylan Once Said That Norman Raeben Was the Man Who ‘Taught Me How to See.’” 15 Sept. 2025, https://forward.com/culture/music/765628/norman-raeben-bob-dylan-sam-sussman-boy-from-the-north-country/
