A Guy Who Thinks He Might Be Bob Dylan’s Son Picks 10 Great Bob Dylan Songs

A few years ago, Sam Sussman wrote a personal essay about his mother, Fran, who as a young woman in early ‘70s New York, took a painting class at Carnegie Hall led by the artist Norman Raeben. As it happened, one of her fellow students was Bob Dylan, who would later say Raeben influenced him to approach songwriting in a more fluid fashion. At the time, Dylan was about a year away from releasing Blood on the Tracks, widely considered to be a confessional album about the disintegration of his marriage to his first wife, Sara. Fran would later tell Sussman that she and Dylan had an affair.

Growing up, Sussman wrote, his mother had “resisted” telling him about her history with Dylan. It wasn’t until Sussman got older—and was told, repeatedly, that he resembled Bob Dylan—that he began questioning his identity and Dylan’s potential place in his life. In his book Boy from the North Country (Penguin Press, 2025), Sussman addresses these topics in the form of a novel. His protagonist, Evan, returns home from London to spend time with his mother, June, in upstate New York, after she alerts him of her cancer diagnosis.

What follows is an intimate portrait of a son caring for his mother before she dies. Though their conversations, often moving and revelatory in nature, delve into her creative past as a theater actor, and her stories about a long-ago fling with Bob Dylan, she doesn’t provide him, or his readers for that matter, with a conclusive answer about whether Dylan is his father, leaving Sussman—and the reader—to extrapolate their own answers. (A representative for Bob Dylan did not answer requests for comment on Sussman’s book.)

Sussman feels strongly that Boy from the North Country is really about his mother, and in many ways it is. The novel’s most singular voice belongs to June, the protagonist’s mother. In his review of the book in the New York Times, Dwight Garner writes: “These sections sound like nothing else in ‘Boy From the North Country,’ and “are easily the best thing in the book.”

When I asked Sussman about this, he responded, “Garner suggests that I sort of took transcripts she had, which is completely baseless and outlandish.” Instead he says, “the story is about me coming into an understanding that my life, what made me who I am, what I value comes from my mother.”