‘I want the reader to have a similar journey to mine’

Sam Sussman thinks Bob Dylan might be his dad – now he's written a novel about it. At the same New York apartment where his mother and the married musician used to meet, the 34-year-old writer tells his tangled-up story to Jim Farber

- By Jim Farber

In the early Noughties, when Sam Sussman entered the awkward age of adolescence, nearly every person he encountered asked him the same question: “Do you know who you look like?” Based on the curve of his mouth, the arc of his nose, the contours of his eyes, and the kinks in his hair, every one of them answered their own question: “Bob Dylan.”

“At first it was thrilling,” says Sussman, who is now 34. “Who doesn’t want to be told they look like a cultural icon?” A few years later, however, when bits of information about his past began to come to him, “the situation became much more volatile and complex. I just didn’t want to have that conversation with people any more.”

In fitful and often fraught exchanges, his mother Fran had begun doling out stories from a past she shared with Dylan that often invited more questions than answers. Over time, Sussman pieced together the outlines of a relationship between them that, while fleeting and distant, was, at least for him, potentially profound. He wrote about their liaison, and the surprising and complex role it has had in his life, in a celebrated essay published by Harper’s Magazine in 2021. In the piece, he pondered whether Dylan was, in fact, his father, a speculation that drew a terse “no comment” from the musician’s team when the magazine reached out to them. But as important as Dylan’s role was to Sussman’s story, his true focus turned out to be his mother and the mysteries surrounding his birth that she left unsolvable when she died of ovarian cancer at age 63 in 2017.

The success of the Harper's piece inspired Sussman to reimagine his story as a novel, his first, to be published this month: