Sam Sussman

“What matters in life is whether people are there for you. When you suffer, when you thrive, who is there for you?” She had told me she wanted to live her own life, not be a footnote in Dylan’s. I looked at my reflection and understood that my mother’s refusal to discuss him was one prolonged act of protection, not against the answer but rather the question. Her desire had always been for me to become my own person in my own way.”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“replacing her with him, singing with wounded emotion about the boy from the north country. He sang with his eyes closed and scrunched face taking on each of the ballad’s emotions, like he was part of the song, it was a story he was living inside. He’d become a different person when he entered the song, the way Stella said the best actors entered a character, the way Chagall became Joseph, and as he pleaded another stanza it occurred to me that Bob Dylan himself was a character of his own creation, a work of fiction.”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel