Novelist Sam Sussman believes he might be Bob Dylan’s son

Posted On September 5, 2025September 5, 2025

Novelist Sam Sussman has questioned whether Bob Dylan could be his father in his new book, Boy From the North Country.

The upcoming novel, Boy from the North Country, is set to be released through Penguin Press on September 16th, 2025, and explores Sussman’s questions regarding his biological father. It was originally an essay in Harper’s in 2021, which has now been extended into a novel.

According to Sussman, his late mother met Dylan in 1974 at a painting class held by artist Norman Raeben, which he claims led to a relationship which is said to have lasted for around a year before they drifted out of each other’s lives.

Then, years later, Dylan is alleged to have got back in touch during the late 1980s to briefly rekindle their relationship, Sussman, who was born in 1990, told the New York Times.

Sussman grew up believing his biological father was a civil rights attorney who his mother divorced when he was an infant. However, on a car journey, when he was 15, his mother told him the tale of her relationship with Dylan.

“Nothing I’m going to say can capture what that emotion felt like, what that possibility felt like at that point in my life,” he told the New York Times. “I remember being a teenager and it being late at night and standing at my window, listening to his music, and just thinking, can I actually just walk down to the garage, get in my mom’s car and drive west, and just try to find him?”

Sussman doesn’t have the answer to his burning question about whether Dylan is his biological father. His mother, Fran, died in 2017, which left him still wondering about the possibility. “Her silence and her protectiveness were not toward the answer, but toward the question,” he said.

The novelist continued, “She thought the wrong question in my life was his place, and her determination was that she should live her life and achieve, and I should live my life and that it shouldn’t be defined by him.”

However, the book is more of a love letter to his late mother than it is about his possible connection to Dylan, sharing, “My journey in the book is relinquishing a fixation with a man that I don’t know, and coming into a depth of appreciation for the woman who raised me, who gave me everything that I value in myself.”

In another interview with The Independent, Sussman said he has little interest in meeting Dylan or finding out his thoughts on the book but would like “to talk to him about my mother because I don’t know many people who knew her in that period”.

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