Debut author Sam Sussman joins Zibby to discuss BOY FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY, a searingly tender mother-son story, and Zibby’s Book Club pick for October. Inspired by the author’s own uncertain celebrity paternity, the book follows Evan, a young man grappling with love, loss, and the mystery of his father’s identity—rumored to be Bob Dylan—while caring for his mother during her final months. Sam reveals how the novel draws deeply from his own life and his late mother’s story, weaving together themes of grief, inheritance, art, and the many forms of love.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Sam. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked with Zibby to talk about Boy From The North Country.

Congratulations. 

Sam: Thanks so much for having me. 

Zibby: Oh, as you know, I'm obsessed with this book. It is one of my Zibby's Book Club pics, and I love it so much. Could not put it down. Held it to my heart for like 10 minutes afterwards. I was like, this is ridiculous. I have more stuff I have to do now, but I can't like stop thinking about the, the book.

Anyway, uh, tell everybody what the book is about, please. 

Sam: Yeah. Well first thank you Zibby. I really appreciate those kind words. The book is about, um, love and loss and grief and caretaking, and it's about mothers and sons. I'll tell the story very briefly. Um, the story centered on a young man named Evan who grows up with his mother June in the Hudson Valley and from an early age, he's not certain about the identity of his biological father and strangers begin to tell Evan that he resembles uncannily. He looks like a writer musician. Some people may have heard of Bob Dylan, and it slowly comes out that his mother, earlier in her life had a romantic relationship with Dylan, which she will never talk to Evan Bow. And then slowly, there are a few breadcrumbs.

She says, yes, I did have that relationship. Okay, maybe I was with him the year before you were born, but she won't say anything more. So Evan goes off to live his life. He leaves home, he gets as far away as he can. He goes. He studies at Oxford, he lives in Berlin. He lives in London and Jerusalem, and in his mid twenties, June becomes sick.

She's diagnosed with cancer and she asks him to come home. And as they're spending this time, which Evan does not yet realize is the last month of his mother's life, she begins for the first time to open up about her life, this wild Bohemian youth that she had as an actress and a painter in New York.

And she's telling him about for the first time her relationship with Dylan and Evan feels that he's being led toward the truth of his story, their relationship closer to Dylan. But what we've really come to see is that he's actually gaining a deeper and more profound appreciation of the mother who raised him.

And by the end, Evan is going to realize that everything he values in himself, his goodness. Also his artistic ambitions, his desire to be a writer. Everything that he's trying to become doesn't come from this celebrity artist who he's never met. Rather, it comes from the mother who has raised him. 

Zibby: Wow. And where do you fit into the story yourself?

Sam: Oh, you caught me. Well, I did. I did write an essay for Harper's Magazine called, um, on possibly being Bob Dylan's son. And yes, this is what people these days call auto fiction, a novel taken from life. For me literature and life are deeply intertwined. I want to read great literature so that it makes me more alive to life, more sensitive, more thoughtful, and I want to write from my life.

And so this is my story. It is my mother's story, and Evan, it turns out, is my middle name. 

Zibby: Ah, and 

Sam: June, my mother's middle name was zuna. She was named for Zuna Barnes, and so I've turned that into June here. And like anyone who writes a memoir or an auto fictional novel, it, it would be fiction to say that this is all, every detail is true.

When we tell a story. When we write a novel, we compress. We don't have the time or space to explain everything that happened in our lives. There are large chunks of my life that are not in this book, um, but the heart of the story, the truth of this particularly young man's journey is from my life. 

Zibby: And why not write a memoir?

Did you think about writing a memoir and did you also work on a novel for seven years the way that Evan did and then abandon it to write this one? 

Sam: I did. I, I wrote two novels before this, over seven years. I had a long and winding road as a writer, you know, they say if you want to be a novelist, do an MFA or come to New York City.

And I didn't do either of those things. The writers that I admired the most were out in the world writing from their life and experience. So I spent my twenties living in all the places that Evan lives, Oxford, London, Jerusalem, Berlin. And that was also a reaction to growing up in the woods in the Hudson Valley and wanting to go out and explore the world and discover myself.

And part of what I discovered in writing this book is that actually the deepest parts of myself that I value. The most really are rooted in those woods in the Hudson Valley where I grew up with my mother, who gave me such a deep love of literature and art and my earliest memories of art, of her reading to me.

So you ask why I didn't write a memoir, and I'll try to explain it this way. Samuel Beckett has a great line where he says, as a writer, you have to find the form that fits the mess form, that fits the mess. So for me. At the center of this story is my growth and my growth into a depth of appreciation for the mother who raised me, and a desire not to be defined by any other feature or possible feature of myself.

And so I chose a form the novel, which says, I'm not going to tell you what's true or what's not true. 

Zibby: Thanks a lot. 

Sam: That is the form. That is the form that fits the mess of my life, and I knew that if I wrote a memoir, just to put it in slightly more concrete terms, I knew that if I wrote a memoir that it would be much harder to establish my voice and my mother's story outside of the shout of that, a figure of as cultural significance of as culturally significant as Dylan that he would cast. So this for me was an act of freedom, of saying, I'm going to write this story on my terms in my way, and it helps that I happen to be a novelist. 

Zibby: Yes. Well, I feel like there are almost two parallel novels within your book.

Two stories that you have intertwining the whole time in a really beautiful, sort of braided way, which is the contemporary timeline where you, okay. Where Evan is helping June through chemotherapy and her illness, and learning about that and helping her with that, and all the physicality of. Illness. And I haven't actually take, I haven't had anyone go through chemo where I was the main caretaker.

I've had friends, but I wasn't like the one the way that you were for the way that Evan was for June. So that storyline alone would have made a compelling sort of gut wrenching story. But the fact that then she tells the story of her coming of age story herself is Emma's like. Another one on top of it, so it's really like a two for one special in the book.

Sam: I'm so glad that you enjoyed both of those storylines and, and put it that way. And I think it was so important for me to tell my mother's story in as close to her words as I could. And so, as you say, the way the book is structured is that I, I or Evan, uh, our home with my mother June, and then every time we go into New York City for her chemotherapy treatment, she draws us back to the 1970s as she's describing this youth that she had, um, and that in life she had almost never talked to me about and was really opening up about that period of her life. And it just so happened that the hospital where she was treated was around the corner where she had lived in Yorkville, in the Upper East Side. Just actually the apartment that I'm in now that I currently.

Live in, and it was there that she first began this relationship with Dylan in the mid 1970s. So when I'm writing these scenes of my mother and Dylan having this affair, which is creatively intense, and it was happening in this apartment where I was writing, and there was a deep magic to me of transporting myself back to that period of time and imagining what these two people.

What it been like at that moment, and I had a great deal to go on because my mother talked to me about that period. And, and I'll say that for those who are drawn to the Dylan element of the story, this is the time when he was writing Blood on the Tracks and he was in this moment of deep artistic crisis.

And through the book, we see him turn out of that period and come into this riveting moment where he's able to write as he wants to write again. And what comes out of that is blood on the tracks. And my mother had a, a view, an intimate view of that process for him. And so much of this book for me is about what it means for an artist to become his or her fullest self.

And that's what my mother was trying to do. It's what Dylan was trying to do, and it's what I have been trying to do through this book. 

Zibby: Wow. It's just so neat how it all came together though. I mean, it sounds like we can take it apart, but the end result is like so seamless, which is really amazing. So I just to really double down on Bob Dylan to immerse myself in this book.

I watched The Great Unknown, like in the middle of it. And so this actually, this is way past that. It's after that movie ends and sort of a coda to that for anybody who left that movie. And it's like, well then what happened? So this is like post motorcycle accident. Into the time where he was sort of, you know, drawn into himself and then how your mom played a role of his sort of coming out and writing again.

And I feel like having watched the movie and read the books or simultaneously this sort of manic element to Dylan's writing and the middle of the night scribbling and the notes everywhere and the. Popping into, you know, in the movie it was the same kind of setup with the apartment and the compilation of of women.

I feel like you capture that so well. Like what is it like and how do you interact with somebody who can be, you know, artistically gifted, yet erratic in their sort of day-to-day behavior in a way that's not even particularly socially acceptable. Like, what? What do you make of all of that? 

Sam: Yeah. Well that was the reason my mother broke up with him because he, I think you can't know about Dylan as an artist without revering the depth of his commitment to his work. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Sam: And yet, you know, listening to my mother, it was clear the personal cost that that came at for him the work was the sun and the moon and, you know, she would describe, um, so just to back up for a moment, when they met, as you say, after a complete unknown, which ends in the mid sixties, uh, Dylan is at the height of celebrity.

He's in his mid late twenties, and he then, you know, he wants to get away from it all. He goes to Woodstock. Um, he thinks that if he has time alone, he can, um, get back to the artistic work that really matters to him. But what happens is that through his late twenties and early thirties, he does not write work that he is satisfied with.

Now, plenty of other people love the albums that came out in the late sixties and early seventies. But when my mother met him, um, in the early seventies, he was deeply unsatisfied with his work. And he had come to New York City because he'd heard of this painter named Norman Raven. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Sam: Who is the youngest child of Schol Maum, the great 19th century Yiddish short story writer and my mother meets Dylan in Raven's class, and Raven is this enormous figure for Dylan. Dylan later credits him with turning himself around creatively. And so, you know, my book is sort of doing for Dylan of the seventies, what a complete unknown is doing for Dylan of the sixties. Now you asked what I sort of, how do I relate to that creative intensity.

Admiration. But of course it's also a, a cautionary tale because like what my mother took from their relationship is that she wanted a fuller life than you can have as an artist who's committed to nothing but your own work. And one of the reasons that she ended. Their relationship was that she, she wanted more for herself.

She wanted family. She wanted to help other people, as she later did, as a holistic health practitioner. And those are the things that I've tried to take from her to learn that you can be committed to your work. I worked very hard on this novel, novel. I was ruthless with myself in trying to get as close, tell the best story, write the best story that I could.

At the same time, I have a lot of love and friendship and people in my life that are disconnected from my identity as an artist, and I think that's something my mother really emphasized to me. 

Zibby: Well, your mother is so amazing and I'm so sorry for your loss. The world's loss of her, I feel like I know her, which is of course the magic of writing and reading is that we can sort of conjure up the souls of those we've lost in such a powerful way.

It's really unbelievable, and this is such a prime example of that. But she went through so much, which the reader finds out along the way of like some of the things that have happened in her past, her relationship with men. Yes, Dylan is one of them, but you know, all of her relationships have defined her and despite what happens, her commitment to love itself.

Overwhelms overpowers everything else. And she keeps sort of trying to teach you that, like literally saying it to you, but also showing it to you to the last second. That's what she wanted you to hold onto. And it's so powerful. Most parents don't necessarily have like a thesis or something that they're like, no, no, this is it.

This is the point of it all. How do you take that? Like how do you take that into your life? And I know you write about your own relationships here, but. It almost feels like a little bit of extra pressure, right? What does that mean to devote a life to love? 

Sam: It's an extraordinarily high standard of how to live.

And you know, she would say to me, nothing is holy or than love. And you know, I think for me, something that I've tried to take from her life is the many forms that love can take. And when she died, she had a dog named Lucy who then came to me and lived with me for six and a half years. Lucy taught me enormously about love.

My mother had many clients who she worked with, and part of her work there was focused on taking her own traumas and trying to help other women, um, who had been victims of similar sorts of abuse. And that was a deep and profound form of love and her life. And part of what I'm trying to do with this book is offer love to people who have gone through grief.

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Sam: We live in a culture that often struggles to be imaginative with how to relate to loss and grief, and I really felt after my mother died how hard it was to talk about what that experience it was like, and you know, my mother used to say, we're here to take the pieces of the universe that we have been given, burnish them with love, and return them in better condition than we received.

And what I'm trying to do with this book is take these agonizing pieces of the universe that I've been given and burnish them with love and return them to other people in better condition than I received. And I hope that if there are people struggling with grief or loss, that they can read this book and find someone else who went through that experience.

And I made a rule with myself that I was going to be completely vulnerable emotionally in how I talked about this loss and this grief in the book. And I hope that stories at their best can be a place where we find that love. 

Zibby: Totally. Oh my gosh. Have you reached out? To Bob Dylan. I know it's only one piece of this whole book, right?

But does he know? Do you know if he knows? Are you gonna send him the book? Have you thought about it? Do you care? Did you need permission? Like, what's the short answer there? 

Sam: I used to feel that I needed permission endorsement inspiration. I used to feel that I'm needed him, I, I used to look at his photograph when I was a teenager and look between his photograph and my reflection and feel that I needed him.

And when I was young, my mother would say to me, you are loved, you are protected, you are free. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Sam: And I didn't understand what she was saying. And now at this point in my life. I feel it so deeply every day. I feel her love. I feel the love of other people in my life. I'm loved. I'm protected. I'm free. I didn't write the book for Bob Dylan.

There are great sections about his creative life for those who will want to hear that story, and I hope that they'll enjoy it. It's the most intimate portrait of Dylan writing Blood on the tracks that will ever be published. But personally for me, I thought about my mother and how she would respond to this book.

Every day that I wrote it, and I asked myself every day, am I putting her on the page with the complexity and love that she deserves? Because that was the hardest part of writing this book for me. People are more complex than any character, but personally for him, listen, if I had an hour with him, I would just ask him about her.

Zibby: It's amazing. Well, you also do such a good job of setting us in, like from a technical standpoint, setting us in a place. I feel this book literally picks me up and plunks me down. In nature, you can see what you are eating, what you are smelling, just like being surrounded by the woods. The one moment you said the two of you had been outside and you were like, was that a dream?

But you could see like a slight depression in the leaves. I mean, these details are so outstanding. And then you say that you wrote. The book there, a lot of it too. Is that is and, and just being surrounded by all of that. Talk a little bit about how you get. How you brought the outside in. And even Lucy too.

I mean all the licks and the times you mentioned her. And there, there was one time I was like, wait, what about the dog? And then you were like, and then I called so and so to watch Lucy, and I'm like, thank God, you know, I was getting worried here.

Sam: Oh, right. Well, as you mentioned, so I should say I grew up with my mother in this beautiful place in the woods, in Hudson Valley near Goshen, in a valley looking onto mountains and hills. And my mother loved nature and two of the great loves that she gave me in life were nature and literature, and I'm bringing those two things together in this book and you know, after she passed away, I stayed in that house and I, which was a very important place for me to feel connected to her and to grieve. And I ended up writing this book in the two places where it takes place. Just that house in upstate New York and this apartment in the city. And when I was stuck riding or when I was struggling.

There was a lot of struggle in this book because it was just so painfully from my life. Lucy and I would just go for a walk in nature and I would look at the trees. I would look onto the mountains. Sometimes I would really just lie in the grass for 15 or 20 minutes and look at the clouds and think about.

What is the narrative problem I'm dealing with? Why can't I get around it? I would look at Lucy and I would say, well, what do you think here? And Lucy was my great, great artistic assistant. She was nine pounds, so she sat in my lap almost every moment that I wrote this book. And you know, when I was working too hard, she would look at me like.

You know, don't we, isn't it time for our afternoon walk? I would say, okay, Lucy. And sometimes I would wake up in the morning with such a passion intensity to write. I would have an idea and I would want to go to my desk as soon as possible. And Lucy would remind me that we had to begin our day with a walk.

So for me, part of the, the ambition of this book is to integrate all of these elements of life that I loved, that my mother loved into a work of literature. That reflects the beauty of her life and her loves and her legacies. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Sam: And the legacy of that nature of Lucy, all of that house, they were all with me.

And I will say, I could not have written the book without that legacy of love. I could not have written that book without Lucy and the House and my memories of my mother. I needed all of those things to sit down and write every day. 

Zibby: By the way, my artistic ambition is laying down here with her legs, like, you know, um, my own dog is, I totally get it.

She comes with me everywhere and she was actually my husband, my husband's late mother's dog who we took in as well, so right around the same time. She, we've had her for five years now. But anyway, when you wrote about the interaction essentially of genes and environment and what we inherit and the way we can influence, but not necessarily completely redirect, I feel like.

It's an allegory, if you will, of life itself. Right. What we are given, we can only do so much to change. We have the bodies, we have, we are all going to die. Not to be totally depressing today, but it's true. Right? And we can live healthy in all the ways your mother did, and I was like, oh my gosh, should I be taking notes for all the things his mom did?

Like I'm not doing any of those things. When you said you went to the hospital cafeteria and you're like, I guess like the most food like substance is this bar that I have to eat with like 48 grams of sugar. I'm like, oh my gosh, I have a bar. It's like a good day, you know? Anyway, that's okay. But I will try to eat clean and model myself after, after.

Your mom in the book. Um, but maybe just talk a little bit about that and, and where that leaves you at at the end. 

Sam: No, we each inherit, um. Love and complexity and difficulty and the things that our parents have struggled with. And there's, um, my mom was very conscious of what she had passed to me, what she had given.

And by the end of her life, I feel that she knew that I understood the depth of love that she had given me. And she also worried about what she hadn't given me. And she would often say to me. You know, I never modeled a full, lifelong romantic relationship for you. But don't let that make you feel that you can't have that in your life.

Um, she in the novel as she did in life, she quotes from Per vote, the Ethics of the Father, where, where she says It is not upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it. And that's how I think about parental inheritance. That we are given so much and all of us are given something even in the most difficult situations.

And our project in our lives is to make the most of that and try to pass on something more. And also to not feel that we are free to desist from what we, from pursuing, what we were not given or what was not perfect for us. 

Zibby: Do you ever listen to Danny Shapiro's, uh, podcast Family Secrets? Do you know that?

Sam: Yes. Great podcast. 

Zibby: If you are not scheduled to go on there, I would like to introduce you because I feel like you need to talk to her. And she wrote a whole book, I don't know if you've read it, called Inheritance, which is so amazing. So 

Sam: yes, yes, yes. Two of you 

Zibby: in conversation would be amazing.

Sam: I would love that.

Thank you, zaby. I would love that. 

Zibby: Actually, she's coming to that live event, but I don't know if it's the same day. Lemme see. Maybe I could do something where you talk there. All right, let me, let me, my wheels are turning. 

Sam: I would love that. Okay. Fantastic. Thank you, Zibby. That'd be great. 

Zibby: Where do you go from here?

Sam, you spill your life out as Evan, there are no, there seem to be no secrets. We are. It's hard to not root for you, right? You are rooting for Evan so much like the fact that then there's a book is so exciting because we're rooting for you as a character, but also as an author. Where do you go from here?

Sam: Well, thanks for rooting for me. That's much appreciated. A novelist spends many, many hours alone in the room at the desk, so to feel that there are others, rooting for me is a powerful feeling when I finish this novel. I was very conscious. How can I possibly write something that's going to feel as significant?

I'm dealing with death, love, mother's, father's, paternity, and when I finished the book, I remember there was a day where I closed the laptop and I walked around the woods behind my mother's house, and I thought to myself, the only thing larger than everything I've just written is love. And that will be the subject of my next book.

And that is also the active pursuit of my life now. And as I was saying before, something that I learned from my mother's relationship with Dylan is that actualizing as an artist is not the totality of one's life. That has been the great project of my life since my mother's death to write this book, to make meaning of her death, and now it's time to recreate the forms of love that I was lucky enough to experience with her, with other people.

And to move forward and to have my own life and my own family and to make that love the center of my next work. 

Zibby: I love that, Sam. Congratulations. This book is so good. It's so powerful. Like even when you talk about the woods, I'm like seeing everything. I feel like I have been to your house and your apartment.

You're we're, I'm just gonna move in at this point. So anyway.. 

Sam: You're welcome. You're welcome to visit. You're welcome to visit anytime, Zibby, you have a standing invitation. 

Zibby: Thank you. Thank you. Well, I'm looking forward to meeting you in person. Thank you for this. I'm so excited for other people to read it.

Last quick question, why this title, Boy From The North Country? I mean, I know it comes from, I know where it came from and I saw in the book where you referenced it. But you, are we talking about you? Are we talking about him? Are we talking about both of you? 

Sam: We're talking about my mother and we're talking about me, and we're also talking about all the other boys from the north country that are in this novel, there are descriptions of Mark Al. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Sam: And Leonard Cohen and Amos Oz. And this book is really a tribute to a certain form of especially Jewish literary artistic tradition. And it's a tribute to artists who come from the north country, from places nobody has heard of and seek to actualize themselves and you know, the last thing I'll say is there's, um, a bacho collection, the narrow road to the deep north and the deep north, the north country it's the place that we're all going. It's the place that we're from. It's the story that we tell about our origins and what we're trying to, where we're trying to go.

It's, it's the, the way that we understand ourselves, that's what the north country is. 

Zibby: Amazing. I love it. Congrats. Yay. 

Sam: Thank you. 

Zibby: Okay. All right. Take care to be continued. All right. 

Sam: Thank you so much. 

Zibby: Bye.