Sam Sussman, a 34-year-old from Goshen, New York, has written a novel that centers on the possibility that he is Bob Dylan’s son. The auto-fiction, titled Boy from the North Country and published by Penguin Press, blends memoir and fiction as it follows his mother’s mid-1970s affair with the music icon and the questions it raises about his birth.

The book, told in June’s voice, recounts how she and Dylan connected after meeting in a beginner’s painting class, where June was the lone student who dared to critique his work. The pair reportedly grew emotionally and artistically intimate over the course of a year, though they were not dating in the conventional sense. A driving memory in the narrative centers on a late-night moment when Dylan’s song Like a Rolling Stone came on the radio and Luke, Sussman’s stepfather, reminded him: “There’s a lyric in there about your mother. They used to know each other in her early New York days.”

Music and lyric are woven into the scenes. Sussman has said Dylan listened to “Tangled Up in Blue” and that the lyric was used in the book to describe a memory of June. He is quoted saying, “Dylan drew me nearer and whispered, ‘June, if I had the stars from the darkest night I’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss.’” The line is taken from Dylan’s song Boots of Spanish Leather, and it marks a key moment in the relationship for June, Sussman notes. “I heard the sentence in its familiar rhythm,” June recalls, “He’d taken that sentence right from his own song and tried to place it in my heart. It wasn’t for me. It was from him to himself.”

In 1990, nine months before Sam’s birth, the two reconnected. June was married at the time to the man Sussman knows as his father, and the pair would meet at night, with Dylan dropping ideas for lyrics between conversations. June recalls lighting her stove and handing Dylan a pipe that had been sitting on a poetry book, then reading to him from the book. This scene is portrayed as part of Dylan’s story in the book, which also notes that Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” appears to capture that moment. The late-night calls and the realization that their relationship was over came after Dylan played her what was clearly a love song to his wife.

“There was a thrill that I could have a connection to him,” Sussman told The Post of Dylan. “But there was also a thought that I didn’t understand a significant part of the story of my own life.”

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The book’s tension deepens as Sussman reflects on his own sense of kinship with Dylan’s music during childhood in Goshen. “I felt certain parallels,” he said, “I was this young Jewish kid growing up in a rural part of America, longing to go where there was a larger culture.” An aspiring poet, he describes carrying that sense of longing into adulthood and writing as a way to locate the pieces of his own life.

In the years that followed, Sussman and June navigated a path that left his paternity uncertain but his bond with his mother central. June died of cancer in 2017 at age 63, and Sussman has said the search for a definitive answer never eclipsed his respect for the life she lived. “I am her son. That’s the center of my relationship to myself. And that’s enough,” he told The Post.

The novel, published by Penguin Press under the title Boy from the North Country, is out now. Sussman, who currently lives in the Yorkville apartment where much of the book’s scene takes place, says he would welcome a meeting with Dylan to hear the singer’s memories of June. “My determination to know more about him led me much closer to her,” Sussman explained, “and that’s the story I was trying to tell.” If a direct paternity determination ever emerges, he says his sense of self—formed in the shadow of his mother’s life—will remain the anchor of his narrative.

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