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As a 13-year-old aspiring writer, Sam Sussman spent most of his time in junior high scribbling poetry in the back of class. He was bullied a lot, set apart in his town in upstate New York by being shy, bookish and Jewish, and living in the sticks with a bohemian single mother.
One day a teacher took him aside.
“You really look like this musician,” the teacher said, pointing to a photograph on a desktop computer. “Some say he’s a poet.”
It was Bob Dylan. Sam rummaged around that night on LimeWire, which in the early 2000s was a popular site for pirated music, and downloaded “Love Minus Zero,” a track from Dylan’s 1965 album “Bringing It All Back Home.” He was stunned. He downloaded more songs from other albums, and burned them onto a CD, which he would play on headphones during rides to and from school.
“I thought it was majestic,” he recalled. “I remember listening on the bus just thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re allowed to do anything in a poem. You can put Shakespeare in the alley. You can put him in pointed shoes and bells,’ ” he went on, paraphrasing “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.”
Two years into Sam’s Dylan phase, a longtime boyfriend of his mother’s took note of his musical passion.
Your mother knew that guy, the boyfriend said — a moment Sussman recounts in “Boy From the North Country,” a soon-to-be-published novel based on his life, with a character named Evan serving as his stand-in. It was like learning that his mother had met Batman. Dylan seemed more myth than flesh.
