Sam Sussman isn’t shy about the fact that his debut novel, Boy From the North Country, draws heavily upon his own life. But from the beginning, he set out to write a novel rather than a memoir.
“The ambition of any artist is to create a work of art that is larger than the experiences that go into that work by simply offering facticity of one’s own life,” he said. “I thought if it was a memoir, it would be read for facticity. It wouldn’t be understood as a work of art that’s trying to ask these deeper questions about why all of us draw deep meaning in our life through art.”
Sussman’s debut hit shelves on Sept. 16, and he’s since spoken about the release at events sponsored by PEN America in New York and California, including talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Ayad Akhtar, author Aminatta Forna, and lawyer Chloe Conaway.
The event with Akhtar, held on Sept. 19 at the 92nd Street Y, opened with the novel’s editor, John Burnham Schwartz, praising Sussman’s “high-wire literary act” and admitting that even the initial manuscript brought him to tears. “I think the superpower of this novel is its sincerity: the degree to which the novelist places his emotions, and the emotions of the characters, and particularly the experience of love between a mother and a son, on the page,” he said.
Schwartz then introduced Sussman and Akhtar, who went on to discuss the novel’s central themes of loss, love, and art. Boy From the North Country, inspired in large part by Sussman’s own life, follows Evan, a young man who is called home from abroad to care for his dying mother. Upon his return, Evan’s mother lays bare secrets of her past — including her romantic history with Bob Dylan, which leaves her son suspecting that he could be the famed singer’s child. Though the possibility adds a sense of intrigue to the novel, a more certain connection ultimately lies at the heart of Boy From the North Country: the loving, affectionate relationship Evan shares with his mother.
Akhtar opened the talk by admitting that he struggled to decide whether to ask Sussman questions about himself or Evan. “Well, Evan is my middle name,” Sussman responded, garnering a great deal of laughter from the audience.
“My middle name felt right to give this character because he’s a part of me, but not all of me,” he continued. “People are too complex to turn into discrete characters in a work of art — I mean, even if you are Knausgaard or Proust.”
Akhtar then asked Sussman to recount the events in his life that inspired the novel. Sussman explained that the account of the relationship provided by Evan’s mother accurately reflects that of his own mother: At first, she claimed never to have known Bob Dylan; then, she admitted that she was involved with the singer long before she gave birth to her son; later, she revealed they saw each other again the year before his birth. For a long time, she refused to say much else.
Only after growing sick did Sussman’s mother disclose the details of the earlier part of her life, recounting how she met Bob Dylan in an art class. At the end of each class, participants would take turns critiquing one another’s work. Everyone would shower Dylan’s in compliments: “The canvas looks like your lyric sounds,” they’d say. Sussman’s mother, however, felt no obligation to flatter him. “Your canvas is uninviting,” she told him. “The colors are too harsh.” Dylan was immediately taken by her brutal honesty, and soon after the two became romantically involved.
Akhtar also asked Sussman to reflect upon his writing process, inquiring about whether he struggled to work on a novel centered on his mother just three years after she passed away.
“That was the most emotionally raw and searing experience that I’ve had as a person: sharing the last months of her life, knowing at a certain point that our time together was dwindling,” Sussman said. “Often in our culture, it’s difficult to talk about death or grieve. I felt that after death, there weren’t too many places to put what I had lived through.”
Boy From the North County served as the perfect outlet for Sussman, but that didn’t mean his story had to be a despairing one. Instead, he wanted love to take up more room in the novel than pain and grief. “I could take you as a reader into those last days of her life, and you could be there with me,” he said, “and it would be bearable because that love would be greater than the difficulty of seeing someone’s last days.”
Sussman added that he had written two novels prior to Boy From the North County, both while living abroad, but neither were published — likely because they lacked the sense of soul that his debut novel possesses.
“I thought that a great novel was centered on a powerful concept, on a grand idea, because I’ve read too much French theory,” he explained. “What I had to understand was that a worthwhile novel is drawn from what we’ve lived through, from our emotion, from the people who made us who we are.”
Only following his mother’s death did Sussman recognize the wealth of his mother’s wisdom, especially regarding love and healing, and decide it should be the subject of a new literary endeavor. “That was the first time that I had to really start living by what she had taught me. Without her there, I had to become a more careful student of her life,” he added.
Sussman will discuss his debut work once again on Oct. 23 at an author’s evening organized by PEN America and hosted by Lisa and LilyClaire Hedley. Books will be available for all attendees. PEN America also interviewed Sussman for a recent PEN Ten interview.
