December 11, 2025 • 52 mins
Sam grows up without knowing his biological father. As he enters adolescence, he begins to resemble Bob Dylan. A lot. So when Sam learns his mother had a brief relationship with Dylan in the 70s, the cascade of questions begins to flow.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
My mother always had her secrets. I stood out of bed,
too anxious to sleep. The wooden floorboards creaked as I
crossed the darkness. I raised the window when the cool
night touched my tired eyes. Fireflies shone and died in
the dark. The silhouette of mountains glimmered on the horizon.
(00:27):
All families have subjects that are understood to be better
not discussed, and we were no different.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
My eyes shifted to the shelf.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Of neatly ordered CDs, settling on the face of the
man my mother and I had not discussed for more
than ten years. His mess of brown curls and angled
chin resembled mine. For years, I had done all I
could not to think of that man. It was easier
to refuse my thoughts about him when I was abroad
(00:56):
in the life I had made for myself spoken his
name since leaving home.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
That's Sam Sussman, novelist, essayist, author of the recently published
novel Boy from the North Country. Sam's is a story
of hints and haunts, secrets and longing. It's a story
about possibly being the son of one of the most
famous men of our time. Emphasis Possibly it's also a
(01:25):
story of a son's devotion and love for his remarkable mother.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, secrets that
are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
(01:48):
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Sam, tell me
about the landscape of your childhood in Goshen, Upstate, New York.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Well.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
I grew up with my mother in the Hudson Valley
near Goshen, in the woods. It was an extraordinary landscape.
It was peaceful and quiet. We had horses, dogs, rabbits,
cheap cats, and it was fairly isolated, but in a
(02:25):
wonderful way. Some of my earliest memories are of my
mother reading to me. There was a hammock in the
backyard and between two pine trees, and she would read
out there to me. And my childhood was one full
of art and literature and creative expression and nature and
(02:50):
also a lot of other people. My mother worked as
a holistic health practitioner, really before wellness culture was as
mainstream as it is now, and people came to our home.
Her office was in the back of our house, and
she had training in psychology and nutrition and kinesiology and meditation,
(03:12):
and she would sit with people and her work was
about helping other people live full lives emotionally, physically, spiritually,
And so the idea of healing was very present in
my childhood. But of course when I was young, I
had very little idea of what my mother herself might
(03:34):
be healing from.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
And she was a great lover of storytelling, right like
she both the stories the people in her practice told her,
and also that she would read aloud to you, and
reading stories together seems like it was woven into your childhood.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
I think it was a love language between us.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
She loved reading aloud.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
She had been an actress in her twenty and of
course I didn't know that as a child when she
was reading to me. But there was this great majesty
to the way that she would read a book, and
she read me Harry Potter and King Arthur and Robin Hood.
And it's striking now when I think back on my childhood.
This was the mid late nineties. I mean, all the
(04:20):
digital technologies that have come into our lives were there,
and yet we didn't have cable television. We had an
old TV on which we would watch a film, maybe
once a month, and my mom somehow sort of kept
the Internet from me until I was about twelve. So
my childhood was extraordinarily pastoral. And what she encouraged in
(04:46):
me was a love of the arts, creativity, nature, animals.
That was really the world that I grew up in.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
You became a vegetarian early on, didn't you.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
It was the first choice I ever made.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
My mother used to tell the story like this, We're
in a pizza Rhea and I was four and I
said to her, does pizza have dead animal in it?
And she said no, Why are you asking? And I said,
you know, I've heard that some foods have dead animal.
I really don't want to eat that. And something that
(05:22):
was extraordinary about my mother is she really cared about
cultivating and nourishing what she saw as being true within me.
And she respected that decision even though I was four.
And of course it added complexity to her life as
a single mother to be now have a vegetarian child
(05:43):
and a child.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
That ate meat, and she ate me. I didn't know
the word.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Vegetarian until people started saying to me, oh, we hear
you're a vegetarian. But that for me came from the
love of the animals I grew up with, and a
sort of feeling of terror that I might have, unbeknownst
to myself, been eating those animals.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
Sam goes off to school in a very rural part
of New York State. He's vegetarian, he's bookish, he's Jewish.
None of this helps him win any popularity contests in
this milieu.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
I was bullied horribly.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
I went to a Waldorf school until I was ten,
and so up until that point I was somewhat insulated
because there were other people who more shared my mother's values.
But I switched to the public school when I was ten,
and I just had no sense of how out of
(06:48):
place I was. There would have been no way for
me to know.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
And kids were, you know, I was a vegetarian.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
That was the strangest thing they'd ever heard. And they
would try to shove meet at me or rub it
on my face, and sometimes in harmless ways. Other kids
would ask, you know, what TV shows do you like,
and I'd say, oh, we don't have TV, and the
kid would just kind of walk away because they wouldn't
know it to say to me. And then, of course,
(07:19):
being Jewish, this is not a part of the world
to which in which many Jews choose to live, and
it's a politically and culturally very conservative place. And the
only Jewish community nearby is the Hasidic community in Kirosol,
for which there is really great deal of anti Semitism.
(07:42):
And I remember in school that coming through in all
sorts of ways. I mean, I remember a teacher saying
to me, why are the Jews ruining this town? Because
people were upset at how quickly curious Yell was expanding.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
So for all of these reasons.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
I mean, now I'm in my mid thirties and I
have the language to articulate what was happening. I was
the child of a progressive minded, counter cultural sixties flower child,
growing up in a deeply red part of America without
(08:22):
many people who shared my cultural background. But of course,
as a child, I just felt this was all about me,
and it was very, very painful to deal with.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
Well, it strikes me too that you know, as you
described your mother and flower child, and not particularly religious
in any way in terms of Judaism and this life
that you were living with her in Goshen, and the
only other sort of identifiable Jewish community there being people
(08:59):
who may share an ethnicity with you, but must have
also seemed kind of unrecognizable to you as.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Well, right, And you know that was the irony of
being culturally Jewish in that landscape, is that the hasidam
certainly wouldn't have recognized me as Jewish, and yet the
people I was going to school with or the adults
around me associated me with that world.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
My mother was religious in her own way.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
She drew on many of the spiritual dimensions of Judaism,
but I think, like many people of her generation, she
hadn't had the best experiences within organized Jewish community, and
so she had taken some of the ideas and the
identity and made her own Jewish identity out of that.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
For all his mother's love of stories, listening to them,
telling them, there's one she never speaks, Sam grows up
in the shadow of that silence, sensing its presence long
before he can name it. At thirteen, around his bar Mitzvah,
a teacher pulls him aside and says, you look like
this musician. Some people say he's a poet. You might
(10:23):
be interested in him. Sam searches the name Bob Dylan.
It's not just the resemblance that strikes him. It's the feeling, too,
the feeling of a quiet vibration, not proof, but possibility.
His mom has had a series of partners through the years,
semi father figures coming in and out of Sam's life.
(10:45):
His paternity was never something he directly questioned. But now
now there's this him, this famous musician, this poet, this
towering cultural figure, the Bard.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Well, the first thing that happened is when people told
me that I started listening to his music, and.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
For me, there was this isn't unique to me.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Tens of millions of people have felt this, but there
was a deep I felt a deep connection and thrill.
And I remember standing at the window of my childhood
bedroom with ear muff headphones on, listening to Blonde on
Blonde and looking out into the dark night and just
(11:39):
feeling this majestic sense that Dylan had been a kid
just like me, this Jewish kid in rural America who
had wanted to be a writer. And at this point,
I'm the kid in the back of the classroom scribbling
poetry in his marble composition notebook, and I'm a listening
(12:00):
to this music at night. I'm looking onto the hills
in the valley and our isolated part of the world.
And I'm thinking Dylan wasn't that much older than I was, when,
as the legend he told goes, he got on this
freight train and came to New York and wrote his
(12:20):
way into being the artist that he felt he could be.
And one day I was with my mother's partner at
the time. We were in the car and like a
rolling stone came on and he said to me, there's
a line in there about your mother, And I said,
what It was just inconceivable Dylan to me, First of all,
(12:46):
I knew I was listening to music that had been
made forty years ago. So it was like he was
telling me, your mother knew Shakespeare, your mother not quite,
but your other knew King Arthur. It just didn't make sense.
But I also knew that he was wrong because that
song came out when my mother was thirteen years old.
(13:08):
But there were further conversations, and my mother at some
point acknowledged to me that she had known him and
that she had had a romantic relationship with him.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
What I'm so interested in is where this lived inside
of you? You know, this boy growing up wanting to
be an artist, wanting to be a writer, already knowing
(13:45):
he is in some way. And then when did it
occur to you? Because your mother's relationship with Dylan that
she told you about it happened many years before you
were born, so again, like a rolling stone and her
being in a lyric, it didn't really make sense. And
(14:07):
yet everywhere you go, whether it's the gas station or
your coaches in school or other different teachers saying to you,
you look like this guy. And no matter what you did,
whether you cut your hair short or you grew your
hair long, or it didn't stop. This was something that
continued to happen. Where did that live in you? And
(14:27):
did you question whether, in some crazy magical way, maybe
how could it be possible?
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Of course, it was one of those stories that made
and refused sense at the same time. And I knew
that something's missing, and I was also scared of knowing more.
I was scared of knowing something that would be a
(14:57):
completely different story of my life. And at a certain
point one night, my mother and I were driving to
a therapist I was seeing at that time, and it
was the first time that she brought Dylan up to
me without me asking, and I was a sulky teenager
(15:20):
in the car with my headphones on. And you know,
one feature of that landscape is that it's very dark
at night, so you drive the roads at night, and
you know, I think, like many parents, my mother used
the car ride and a captive audience to have difficult conversation.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
And she brought him up.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
And it was really the first time that, unprodded, she
spoke to me about their relationship and about meeting him.
And she talked to me about how she'd met him
in nineteen seven before. And at a certain point I said,
did you ever see him again? And she said yes,
(16:07):
and she told me that they had been in touch
again much later on, including the year before I was born.
So when my mother was twenty, she was living in
New York. She was an actress. She had dropped out
of college, and she was living this youthful artistic dream
(16:31):
in New York. And she was in a painting class
top by Norman Rabin, who's the youngest child of Sean Malacam,
the great Yiddish writer. And one day Dylan turned up
in the class and there was sort of collective reverence
for him. You know what you would imagine. Raven had
(16:52):
a practice where at the end of a day of painting,
everyone would go around and give feedback on the other
students work, And when it was Dylan's turn, people just
said things like, your painting speaks, like your lyrics, I mean,
just pure reverence.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
And my mother told.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Him that his painting was harsh and uninviting and pointed
out a few ways he might think differently about it,
and he took to this. And I think the reason
he was interested in her is because at that moment
of his life, he was going through deep personal and
(17:36):
artistic crisis. And he had come to that painting class
because Rabin was revered as a painter who could help
other artists find their way through difficulty. And Dylan wasn't
there because he wanted to be told that he was
a great painter. He was there so he could reach
more deeply into his own artwork and create meaningful work.
(18:00):
And so when this twenty year old student was talking
to him about what wasn't working, he was interested in her.
And one day after class he comes up to her
and he says, you know, why don't you host the
party for the class at your place. This really doesn't
make any sense to her. He can have a party
(18:23):
anywhere he wants. Obviously, he's Dylan. He has money, he
has celebrity. She lives in a modest, one bedroom walk
up in New Yorkville on the Upper East Side. It's
actually the apartment where i'm speaking to you from now.
I've lived here the last five years. And she does it.
(18:43):
She hosts this party and he comes, and he's Dylan.
He's standoffish, he doesn't really talk to people. And then
when the last guest is leaving in the early hours
of the morning, he walks the guest to the door,
presses the door shut with his cowboy boots, and he
(19:07):
turns and looks at my mother and says, well, that
was boring. And then of course it's the two of
them alone in her apartment. And they began seeing one
another and they had a very creatively intense relationship. And
at this period, he's struggling through his crises to write
(19:30):
the songs that will be blood on the tracks, and
she's struggling through her own artistic path as an actress,
and he would come over and write lyrics and play
songs for her, and they would talk about what worked
or didn't work, and he would help her with lines
of her play, and they would just listen to music
(19:51):
and read poetry aloud to each other. There was a
night that she lit him a pipe on stove and
read in Petrarch, which mirrors a moment Entangled Up in Blue,
a song that he wrote.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
Around that time.
Speaker 4 (20:15):
Here in the Car is the first and one of
the only times Sam's mother opens up even a little
about this piece of her history. But that deep, silent
tugging thing within him causes Sam to ask, did you
ever see him again?
Speaker 3 (20:32):
But?
Speaker 4 (20:32):
Why? How do we into it? What we cannot know?
As Sam says, it made and refused sense at the
same time. And as he writes in an essay in
Harper's Magazine, what more satisfying validation could there be for
a shy Jewish, vegetarian, bullied teenager than a secret lineage
from the greatest Bard of our age? And then a
(20:54):
little bit later he writes, there were worse people whose
secret child I might be. So now Sam has this
piece of information slash non information, he moves deeper into
existential questions for which he has no answers. He also
reads everything he can get his hands on about Dylan.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
She didn't want to talk more about it. Those parts
of her past, her youth, those were not parts of
her life that she spoke easily about. And it wasn't
only her relationship with him that she was uneasy about.
(21:39):
And part of the journey of our adult relationship was
her gradually becoming more vulnerable and letting me see the
experiences that had made her who she was before I
was born. And I think in some way that I
(22:00):
had to wait until I left home and had slightly
more of an adult advantage point to understand what she
wanted and needed to tell me.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
And so in.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
That period between when she spoke to me for the
first time about her having seen him the year before
I was born and the time that I left home,
it was not something that we talked about. And what
it became for me was a way of thinking about
(22:40):
my displacement in that part of the world and about
how I would leave that behind, that I would go
out into the world and I would become the writer
that I was meant to be.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
And I don't think that now.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
In retrospect twenty years later, I think that was a
misreading of my own life, and much of what I've
written about is coming into the realization that actually that
love of literature and that desire to be an artist
so much came from my mother, but I couldn't see
(23:13):
that at that point of my life, and what she
had told me about Dylan became the way that I
understood what it would mean for me to leave home,
to leave my hometown as he had left his, and
go out into the world and accumulate my experiences as
he'd accumulated his, and become the artist that I was
(23:37):
meant to be. And I remember thinking on some of
those nights in the quiet of the house, looking onto
the hills and the mountains, listening to his music, looking
at my reflection, and thinking to myself, if his blood
is in my veins, there's nothing that can stop me.
(23:58):
I can leave everything that has been painful in my
life behind this trail of men. These people, my peers
who have bullied me, the teachers who failed me on
a paper because they said I was plagiarizing when I
used a word I'd learned the day before on dictionary
dot com Word of the Day. Thanks for signing me
(24:20):
up for that, Mom, The way I thought about him was,
this is larger than everything that I have been through
and that has been painful in my life, and I'm
going to go out into the world and nothing can
hold me back from becoming the artist that I'm going
to become.
Speaker 4 (24:42):
Sam, Do you think that your mother had a sense
of that during those years? And you know that her
silence was in a way this very The only word
that's coming to mind is nobility in that silence that
she didn't you do some version of I am your mother,
(25:05):
and look what I've done, and I taught you all
these things, and I've raised you in this home, and
I read you all these stories. And did she know
that you were in your room listening to his music
and that this was kind of taking root in your
psychology at that time? Do you think she.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Knew I was listening to his music? And I think
that's very insightful what you said. My mother was someone who.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
Faced indignity with great dignity.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
And she was someone who knew how to rise above
the way that she was treated. And I think I'm
not a parent, but I think there is a certain
indignity in being a parent that you give so much
(25:56):
and then your child here, they are more concerned with
someone they don't know. And I think she also understood
that there's a time for every conversation. And what she
cared about deeply was that I would become the fullest
version of myself. And that didn't mean being a replica
(26:21):
of her. For her, I don't think it meant feeling
that I defined myself through her. She gave selflessly and
she didn't expect reverence in return, and the gift that she.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Was giving me in those years.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Was space to understand myself on my own terms. And
she was giving me the encouragement that I wasn't finding
at school or with peers. And I desperately tried to
keep my writing from her, but there were a few
times that I would not realize that something had been
(26:58):
printed out, and she would accidentally come across it in
the printer and let herself read it, and she would
say to me, keep writing, keep exploring yourself as an artist.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
You have a gift. There's something here.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
She was relentlessly encouraging and nurturing. And when I got
to be a little older and less embarrassed of myself
and ready to show her my work, she was my
favorite reader, or she was my reader.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
Of first drafts.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
We would talk endlessly about what I was writing about
the writers who mattered to her. She introduced me to
and that was a really important part of our relationship.
Speaker 4 (27:44):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
It's the summer after Sam's sophomore year at swarz Our
College when he sees that Bob Dylan is playing a
show in Bethel Woods, just a short drive from Goshen nearby.
(28:08):
Sam has spent the past few years internalizing his curiosity,
maybe even pushing it aside, but now he has an
opportunity to bring something unspoken a little closer to the surface.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
It was such a strange feeling that he was going
to be fifteen minutes away from us, and I remember thinking,
he's coming from New York. To drive from New York
to Bethel, you basically have to drive five minutes past
our house. And I remember just thinking, oh my gosh,
(28:47):
there were ways in which I had tried to push
the entire idea away from my life. Those were thrilling
years of my life. I had spent my first year
of college at Binghamton. I spent my second year as
a study abroad student at Oxford.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
It was the first time I ever left America.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
It was really the first time I was spending any
time outside of Upstate New York. The world that was
opening to me. I was reading everything I could. I
was meeting people who shared my values and interests and curiosities,
and who are from countries I'd never heard of. The
whole world was opening to me, and I was trying
(29:33):
not to think or dwell.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
On him.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
And yet here he was, in essentially our backyard. And
I asked my mother, can we go, really not thinking
that she would say yes, but thinking that it might
be a way of revisiting the subject. And she said
(29:59):
to me, we can go, but don't try to draw
his attention.
Speaker 4 (30:08):
So there they are, mother and son, standing together at
the concert, not far from the stage. And then it happens.
Dylan begins to sing Tangled Up in Blue, a song
he wrote during a brief hidden chapter in his life,
one that intersected with hers. As the lyrics fill the air,
(30:29):
that one about Sam's mom lighting a burner on the
stove and offering him a pipe. Sam and his mom
both begin to weep. There it is there she is
right in the middle of the song, and Sam right
in the middle of the story.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
And he starts singing this song, and my mom started laughing,
and then she started laughing more and more, and she
started crying. That he came to a line toward the
end of the song and it goes like this, all
the people we used to know, they're an allusion to me.
(31:11):
Now some are mathematicians, some are Carpenter's wives. Don't know
how it all got started. I don't know what they're
doing with their lives. And I think that was a
moment for me of thinking, perhaps for the first time,
not through my vantage point, but through hers, that this
(31:34):
was someone who had not been in her life for
a long time, and that when you don't know someone,
it's easy to have a fixed.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
Idea of who they are.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
But she had lived that last stanza, that they were
not in one another's lives anymore, and the reason she
was crying had nothing to do with him.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
She was crying for me.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
She was crying in affirmation and joy of the life
that we had had together and everything she had been
able to give me in this magical and idyllic childhood.
And for her, there wasn't any absence. And I saw
a glimmer of that truth that night, and it took
more time for me to come into that understanding of
(32:23):
the story for myself, but that was the first night
that I saw that truth out there on the horizon.
Speaker 4 (32:30):
And on the way home, you do ask her if
it was possible that Dylan is your father, and her
hands tightened on the steering wheel and she stops talking,
and you instantly regret that you had just asked that
(32:51):
question and broken the spell.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Because that question, in some ways took away from what
that moment could have been. And I think what it
was for her, and I think she wanted me to
feel that being her son was enough, and she never
(33:15):
would have said that to me. She never would have
expressed any anger about that, but I think, of course,
like any parent, it must have been what she felt,
and she knew why I was asking, and I wasn't
ready yet to let go of the question.
Speaker 4 (33:35):
Yeah, And a glimmer that you saw at the concert
that you came to understand better in time, was this enoughness,
like more than enoughness, this fullness of you being hers?
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Yeah, that has been my journey, but I wasn't there
at that point.
Speaker 4 (33:55):
So you embark on the highly impractical career becoming a novelist,
and I'm allowed to laugh.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Do you move to.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
Paris during this next period of time? Take me a
little bit through that you go far away?
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Well, being a novelist is so impractical. But one of
the great gifts that I've had along the way is
my provincial naivete. I didn't grow up around the world
of professional artists. I didn't know many people who tried
(34:36):
to make that path work. And what my mother always
encouraged in me was a feeling that I should pursue
what mattered most in my life. And you know, we
really didn't grow up around many people who had more
than enough money, and so the way that she taught
me to think about what I should do with my
(34:58):
life was very focused on the meaning that I would
draw from what mattered to me most, and.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
That was a great gift.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
It strikes me that it's the adult version of not
having the Internet as a child.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, I think that I
was insulated from many of the parts of our culture materialism, status,
consumerism that ultimately make it hard for people to follow
their ideals. And my mother was also someone who you know,
(35:44):
she'd had this period as an artist, an actress in
the city, and she'd really not had any money in
that period. And then she started working in market research,
and after a few years she just felt, this is
not meaningful, this is not what I want to do
with my life, and so she reinvented herself professionally as
(36:06):
a holistic health practitioner. And I think she always understood
that she could have had a more materially robust life,
but it wasn't what she valued. And she never even
talked about the paths not taken, that that wasn't part
of who she was. It wasn't a hard choice for her.
And so I had that deeply rooted in my sense
(36:29):
of what it meant to become an adult. And I
graduated from Swarthmore. I was writing a novel at that point.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
I knew that I needed.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
Time to write, and I was very lucky to get
an academic scholarship for graduate work at Oxford, so I
moved there. And so in that period of my life
I was mainly living abroad. I was in Oxford, I
was in London. I spent time in Berlin and in Jerusalem,
(37:01):
and I think in some ways that was a reaction
to having grown up in such isolated circumstances and having
a great curiosity for the world and wanting to live
in different places and experience different things. And it's interesting
because in those years of my life, I thought, this
(37:23):
is what makes me unique as a person. I didn't
grow up around people who spend time like that abroad.
I had never left the US until I was nineteen.
But of course now at this point in my life,
I'm thirty four. You know, almost everyone I know has
had similar parallel experiences in some ways. And what I
(37:46):
realize is what actually makes me unique is my childhood
in Ghoshen. This wonderful solitude and quiet, insulated from so
many of the difficult things in our world. Well, that
is the world that really made me who I am.
And the things that I love most in my life
are still the things I loved most as a child
(38:08):
in that landscape, reading and writing on the hill at
a wooden desk with my phone and computer very far away.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
During his post college years in Europe, Sam is writing.
He writes two novels that don't quite work. Something is missing.
He hasn't yet found the story lurking beneath all the
other stories, the one he has to tell before he
can tell any other. But then he's pulled back home.
(38:39):
His mother is very ill.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
So when I was twenty five, my mother was diagnosed
with ovarian cancer. I was just finishing up graduate school
at Oxford and it was very sudden. She if this diagnosis,
she needed to have a surgery, and I came back
(39:05):
home for that. So she went through the surgery. I
ended up spending three months of that year with her,
and then I went back to the UK because we
thought that the cancer was resolved. And then the next
year her cancer returned and I came home for what
(39:27):
ended up being the last month of her life. And
it's interesting because my mom and I in some ways
had different feelings about me coming home. She felt guilty.
She felt you were out in the world, becoming yourself,
(39:48):
go back.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
As soon as you can.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
And for me, there was something wonderful about having what
turned out to be these four months with her in
the last year and a half of her life. And
I mean we.
Speaker 3 (40:03):
Were spending time together. In those years.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
I would come home and spend two weeks with her.
We would visit my grandmother together, we talked all the time,
we texted, We were very present in our lives, but
there was a depth of conversation that we could have
in those four months toward the end of her.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
Life that for me.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Truly helped me see her more completely as a woman,
a person, as my mother. And it was in that
period that she began to talk to me really in
a detail that she had never permitted before, about her
youth in New York, about her relationship with Dylan, and
(40:57):
also about the other experience was in that time of
her life that had really shaped who she became.
Speaker 4 (41:07):
Yeah, I'm thinking, I guess in part about the intimacy
of being with someone who's ill, the vulnerability of being ill,
and the awareness of time and it not stretching out infinitely.
(41:29):
And I wonder was the open question of Dylan's paternity
something that was still central for you at that point,
or had it really had your mother's wish in a
way come true, which was that you were hers and
(41:51):
you were you and this was no longer something that
knowing was going to define you. Knowing for sure.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
The paradox is that I couldn't fully let go until
she talked to me more about.
Speaker 5 (42:11):
Him and It was in that period that I was
home with her, just the two of us in this
house that I grew up in.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
There are the crickets at night. There was a lot
of time with each other. We watched movies, we made dinner,
We talked about our lives, and though were the days
that we went to her chemotherapy sessions, we would drive
into the city. Anyone who's gone through that experience knows
(42:45):
sometimes you were sitting there for eight hours, and in
that time she started talking to me about that period
of her life, taking me back in time. And of
course what I felt was she's taking me to doing
(43:07):
She's going to talk to me in detail about their relationship.
She's leading me to this place I've always wanted us.
Speaker 3 (43:20):
To go.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
And the more my mother shared about her life, the
more I understood that he was far from the only
thing that she hadn't wanted to talk about. And she
talked to me about the experiences at that point of
her life that it made or who she was. She
(43:42):
talked to me about being an abusive marriage, her experience
of being raped as a young woman, her realization that
she was not going to find the love that she
needed on stage as an actress or in this relationship
with Dylan, and that the love that she wanted in
(44:03):
her life was something that she would have to create
for herself in a different way, in a different place,
and that what had been most meaningful to her in
her life was being a mother our relationship, taking these
wounded experiences that she had had in her twenties, and
(44:26):
finding ways of transforming that into love for other people,
helping other women who had been through these experiences heal.
Speaker 3 (44:35):
Their own pain.
Speaker 2 (44:36):
And the more that she had talked to me about this,
the more all the pieces of who she was and
what she had given me, and the world in which
she had raised me and created the love between us,
all of those pieces seemed to fall into place. And
when we came to that point, I think for the
(44:58):
first time in my life, I was able to understand
that everything I valued in who I am had come
from her, and that she was the person who had
made me, who had raised me, and even my desire
to be an artist, I mean, that was her right.
That was her reading to me when I was a child,
(45:21):
That was her finding my poetry in the printer even
when I didn't want her to see it and say Hey,
I know you're embarrassed since you're fifteen and your mom
saw your poetry, but keep writing. You have a talent.
You will become the writer that I believe you can be.
And I came to a moment of my life of realizing,
(45:41):
of course I revered Dylan as an artist, but I
don't know him.
Speaker 3 (45:45):
He didn't make me.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
What I cherish and who I am has come from her.
And that realization also coincided with the understanding that her
life was ending, and that the time that we had
with one another.
Speaker 3 (46:04):
Was ending.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
And I had to choose who I was going to
be in this world and how I was going to
define myself, and I wanted that to be about her
and understanding myself as her son. That's who I am.
Speaker 4 (46:25):
Sam's mother dies in twenty seventeen. Not long after her death,
during the quiet uncertainty of the pandemic, Sam receives a
call from his uncle. He's decided to leave the city,
which means the apartment her apartment will be empty and
available to Sam, the same apartment his mom lived in
(46:46):
as a young woman finding art and love in New
York City, Sam moves in, literally moves into the profound
space of her story where so much of her life
and in a way his own began, And in that
space something else begins to take shape. Grief, yes, but
(47:07):
also connection, as if her presence lingers, encouraging him to
find his true voice, as if the past is still
breathing there, waiting for him to arrive and tell more stories.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
And so when I moved into this apartment, it was
just at the time, it was three years after her death,
I was just starting to feel ready to write about
her life and her death. And I had the enormous
privilege of doing that in the two places that had
(47:45):
shaped me and her and in which I felt her spirit,
in the house where I grew up, in the apartment
where she lived. And it was just one of those
experiences of life that almost felt mystical, all of these
elements of life coming together.
Speaker 4 (48:02):
Did you write the novel in the apartment surrounded by
and supported by your mother's spirit and your mother's memory,
And how did writing the novel and shaping the story
impact your grief, because it seems like it very much
(48:23):
went hand in hand. You know, people talk about writing
as cathartic. I don't know if you found it that way.
I don't tend to myself, but it is certainly a
way of working through and coming to understand. So I'm
wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
You know, after my mother died, I really didn't know
what to do with my grief. I think that our
culture sometimes struggles to have honest conversations about grief, and
especially as a younger man, there aren't always places to
express or put those feelings. And I thought a lot
(48:58):
about what my mother did with her own pain and
difficult experiences, and she had a line that she talked about,
a quote that she use.
Speaker 3 (49:10):
She would say, we are here to take the.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Pieces of the universe we have been given, burnish them
with love, and return them in better condition than we
received them. And for her that really meant drawing on
her experiences of sexual and domestic violence to help other
women who had been through something similar. And for me,
I think I came to the realization that I had
(49:35):
to take this experience, all of my formative life experiences
that we've talked about, but especially my mother's death, and
these were the most difficult pieces of the universe that
I've been given, and I had to burnish them. With
love and return them in better shape than I received them.
And for me that nant writing a novel that would
tell this story and in which my mother's love would
(50:01):
be larger than her loss and the end of her life.
Speaker 4 (50:07):
That longing that we talked about earlier, that feeling of
needing to know, even though you came to the understanding
that your wholeness and your essential uness has come from
your mother and from the way that she raised you
(50:29):
and the way that you were shaped by being her son,
has that completely put to rest for you? Or I
could put it this way, is it a question for you?
Where does this end up residing in you now that
your mother's gone?
Speaker 2 (50:45):
For me, I'm my mother's son, and that's where the
story ends.
Speaker 4 (50:56):
Here's Sam reading one last passage Boy from the North Country.
Speaker 2 (51:05):
In the evenings, when the heat pipes just cough, I
sometimes think of the smoke and poetry that once lingered
between Dylan's lips and my mother's. But on nights when
I reach for creative guidance, I think not of Dylan,
but of my mother. Her belief in the integrity of
any story told on its own terms, whether it's the
(51:27):
tales of King Arthur she read to me as a child,
or the stories I'm trying to write today when I
look at words disordered on the page. I am never
sure how being Bob Dylan's child would help me come
closer to beauty or truth. But I know the infinite
gifts of being my mother's son.
Speaker 4 (51:57):
Family Secret is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacour is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
(52:21):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (52:32):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
My mother always had her secrets. I stood out of bed,
too anxious to sleep. The wooden floorboards creaked as I
crossed the darkness. I raised the window when the cool
night touched my tired eyes. Fireflies shone and died in
the dark. The silhouette of mountains glimmered on the horizon.
(00:27):
All families have subjects that are understood to be better
not discussed, and we were no different.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
My eyes shifted to the shelf.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Of neatly ordered CDs, settling on the face of the
man my mother and I had not discussed for more
than ten years. His mess of brown curls and angled
chin resembled mine. For years, I had done all I
could not to think of that man. It was easier
to refuse my thoughts about him when I was abroad
(00:56):
in the life I had made for myself spoken his
name since leaving home.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
That's Sam Sussman, novelist, essayist, author of the recently published
novel Boy from the North Country. Sam's is a story
of hints and haunts, secrets and longing. It's a story
about possibly being the son of one of the most
famous men of our time. Emphasis Possibly it's also a
(01:25):
story of a son's devotion and love for his remarkable mother.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, secrets that
are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
(01:48):
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Sam, tell me
about the landscape of your childhood in Goshen, Upstate, New York.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Well.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
I grew up with my mother in the Hudson Valley
near Goshen, in the woods. It was an extraordinary landscape.
It was peaceful and quiet. We had horses, dogs, rabbits,
cheap cats, and it was fairly isolated, but in a
(02:25):
wonderful way. Some of my earliest memories are of my
mother reading to me. There was a hammock in the
backyard and between two pine trees, and she would read
out there to me. And my childhood was one full
of art and literature and creative expression and nature and
(02:50):
also a lot of other people. My mother worked as
a holistic health practitioner, really before wellness culture was as
mainstream as it is now, and people came to our home.
Her office was in the back of our house, and
she had training in psychology and nutrition and kinesiology and meditation,
(03:12):
and she would sit with people and her work was
about helping other people live full lives emotionally, physically, spiritually,
And so the idea of healing was very present in
my childhood. But of course when I was young, I
had very little idea of what my mother herself might
(03:34):
be healing from.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
And she was a great lover of storytelling, right like
she both the stories the people in her practice told her,
and also that she would read aloud to you, and
reading stories together seems like it was woven into your childhood.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
I think it was a love language between us.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
She loved reading aloud.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
She had been an actress in her twenty and of
course I didn't know that as a child when she
was reading to me. But there was this great majesty
to the way that she would read a book, and
she read me Harry Potter and King Arthur and Robin Hood.
And it's striking now when I think back on my childhood.
This was the mid late nineties. I mean, all the
(04:20):
digital technologies that have come into our lives were there,
and yet we didn't have cable television. We had an
old TV on which we would watch a film, maybe
once a month, and my mom somehow sort of kept
the Internet from me until I was about twelve. So
my childhood was extraordinarily pastoral. And what she encouraged in
(04:46):
me was a love of the arts, creativity, nature, animals.
That was really the world that I grew up in.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
You became a vegetarian early on, didn't you.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
It was the first choice I ever made.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
My mother used to tell the story like this, We're
in a pizza Rhea and I was four and I
said to her, does pizza have dead animal in it?
And she said no, Why are you asking? And I said,
you know, I've heard that some foods have dead animal.
I really don't want to eat that. And something that
(05:22):
was extraordinary about my mother is she really cared about
cultivating and nourishing what she saw as being true within me.
And she respected that decision even though I was four.
And of course it added complexity to her life as
a single mother to be now have a vegetarian child
(05:43):
and a child.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
That ate meat, and she ate me. I didn't know
the word.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Vegetarian until people started saying to me, oh, we hear
you're a vegetarian. But that for me came from the
love of the animals I grew up with, and a
sort of feeling of terror that I might have, unbeknownst
to myself, been eating those animals.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
Sam goes off to school in a very rural part
of New York State. He's vegetarian, he's bookish, he's Jewish.
None of this helps him win any popularity contests in
this milieu.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
I was bullied horribly.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
I went to a Waldorf school until I was ten,
and so up until that point I was somewhat insulated
because there were other people who more shared my mother's values.
But I switched to the public school when I was ten,
and I just had no sense of how out of
(06:48):
place I was. There would have been no way for
me to know.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
And kids were, you know, I was a vegetarian.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
That was the strangest thing they'd ever heard. And they
would try to shove meet at me or rub it
on my face, and sometimes in harmless ways. Other kids
would ask, you know, what TV shows do you like,
and I'd say, oh, we don't have TV, and the
kid would just kind of walk away because they wouldn't
know it to say to me. And then, of course,
(07:19):
being Jewish, this is not a part of the world
to which in which many Jews choose to live, and
it's a politically and culturally very conservative place. And the
only Jewish community nearby is the Hasidic community in Kirosol,
for which there is really great deal of anti Semitism.
(07:42):
And I remember in school that coming through in all
sorts of ways. I mean, I remember a teacher saying
to me, why are the Jews ruining this town? Because
people were upset at how quickly curious Yell was expanding.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
So for all of these reasons.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
I mean, now I'm in my mid thirties and I
have the language to articulate what was happening. I was
the child of a progressive minded, counter cultural sixties flower child,
growing up in a deeply red part of America without
(08:22):
many people who shared my cultural background. But of course,
as a child, I just felt this was all about me,
and it was very, very painful to deal with.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
Well, it strikes me too that you know, as you
described your mother and flower child, and not particularly religious
in any way in terms of Judaism and this life
that you were living with her in Goshen, and the
only other sort of identifiable Jewish community there being people
(08:59):
who may share an ethnicity with you, but must have
also seemed kind of unrecognizable to you as.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Well, right, And you know that was the irony of
being culturally Jewish in that landscape, is that the hasidam
certainly wouldn't have recognized me as Jewish, and yet the
people I was going to school with or the adults
around me associated me with that world.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
My mother was religious in her own way.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
She drew on many of the spiritual dimensions of Judaism,
but I think, like many people of her generation, she
hadn't had the best experiences within organized Jewish community, and
so she had taken some of the ideas and the
identity and made her own Jewish identity out of that.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
For all his mother's love of stories, listening to them,
telling them, there's one she never speaks, Sam grows up
in the shadow of that silence, sensing its presence long
before he can name it. At thirteen, around his bar Mitzvah,
a teacher pulls him aside and says, you look like
this musician. Some people say he's a poet. You might
(10:23):
be interested in him. Sam searches the name Bob Dylan.
It's not just the resemblance that strikes him. It's the feeling, too,
the feeling of a quiet vibration, not proof, but possibility.
His mom has had a series of partners through the years,
semi father figures coming in and out of Sam's life.
(10:45):
His paternity was never something he directly questioned. But now
now there's this him, this famous musician, this poet, this
towering cultural figure, the Bard.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Well, the first thing that happened is when people told
me that I started listening to his music, and.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
For me, there was this isn't unique to me.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Tens of millions of people have felt this, but there
was a deep I felt a deep connection and thrill.
And I remember standing at the window of my childhood
bedroom with ear muff headphones on, listening to Blonde on
Blonde and looking out into the dark night and just
(11:39):
feeling this majestic sense that Dylan had been a kid
just like me, this Jewish kid in rural America who
had wanted to be a writer. And at this point,
I'm the kid in the back of the classroom scribbling
poetry in his marble composition notebook, and I'm a listening
(12:00):
to this music at night. I'm looking onto the hills
in the valley and our isolated part of the world.
And I'm thinking Dylan wasn't that much older than I was, when,
as the legend he told goes, he got on this
freight train and came to New York and wrote his
(12:20):
way into being the artist that he felt he could be.
And one day I was with my mother's partner at
the time. We were in the car and like a
rolling stone came on and he said to me, there's
a line in there about your mother, And I said,
what It was just inconceivable Dylan to me, First of all,
(12:46):
I knew I was listening to music that had been
made forty years ago. So it was like he was
telling me, your mother knew Shakespeare, your mother not quite,
but your other knew King Arthur. It just didn't make sense.
But I also knew that he was wrong because that
song came out when my mother was thirteen years old.
(13:08):
But there were further conversations, and my mother at some
point acknowledged to me that she had known him and
that she had had a romantic relationship with him.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
What I'm so interested in is where this lived inside
of you? You know, this boy growing up wanting to
be an artist, wanting to be a writer, already knowing
(13:45):
he is in some way. And then when did it
occur to you? Because your mother's relationship with Dylan that
she told you about it happened many years before you
were born, so again, like a rolling stone and her
being in a lyric, it didn't really make sense. And
(14:07):
yet everywhere you go, whether it's the gas station or
your coaches in school or other different teachers saying to you,
you look like this guy. And no matter what you did,
whether you cut your hair short or you grew your
hair long, or it didn't stop. This was something that
continued to happen. Where did that live in you? And
(14:27):
did you question whether, in some crazy magical way, maybe
how could it be possible?
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Of course, it was one of those stories that made
and refused sense at the same time. And I knew
that something's missing, and I was also scared of knowing more.
I was scared of knowing something that would be a
(14:57):
completely different story of my life. And at a certain
point one night, my mother and I were driving to
a therapist I was seeing at that time, and it
was the first time that she brought Dylan up to
me without me asking, and I was a sulky teenager
(15:20):
in the car with my headphones on. And you know,
one feature of that landscape is that it's very dark
at night, so you drive the roads at night, and
you know, I think, like many parents, my mother used
the car ride and a captive audience to have difficult conversation.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
And she brought him up.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
And it was really the first time that, unprodded, she
spoke to me about their relationship and about meeting him.
And she talked to me about how she'd met him
in nineteen seven before. And at a certain point I said,
did you ever see him again? And she said yes,
(16:07):
and she told me that they had been in touch
again much later on, including the year before I was born.
So when my mother was twenty, she was living in
New York. She was an actress. She had dropped out
of college, and she was living this youthful artistic dream
(16:31):
in New York. And she was in a painting class
top by Norman Rabin, who's the youngest child of Sean Malacam,
the great Yiddish writer. And one day Dylan turned up
in the class and there was sort of collective reverence
for him. You know what you would imagine. Raven had
(16:52):
a practice where at the end of a day of painting,
everyone would go around and give feedback on the other
students work, And when it was Dylan's turn, people just
said things like, your painting speaks, like your lyrics, I mean,
just pure reverence.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
And my mother told.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Him that his painting was harsh and uninviting and pointed
out a few ways he might think differently about it,
and he took to this. And I think the reason
he was interested in her is because at that moment
of his life, he was going through deep personal and
(17:36):
artistic crisis. And he had come to that painting class
because Rabin was revered as a painter who could help
other artists find their way through difficulty. And Dylan wasn't
there because he wanted to be told that he was
a great painter. He was there so he could reach
more deeply into his own artwork and create meaningful work.
(18:00):
And so when this twenty year old student was talking
to him about what wasn't working, he was interested in her.
And one day after class he comes up to her
and he says, you know, why don't you host the
party for the class at your place. This really doesn't
make any sense to her. He can have a party
(18:23):
anywhere he wants. Obviously, he's Dylan. He has money, he
has celebrity. She lives in a modest, one bedroom walk
up in New Yorkville on the Upper East Side. It's
actually the apartment where i'm speaking to you from now.
I've lived here the last five years. And she does it.
(18:43):
She hosts this party and he comes, and he's Dylan.
He's standoffish, he doesn't really talk to people. And then
when the last guest is leaving in the early hours
of the morning, he walks the guest to the door,
presses the door shut with his cowboy boots, and he
(19:07):
turns and looks at my mother and says, well, that
was boring. And then of course it's the two of
them alone in her apartment. And they began seeing one
another and they had a very creatively intense relationship. And
at this period, he's struggling through his crises to write
(19:30):
the songs that will be blood on the tracks, and
she's struggling through her own artistic path as an actress,
and he would come over and write lyrics and play
songs for her, and they would talk about what worked
or didn't work, and he would help her with lines
of her play, and they would just listen to music
(19:51):
and read poetry aloud to each other. There was a
night that she lit him a pipe on stove and
read in Petrarch, which mirrors a moment Entangled Up in Blue,
a song that he wrote.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
Around that time.
Speaker 4 (20:15):
Here in the Car is the first and one of
the only times Sam's mother opens up even a little
about this piece of her history. But that deep, silent
tugging thing within him causes Sam to ask, did you
ever see him again?
Speaker 3 (20:32):
But?
Speaker 4 (20:32):
Why? How do we into it? What we cannot know?
As Sam says, it made and refused sense at the
same time. And as he writes in an essay in
Harper's Magazine, what more satisfying validation could there be for
a shy Jewish, vegetarian, bullied teenager than a secret lineage
from the greatest Bard of our age? And then a
(20:54):
little bit later he writes, there were worse people whose
secret child I might be. So now Sam has this
piece of information slash non information, he moves deeper into
existential questions for which he has no answers. He also
reads everything he can get his hands on about Dylan.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
She didn't want to talk more about it. Those parts
of her past, her youth, those were not parts of
her life that she spoke easily about. And it wasn't
only her relationship with him that she was uneasy about.
(21:39):
And part of the journey of our adult relationship was
her gradually becoming more vulnerable and letting me see the
experiences that had made her who she was before I
was born. And I think in some way that I
(22:00):
had to wait until I left home and had slightly
more of an adult advantage point to understand what she
wanted and needed to tell me.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
And so in.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
That period between when she spoke to me for the
first time about her having seen him the year before
I was born and the time that I left home,
it was not something that we talked about. And what
it became for me was a way of thinking about
(22:40):
my displacement in that part of the world and about
how I would leave that behind, that I would go
out into the world and I would become the writer
that I was meant to be.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
And I don't think that now.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
In retrospect twenty years later, I think that was a
misreading of my own life, and much of what I've
written about is coming into the realization that actually that
love of literature and that desire to be an artist
so much came from my mother, but I couldn't see
(23:13):
that at that point of my life, and what she
had told me about Dylan became the way that I
understood what it would mean for me to leave home,
to leave my hometown as he had left his, and
go out into the world and accumulate my experiences as
he'd accumulated his, and become the artist that I was
(23:37):
meant to be. And I remember thinking on some of
those nights in the quiet of the house, looking onto
the hills and the mountains, listening to his music, looking
at my reflection, and thinking to myself, if his blood
is in my veins, there's nothing that can stop me.
(23:58):
I can leave everything that has been painful in my
life behind this trail of men. These people, my peers
who have bullied me, the teachers who failed me on
a paper because they said I was plagiarizing when I
used a word I'd learned the day before on dictionary
dot com Word of the Day. Thanks for signing me
(24:20):
up for that, Mom, The way I thought about him was,
this is larger than everything that I have been through
and that has been painful in my life, and I'm
going to go out into the world and nothing can
hold me back from becoming the artist that I'm going
to become.
Speaker 4 (24:42):
Sam, Do you think that your mother had a sense
of that during those years? And you know that her
silence was in a way this very The only word
that's coming to mind is nobility in that silence that
she didn't you do some version of I am your mother,
(25:05):
and look what I've done, and I taught you all
these things, and I've raised you in this home, and
I read you all these stories. And did she know
that you were in your room listening to his music
and that this was kind of taking root in your
psychology at that time? Do you think she.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Knew I was listening to his music? And I think
that's very insightful what you said. My mother was someone who.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
Faced indignity with great dignity.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
And she was someone who knew how to rise above
the way that she was treated. And I think I'm
not a parent, but I think there is a certain
indignity in being a parent that you give so much
(25:56):
and then your child here, they are more concerned with
someone they don't know. And I think she also understood
that there's a time for every conversation. And what she
cared about deeply was that I would become the fullest
version of myself. And that didn't mean being a replica
(26:21):
of her. For her, I don't think it meant feeling
that I defined myself through her. She gave selflessly and
she didn't expect reverence in return, and the gift that she.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Was giving me in those years.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Was space to understand myself on my own terms. And
she was giving me the encouragement that I wasn't finding
at school or with peers. And I desperately tried to
keep my writing from her, but there were a few
times that I would not realize that something had been
(26:58):
printed out, and she would accidentally come across it in
the printer and let herself read it, and she would
say to me, keep writing, keep exploring yourself as an artist.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
You have a gift. There's something here.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
She was relentlessly encouraging and nurturing. And when I got
to be a little older and less embarrassed of myself
and ready to show her my work, she was my
favorite reader, or she was my reader.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
Of first drafts.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
We would talk endlessly about what I was writing about
the writers who mattered to her. She introduced me to
and that was a really important part of our relationship.
Speaker 4 (27:44):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
It's the summer after Sam's sophomore year at swarz Our
College when he sees that Bob Dylan is playing a
show in Bethel Woods, just a short drive from Goshen nearby.
(28:08):
Sam has spent the past few years internalizing his curiosity,
maybe even pushing it aside, but now he has an
opportunity to bring something unspoken a little closer to the surface.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
It was such a strange feeling that he was going
to be fifteen minutes away from us, and I remember thinking,
he's coming from New York. To drive from New York
to Bethel, you basically have to drive five minutes past
our house. And I remember just thinking, oh my gosh,
(28:47):
there were ways in which I had tried to push
the entire idea away from my life. Those were thrilling
years of my life. I had spent my first year
of college at Binghamton. I spent my second year as
a study abroad student at Oxford.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
It was the first time I ever left America.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
It was really the first time I was spending any
time outside of Upstate New York. The world that was
opening to me. I was reading everything I could. I
was meeting people who shared my values and interests and curiosities,
and who are from countries I'd never heard of. The
whole world was opening to me, and I was trying
(29:33):
not to think or dwell.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
On him.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
And yet here he was, in essentially our backyard. And
I asked my mother, can we go, really not thinking
that she would say yes, but thinking that it might
be a way of revisiting the subject. And she said
(29:59):
to me, we can go, but don't try to draw
his attention.
Speaker 4 (30:08):
So there they are, mother and son, standing together at
the concert, not far from the stage. And then it happens.
Dylan begins to sing Tangled Up in Blue, a song
he wrote during a brief hidden chapter in his life,
one that intersected with hers. As the lyrics fill the air,
(30:29):
that one about Sam's mom lighting a burner on the
stove and offering him a pipe. Sam and his mom
both begin to weep. There it is there she is
right in the middle of the song, and Sam right
in the middle of the story.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
And he starts singing this song, and my mom started laughing,
and then she started laughing more and more, and she
started crying. That he came to a line toward the
end of the song and it goes like this, all
the people we used to know, they're an allusion to me.
(31:11):
Now some are mathematicians, some are Carpenter's wives. Don't know
how it all got started. I don't know what they're
doing with their lives. And I think that was a
moment for me of thinking, perhaps for the first time,
not through my vantage point, but through hers, that this
(31:34):
was someone who had not been in her life for
a long time, and that when you don't know someone,
it's easy to have a fixed.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
Idea of who they are.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
But she had lived that last stanza, that they were
not in one another's lives anymore, and the reason she
was crying had nothing to do with him.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
She was crying for me.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
She was crying in affirmation and joy of the life
that we had had together and everything she had been
able to give me in this magical and idyllic childhood.
And for her, there wasn't any absence. And I saw
a glimmer of that truth that night, and it took
more time for me to come into that understanding of
(32:23):
the story for myself, but that was the first night
that I saw that truth out there on the horizon.
Speaker 4 (32:30):
And on the way home, you do ask her if
it was possible that Dylan is your father, and her
hands tightened on the steering wheel and she stops talking,
and you instantly regret that you had just asked that
(32:51):
question and broken the spell.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Because that question, in some ways took away from what
that moment could have been. And I think what it
was for her, and I think she wanted me to
feel that being her son was enough, and she never
(33:15):
would have said that to me. She never would have
expressed any anger about that, but I think, of course,
like any parent, it must have been what she felt,
and she knew why I was asking, and I wasn't
ready yet to let go of the question.
Speaker 4 (33:35):
Yeah, And a glimmer that you saw at the concert
that you came to understand better in time, was this enoughness,
like more than enoughness, this fullness of you being hers?
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Yeah, that has been my journey, but I wasn't there
at that point.
Speaker 4 (33:55):
So you embark on the highly impractical career becoming a novelist,
and I'm allowed to laugh.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Do you move to.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
Paris during this next period of time? Take me a
little bit through that you go far away?
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Well, being a novelist is so impractical. But one of
the great gifts that I've had along the way is
my provincial naivete. I didn't grow up around the world
of professional artists. I didn't know many people who tried
(34:36):
to make that path work. And what my mother always
encouraged in me was a feeling that I should pursue
what mattered most in my life. And you know, we
really didn't grow up around many people who had more
than enough money, and so the way that she taught
me to think about what I should do with my
(34:58):
life was very focused on the meaning that I would
draw from what mattered to me most, and.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
That was a great gift.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
It strikes me that it's the adult version of not
having the Internet as a child.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, I think that I
was insulated from many of the parts of our culture materialism, status,
consumerism that ultimately make it hard for people to follow
their ideals. And my mother was also someone who you know,
(35:44):
she'd had this period as an artist, an actress in
the city, and she'd really not had any money in
that period. And then she started working in market research,
and after a few years she just felt, this is
not meaningful, this is not what I want to do
with my life, and so she reinvented herself professionally as
(36:06):
a holistic health practitioner. And I think she always understood
that she could have had a more materially robust life,
but it wasn't what she valued. And she never even
talked about the paths not taken, that that wasn't part
of who she was. It wasn't a hard choice for her.
And so I had that deeply rooted in my sense
(36:29):
of what it meant to become an adult. And I
graduated from Swarthmore. I was writing a novel at that point.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
I knew that I needed.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
Time to write, and I was very lucky to get
an academic scholarship for graduate work at Oxford, so I
moved there. And so in that period of my life
I was mainly living abroad. I was in Oxford, I
was in London. I spent time in Berlin and in Jerusalem,
(37:01):
and I think in some ways that was a reaction
to having grown up in such isolated circumstances and having
a great curiosity for the world and wanting to live
in different places and experience different things. And it's interesting
because in those years of my life, I thought, this
(37:23):
is what makes me unique as a person. I didn't
grow up around people who spend time like that abroad.
I had never left the US until I was nineteen.
But of course now at this point in my life,
I'm thirty four. You know, almost everyone I know has
had similar parallel experiences in some ways. And what I
(37:46):
realize is what actually makes me unique is my childhood
in Ghoshen. This wonderful solitude and quiet, insulated from so
many of the difficult things in our world. Well, that
is the world that really made me who I am.
And the things that I love most in my life
are still the things I loved most as a child
(38:08):
in that landscape, reading and writing on the hill at
a wooden desk with my phone and computer very far away.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
During his post college years in Europe, Sam is writing.
He writes two novels that don't quite work. Something is missing.
He hasn't yet found the story lurking beneath all the
other stories, the one he has to tell before he
can tell any other. But then he's pulled back home.
(38:39):
His mother is very ill.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
So when I was twenty five, my mother was diagnosed
with ovarian cancer. I was just finishing up graduate school
at Oxford and it was very sudden. She if this diagnosis,
she needed to have a surgery, and I came back
(39:05):
home for that. So she went through the surgery. I
ended up spending three months of that year with her,
and then I went back to the UK because we
thought that the cancer was resolved. And then the next
year her cancer returned and I came home for what
(39:27):
ended up being the last month of her life. And
it's interesting because my mom and I in some ways
had different feelings about me coming home. She felt guilty.
She felt you were out in the world, becoming yourself,
(39:48):
go back.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
As soon as you can.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
And for me, there was something wonderful about having what
turned out to be these four months with her in
the last year and a half of her life. And
I mean we.
Speaker 3 (40:03):
Were spending time together. In those years.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
I would come home and spend two weeks with her.
We would visit my grandmother together, we talked all the time,
we texted, We were very present in our lives, but
there was a depth of conversation that we could have
in those four months toward the end of her.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
Life that for me.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Truly helped me see her more completely as a woman,
a person, as my mother. And it was in that
period that she began to talk to me really in
a detail that she had never permitted before, about her
youth in New York, about her relationship with Dylan, and
(40:57):
also about the other experience was in that time of
her life that had really shaped who she became.
Speaker 4 (41:07):
Yeah, I'm thinking, I guess in part about the intimacy
of being with someone who's ill, the vulnerability of being ill,
and the awareness of time and it not stretching out infinitely.
(41:29):
And I wonder was the open question of Dylan's paternity
something that was still central for you at that point,
or had it really had your mother's wish in a
way come true, which was that you were hers and
(41:51):
you were you and this was no longer something that
knowing was going to define you. Knowing for sure.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
The paradox is that I couldn't fully let go until
she talked to me more about.
Speaker 5 (42:11):
Him and It was in that period that I was
home with her, just the two of us in this
house that I grew up in.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
There are the crickets at night. There was a lot
of time with each other. We watched movies, we made dinner,
We talked about our lives, and though were the days
that we went to her chemotherapy sessions, we would drive
into the city. Anyone who's gone through that experience knows
(42:45):
sometimes you were sitting there for eight hours, and in
that time she started talking to me about that period
of her life, taking me back in time. And of
course what I felt was she's taking me to doing
(43:07):
She's going to talk to me in detail about their relationship.
She's leading me to this place I've always wanted us.
Speaker 3 (43:20):
To go.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
And the more my mother shared about her life, the
more I understood that he was far from the only
thing that she hadn't wanted to talk about. And she
talked to me about the experiences at that point of
her life that it made or who she was. She
(43:42):
talked to me about being an abusive marriage, her experience
of being raped as a young woman, her realization that
she was not going to find the love that she
needed on stage as an actress or in this relationship
with Dylan, and that the love that she wanted in
(44:03):
her life was something that she would have to create
for herself in a different way, in a different place,
and that what had been most meaningful to her in
her life was being a mother our relationship, taking these
wounded experiences that she had had in her twenties, and
(44:26):
finding ways of transforming that into love for other people,
helping other women who had been through these experiences heal.
Speaker 3 (44:35):
Their own pain.
Speaker 2 (44:36):
And the more that she had talked to me about this,
the more all the pieces of who she was and
what she had given me, and the world in which
she had raised me and created the love between us,
all of those pieces seemed to fall into place. And
when we came to that point, I think for the
(44:58):
first time in my life, I was able to understand
that everything I valued in who I am had come
from her, and that she was the person who had
made me, who had raised me, and even my desire
to be an artist, I mean, that was her right.
That was her reading to me when I was a child,
(45:21):
That was her finding my poetry in the printer even
when I didn't want her to see it and say Hey,
I know you're embarrassed since you're fifteen and your mom
saw your poetry, but keep writing. You have a talent.
You will become the writer that I believe you can be.
And I came to a moment of my life of realizing,
(45:41):
of course I revered Dylan as an artist, but I
don't know him.
Speaker 3 (45:45):
He didn't make me.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
What I cherish and who I am has come from her.
And that realization also coincided with the understanding that her
life was ending, and that the time that we had
with one another.
Speaker 3 (46:04):
Was ending.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
And I had to choose who I was going to
be in this world and how I was going to
define myself, and I wanted that to be about her
and understanding myself as her son. That's who I am.
Speaker 4 (46:25):
Sam's mother dies in twenty seventeen. Not long after her death,
during the quiet uncertainty of the pandemic, Sam receives a
call from his uncle. He's decided to leave the city,
which means the apartment her apartment will be empty and
available to Sam, the same apartment his mom lived in
(46:46):
as a young woman finding art and love in New
York City, Sam moves in, literally moves into the profound
space of her story where so much of her life
and in a way his own began, And in that
space something else begins to take shape. Grief, yes, but
(47:07):
also connection, as if her presence lingers, encouraging him to
find his true voice, as if the past is still
breathing there, waiting for him to arrive and tell more stories.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
And so when I moved into this apartment, it was
just at the time, it was three years after her death,
I was just starting to feel ready to write about
her life and her death. And I had the enormous
privilege of doing that in the two places that had
(47:45):
shaped me and her and in which I felt her spirit,
in the house where I grew up, in the apartment
where she lived. And it was just one of those
experiences of life that almost felt mystical, all of these
elements of life coming together.
Speaker 4 (48:02):
Did you write the novel in the apartment surrounded by
and supported by your mother's spirit and your mother's memory,
And how did writing the novel and shaping the story
impact your grief, because it seems like it very much
(48:23):
went hand in hand. You know, people talk about writing
as cathartic. I don't know if you found it that way.
I don't tend to myself, but it is certainly a
way of working through and coming to understand. So I'm
wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
You know, after my mother died, I really didn't know
what to do with my grief. I think that our
culture sometimes struggles to have honest conversations about grief, and
especially as a younger man, there aren't always places to
express or put those feelings. And I thought a lot
(48:58):
about what my mother did with her own pain and
difficult experiences, and she had a line that she talked about,
a quote that she use.
Speaker 3 (49:10):
She would say, we are here to take the.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Pieces of the universe we have been given, burnish them
with love, and return them in better condition than we
received them. And for her that really meant drawing on
her experiences of sexual and domestic violence to help other
women who had been through something similar. And for me,
I think I came to the realization that I had
(49:35):
to take this experience, all of my formative life experiences
that we've talked about, but especially my mother's death, and
these were the most difficult pieces of the universe that
I've been given, and I had to burnish them. With
love and return them in better shape than I received them.
And for me that nant writing a novel that would
tell this story and in which my mother's love would
(50:01):
be larger than her loss and the end of her life.
Speaker 4 (50:07):
That longing that we talked about earlier, that feeling of
needing to know, even though you came to the understanding
that your wholeness and your essential uness has come from
your mother and from the way that she raised you
(50:29):
and the way that you were shaped by being her son,
has that completely put to rest for you? Or I
could put it this way, is it a question for you?
Where does this end up residing in you now that
your mother's gone?
Speaker 2 (50:45):
For me, I'm my mother's son, and that's where the
story ends.
Speaker 4 (50:56):
Here's Sam reading one last passage Boy from the North Country.
Speaker 2 (51:05):
In the evenings, when the heat pipes just cough, I
sometimes think of the smoke and poetry that once lingered
between Dylan's lips and my mother's. But on nights when
I reach for creative guidance, I think not of Dylan,
but of my mother. Her belief in the integrity of
any story told on its own terms, whether it's the
(51:27):
tales of King Arthur she read to me as a child,
or the stories I'm trying to write today when I
look at words disordered on the page. I am never
sure how being Bob Dylan's child would help me come
closer to beauty or truth. But I know the infinite
gifts of being my mother's son.
Speaker 4 (51:57):
Family Secret is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacour is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
(52:21):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (52:32):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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