Suze Rotolo (1943–2011)

A charming but uneven book. Part touching recollection, well-told, part reflection of life close to genius, made all the more moving because it is not a reckoning. Other parts of the book contain a touch of nostalgia for a time and place -- this is where it gets a bit narcissistic. Then there are sections that read as catalogs of met him, went there, without analysis or narrative, although many of these vignettes are nonetheless interesting.
I'm glad the author waited as long as she did to publish this (but not any longer, she died soon after it came out). If she had written it sooner, it would have seemed as if she were trying to cash in on her proximity to Dylan. In the decades of her silence, she gained the respect of many for guarding both her own privacy but his as well. Yet hers was a story worth telling. And the wait paid off in that her maturity and taste show through in her crafted prose. A good read.… (más)

It was one of the iconic images of the early 1960s: a young Bob Dylan walking down a snow-covered street in Manhattan, looking down, while a young woman clutching his left arm walks with him, facing the camera, a knowing smile on her face. The photo appears on the cover of Dylan's second, breakthrough album, and the woman in the picture is Suze Rotolo. Rotolo was a 17 year old girl when she met Dylan, who was three years older, and the time she spent with him was the time he made the transition from unknown folk singer to superstar. This could have been a book only about Dylan, and a lot of it is, but it's also Rotolo's own story, a story of love and frustration and betrayal, and of a young woman's coming of age in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. Though the chronology can be a bit confusing, the story is actually quite well told. Sadly, Rotolo passed away just two years after writing the book.… (más)

Another bestseller I am years late coming to, but Suze Rotolo's fine coming-of-age-in-the-60s memoir, A FREEWHEELIN' TIME, is still relevant, still a fine and compelling read. And not just because she was Bob Dylan's first girlfriend and appeared on the cover of that album with him. Nope. She's got a voice of her own, and this is not just an "I knew him when" kind of book. It's a true memoir, and she tells her own story the best she can remember it, fifty years later. True there is plenty of name-dropping here and there throughout the narrative, but she still manages to tell her own story, and does it with charm and honesty. The one revelation that did shock me - was I the last one to know? - was that she became pregnant during her Dylan years, and had an abortion, which was illegal and could be dangerous at the time. She suffered a long period of depression after that too.

Indeed, in looking back at those pre-feminist years, Rotolo recognizes now how innocent and 'unfree' she was then, as a young woman, noting -

"In my youthful confusion I was still struggling for permission to be. All that was offered to a musician's girlfriend in the early 1960s was a role as her boyfriend's 'chick,' a string on his guitar."

She remembers too going with Dylan to see PULL MY DAISY, an experimental new film from the time which featured Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso and other writers and artists.

"I identified with the men in the film, not the women, who seemed insignificant in the midst of these wild, funny and offbeat guys. I wanted to be them, but didn't know how. I envied them their freedom. Many years later when I saw the film again, I was shaken by that memory. This time I was cognizant of the women and their role in the story. They were inconsequential and extraneous in the way a prop is part of the set."

Rotolo went on to become an artist in her own right. She carries no grudges or hard feelings from those years, saying -

"... I see no reason to take anyone to task for the foibles of the young. We were a passionate lot, dedicated to whatever it was we were doing."

Suze Rotolo is a fine writer, who knows by now just who she is. She's the same age as I am, so a lot of her memories are mine too, only different, of course. It might have helped too that I was listening to some early Dylan as I read. I enjoyed the heck outa her story. Thanks, Suze. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (más)