A Freewheelin' Time

A Freewheelin' Time is a moving account of the fertile years just before the circus of the 1960s was in full swing with Bob Dylan as the anointed ringmaster. Suze Rotolo chronicles the backstory of Greenwich Village in the early days, when Dylan was honing his skills and she was in the ring with him. Set during the time when Dylan was writing the soundtrack to the cultural revolution of the 1960s, this is a wonderfully romantic story of their sweet but sometimes wrenching love affair and its eventual collapse under the pressure of Dylan's growing fame. A shy girl from Queens, Suze was the politically active daughter of Italian working-class Communists. Her story is filled with vivid memories of those turbulent years of dramatic change and poignantly rising expectations--when art, culture, and politics all seemed to be conspiring to bring our country a better, freer, richer, and more equitable life. And like Joyce Johnson's classic Minor Characters, A Freewheelin' Time forthrightly describes the sometimes frustrating experience of being a woman in a male-dominated artistic milieu before women's liberation changed the rules for the better.

About the Author :
Suze Rotolo (aka Susan) is an artist who lives in New York City with her family.

Review :
Face it: The art -- or is it more of a science? -- of dissecting Bob Dylan is a man's game. Most of the Dylan scholars (both the smart and the lame ones), the rock critics who have collectively spent several lifetimes wrestling with his lyrics, the civilian gasbags who hold forth at dinner parties whenever his name is even mentioned, are men. I used to have an officemate who, whenever he wanted to take a break from doing actual work (which was shockingly often), would march into my office singing some random Dylan lyric and challenge me to name which song it came from. I know women who love Dylan's music as much as anyone else does, but I've never met one who felt the need to be a walking, talking sack of trivia. So whether she knows it or not -- and I suspect she does -- Suze Rotolo has taken something of a risk in writing a memoir of the time she spent in the early '60s as the girlfriend of the Great Man. There are going to be people out there who think she's just cashing in on her role as a handmaiden to genius. But "A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties" is only partly about Dylan. Rotolo has written a perceptive, entertaining and often touching book about a remarkable era in recent American cultural history, about a way of living, of making art, that couldn't have happened at any other time or in any other place. This is about as far from a juicy tell-all as a memoir can get: Rotolo does share some private details of the story of her romance with Dylan -- the two met in 1961, when Rotolo was 17 and Dylan was 20, and were a couple for some four years -- but her approach is so sensitive, discreet and affectionate that she never comes off as opportunistic. This is an honest book about a great love affair, set against the folk music revival of the early 1960s, but its sense of time and place is so vivid that it's also another kind of love story: one about a very special pocket of New York, in the days when impoverished artists, a Advance Praise for "A Freewheelin' Time": "Suze Rotolo and I must have crossed each others' paths countless times on those downtown New York streets during the post-Beat years when the area was a Mecca for the young and the quirky and the gifted. This was a magic era. Now the last of its funky monuments are being leveled by condo-ization, but its spirit persists strongly in Suze Rotolo. What a wonderful kid she must have been--brave, openhearted, keenly observant and preternaturally wise, able to rise to the challenge of loving a genius like Bob Dylan and knowing when to let go. I'm glad I finally got to meet her in these pages." --Joyce Johnson, author of "Minor Characters ""Suze Rotolo digs hard and deep. Then she strolls, frets, and paints a gorgeous picture of a singular place and a time that was simpler but all tangled up. Best of all, she's a natural writer who puts the beguiling voice, skeptical brow, shining eyes, and conductor's hands I know right before you on the printed page. What's her secret?" --Sean Wilentz "A welcome, page-turning perspective conspicuously absent from the plethora of books on Dylan and the folk era of the 1960s: that of a woman witnessing it all from its cultural and political epicenter." --Todd Haynes, screenwriter and director of "I'm Not There" "There have been a lot of books written about Greenwich Village in the sixties, and I've probably read all of them. What makes Suze's story so special is that she grew up in this neighborhood and she still lives here. She knows these crooked streets intimately, and they know her." --Steve Earle