Suzanne Takes You Down to Her Place Near the River

You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her
And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China

— Leonard Cohen, “Suzanne”                             

Suzanne Verdal told me she could make me famous. “Be ruthless, be ambitious. For both of us,” she urged, her onyx-colored eyes not just big, but almost manic in their largeness. If I did her tale justice, Suzanne said, I could put us both on the map. And that’s how I found myself sitting in a diner in a forgotten mountain town along the California/Oregon border, trying to convince Suzanne to let me record our conversation. She eyed my phone with suspicion, then waved her hands over me like some kind of enigmatic clairvoyant and promised that if I stick with her, only great things could come my way. Mesmerized, I thought, Where do I sign up?

When my father played Leonard Cohen’s music for me as a child, Suzanne — the inspiration behind Cohen’s indelible song of that name — was who I wanted to be. She was my first understanding of what it meant to be a “muse,” and she imbued the role with a rare kind of power. In the song, she’s a force to be reckoned with, leading an entranced Cohen to a place of deeper understanding by illuminating the grace in the wreckage that’s all around them. Cohen depicts her as a woman whose beauty, mystery, and joie de vivre drive him to some of his greatest artistic heights. That ability struck me as enviable and romantic; I wanted to hold that kind of sway. Long before I knew what Suzanne looked like, I identified her with the woman depicted in the illustration on the back of the 1967 record Songs of Leonard Cohen. Dark haired and nude, she was emerging from violent flames and wearing chains around her wrists. It was a stunning, startling image that fused beauty with captivity. At the time, I didn’t question that equivalence: I dreamed of being in the spotlight, and I used to fantasize about what it would be like to pose for the image.

As I got older, there was a shift in the way I understood Suzanne: I longed to be the artist instead of the inspiration, and wondered if she was actually a prisoner of someone else’s success. It was a friend’s father who first told me about the real Suzanne. A photographer, he’d met Suzanne when he took pictures of her dancing at a drum circle in Venice Beach in the early 2000s. He described how her life had a taken a bleak turn, how her dream of being a famous dancer had never materialized. Before that, I had no idea Suzanne even had artistic aspirations; I hadn’t really thought about her life outside the song. But Suzanne’s story, as my friend’s father told it, felt depressingly familiar. Despite the powerful