More people than usual probably got their CDs of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan off the shelves last night. A few maybe dug out their surviving vinyl copies too. For the death of Suze Rotolo, the girlfriend in the green coat on Dylan's arm on the album cover, is one of those shared generational moments. The Freewheelin' was Dylan's breakthrough. Millions of today's bus pass generation got to know Blowin' in the Wind and Don't Think Twice It's All Right while gazing at Don Hunstein's iconic picture of Rotolo and Dylan walking along a snow-covered Jones Street in Greenwich Village in February 1963. The album fully deserves its fame. Yet Rotolo deserves honour in her own right too, and not just, as she put it, as "a string on his guitar". In her hugely readable memoir, A Freewheelin' Time – with another of Hunstein's 1963 pictures on its cover – Rotolo gave a candid and credible account of what it was like to be around Dylan in those years and of what it was like to grow up on the left in 1960s New York – where her parents were idealistic communists. Rotolo brought a lot of leftwing politics to her years with Dylan, and they left their mark. But it was her feminism, which Dylan – "a lying shit of a guy with women" – did not share, that caused her to walk away from the relationship. The book, not the album cover, is Rotolo's true epitaph, the book which ends with her resonant statement: "The new generation causing all the fuss was not driven by the market: we had something to say, not something to sell."