Great novelists do not always make great writers of memoirs, but André Aciman is a brilliant master of both. Call Me by Your Name may be his best-known novel, but his five subsequent novels have only fortified his reputation. (Eight White Nights, which takes place on New York’s Upper West Side, is a particular favorite.) Out of Egypt was his first memoir, and, as Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times, the book has scenes “as strange and marvelous as something in García Márquez, as comical and surprising as something in Chekhov.”
Aciman has now followed that 1994 best-seller with Roman Year, his tale of living in Italy as a teenager after leaving Egypt and before moving to New York. It is Aciman at his most moving and poetic, capturing the ache and yearning of what it is like to be on the cusp of adulthood.
JIM KELLY: Your new book is such a lovely evocation not just of being a teenager in a strange new land but of Rome itself, especially the poor, working-class neighborhood where you, your mother, and your younger brother lived for a year before immigrating to the United States. Unlike your mother and brother, you did not appreciate the city for quite a while. Was there one moment that changed your feelings?
ANDRÉ ACIMAN: There is no clear-cut moment when that happened. I was allowed to buy a book at around 75 cents every week. Penguin paperbacks were not expensive at the time, but they allowed me to roam the city from bookshop to bookshop in view of finding my weekly read. It was in roaming the city that I discovered my favorite neighborhoods. When I finally borrowed a bicycle from a local grocer, this gave me access to the city I was already learning to love.
J.K.: You were refugees from Egypt, and let’s just say the uncle who greeted you upon disembarking in Naples had a temper. In fact, his tirade against you as he tried to find the right route to your new apartment in Rome remains the worst hour of your life. He visited your family often, and your descriptions of him are quite vivid and often hilarious. You despised him and vowed at the time to spit on his grave. Do you have any more sympathy for him now than you did then?
A.A.: I never like to say I hate someone. There was no doubt that Great-Uncle Claude was a very difficult man, and of course my depiction of him is from the point of view of a wounded, uprooted teenager, but my views of him changed considerably over time. For starters, I grew to envy his great gifts as a resourceful man—he always had a solution to everything. And second, from the moment I saw him cry on remembering his mother’s cooked artichokes, I realized that he was as vulnerable as anyone else. He was dour, but he had helped us a great deal, and I grew to appreciate this. I think that by the end of the book he comes out humanized.
J.K.: Your mother was deaf, which put extra strain on you in navigating your family’s way in Rome. And she, too, had a temper, but also a sweetness and a very large vocabulary of facial expressions that made her easy to understand. How much of your observational skills as a writer have been shaped by having a deaf mother?
A.A.: My mother was a loving and charming lady, but she was—especially given her disability—a highly skeptical person. I grew to “borrow” that skepticism and to find that same impulse of hers in the writers I admired most: writers who taught me how to “read” other people’ motives and hindthoughts, sometimes how to distrust them, and how to fear their inclinations.
But from this I also learned how to distrust and disbelieve my most hallowed thoughts about myself. The very devices I applied to others I applied to myself. If I loved Proust, Dostoyevsky, Austen, and Stendhal, it is because they understood how the human psyche works and how to project their own thoughts on others. It is best to project one’s insights into people and be proven wrong, than to trust them completely. I learned this from my mother.
“I was allowed to buy a book at around 75 cents every week.... [This] allowed me to roam the city from bookshop to bookshop in view of finding my weekly read.”
J.K.: You visited Paris during your Roman year, where you had your first sexual experience, which then led to a burst of complicated sexual urgings. These also brought you closer to your father, who you feel intuited your feelings and may have shared them. How much did these experiences shape Call Me by Your Name, which as I understand began as a romance between a man and woman and then evolved into the relationship between Elio and Oliver?
A.A.: Roman Year is a memoir about my life, and specifically my adolescence. Being a teenager is often an uneasy, awkward, and confusing journey, and the book delves into my own journey and experiences during this period.
While there aren’t any specific experiences in Roman Year or in my life that shaped Call Me by Your Name, like any writer, you draw on your own understanding of human behavior to make your characters authentic and bring them to life for readers. So, for example, I was a very shy, trepidatious bookworm as a kid. I know how that type of person thinks and feels about the world around them, and I probably transferred some of those qualities to Elio. Similarly, I’ve always felt lucky that my father and I had a very honest and candid relationship, and we could speak to each other about any given topic. In Call Me by Your Name, I wrote a father-son relationship in the most genuine way that I know, with unbridled honesty and warmth.
J.K.: How involved were you in the making of the movie? The movie, of course, made Timothée Chalamet a star, and I wonder if he portrayed Elio exactly as you had envisioned him. And since you wrote a sequel to the book, called Find Me, are there any plans to turn that into a film?
A.A.: Aside from visiting the set, I was not involved in the making of the movie. I had essentially told the director [Luca Guadagnino] he could do as he pleased. I knew his work and trusted him. And I am happy that I did. Timothée, of course, really brought Elio to life. I have not heard anything about a potential sequel for Find Me.
“Being a teenager is often an uneasy, awkward, and confusing journey.”
J.K.: There is a wonderful passage in your book about how an aunt taught you that we have many lifetimes and identities, and that “we house all these lifetimes like Russian matryoshka dolls, each nested in the others.” You also felt a special kinship with your aunt, since you felt both of you were “alien earthlings.” Can you elaborate?
A.A.: We were transplanted people—or so it seemed. In fact, we were people who could never be transplanted; we were rudderless, we were homeless, and wherever we thought we’d found a home, it turned out either that the new home did not want us or, if it did want us, we would soon find that we did not really belong or know how to belong, much less want to belong to it. We were, as I think I said in the memoir, “elsewhere people.” If we descended from a planet, we wouldn’t know which planet that was.
J.K.: You loved to read as a child and developed a deep interest in Marcel Proust. How has Proust affected your writing, and for those of us who do not read French, can you recommend the best translation? And feel free to say that Proust is so much better in French that I should learn French first!
A.A.: Proust taught me how to prize insights into myself and into others. The whole epic by Proust is about the art of insight, how to translate, how to interpret, how to give words to who we are and how we interact with others, but as I said above, how to be wary of others … and of ourselves.
I also learned that “style is vision.” I am quoting Proust here, but there is no doubt that style is not just decoration; it is the soul of writing. Proust can most certainly be read in English. I think the Kilmartin–Scott Moncrieff edition is the best. And no, definitively don’t hold off on reading Proust until you learn French. English has done well for Proust.
J.K.: Finally, you have lived in New York City for decades, and you and your wife raised your three sons here. Why New York? And in raising your sons, what did you learn to do—and not to do—from your father?
A.A.: There is no real and concrete reason “why New York” other than to say that this is where the aunt and uncle who helped us migrate had their home. But in a strange sense I don’t think there was a better city for us to end up in. On any given day, you can accidentally end up speaking to people in French, Italian, Spanish, or Arabic. My mother, who spoke only French, got around by befriending French speakers here. New York is a city of immigrants and of people starting over, and for once, that made us fit in.
In raising my sons, I tried not to make the same mistakes my father made and to incorporate what he did right. I am sure I made many mistakes just the same. But as my father had done, I tried to pass on to my sons a sense of reading both sides of a coin, i.e., not to have arrested or definitive notions about anything but to cradle a sense of irony and sometimes paradox instead. My father always said that he prized kindness, imagination, and humor.
André Aciman will present his new memoir, Roman Year, at an event hosted by McNally Jackson and Air Mail in New York on Thursday, October 24. You can buy tickets for the event here
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIL
