In Conversation

Find Me Author André Aciman Talks Eternal Youth, a Hollywood Sequel, and That Peach Scene

Upon the release of the much-anticipated follow-up to Call Me by Your Name, a candid interview with the best-selling writer.

By Keziah Weir

October 31, 2019

In 2007, André Aciman released his debut novel, the rapturous, desire-drenched Call Me by Your Name, which follows teenage Elio and grad student Oliver over one formative summer in Italy. A decade after the book’s release—during which Aciman wrote three more novels and an essay collection—the book received the Luca Guadagnino treatment, a celluloid pleasure-chest starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer. Aciman’s fan base grew, and there were immediate pleas for a sequel.
Now he’s done what he always planned to: picked the story back up. Call Me by Your Name didn’t just encompass those fateful dog days, it ended with brief moments of reconnection the following winter, and then 15 and 20 years later. In Find Me, Aciman digs even deeper into older iterations of the beloved pair (plus a long section focusing on the psyche of Elio’s father, a supporting player in the original book)—this time portraying love and desire primarily through lack, loss, and comparison. Here, he picks up the phone for a wide-ranging interview.

Vanity Fair: When did you decide you were going to write a follow-up to Call Me by Your Name?

André Aciman: I’ve always known. This is one of those things that I’ve tried many, many times to pick up. I always felt that I had to finish Call Me by Your Name in great haste because I was doing another book. So I jumped [forward] 20 years, and I’ve always wanted to go back to fill those intervening years, and the more time went by, the more it became daunting. About two years ago, I began to think very seriously and I just let myself go. I was very interested in the father, and then of course in Elio and Oliver, and what happened to them and where their hearts really are in all three cases.

Call Me by Your Name was written during a short burst of inspiration—this seemed to be more of a percolation. How long did it take to write?

Yes, Call Me by Your Name was started in April and ended in August, September. This was a bit different because I started it late in October of 2016 and then I had to interrupt it with various other obligations. My whole life is, in fact, an excavation of various books and texts. In total it took about 14 or 15 months. It was rather hasty. But the characters have been living with me, and they’ve gotten old. And I was getting old.

You once said you found it easier to write about young love and lust. In Find Me, as you say, they’re no longer so young.

You will notice that the father sounds like an adolescent sometimes, and it’s because I don’t know how to write old love. Maybe I should learn how to do that, but I still don’t know. Love, I think, has no age. I think it manifests itself. My father was 93 when he died, and I think he still was very, very interested in women until that age, even though he had a touch of dementia already. But that part never went away. He felt the appetite of a young man.

So much of your work is about parental relationships, and especially relationships between fathers and sons. Obviously your father was a big influence, but you’re also a father to three sons.

I think that it’s very important—and I think Call Me by Your Name is itself a good example of this, even though it’s a piece of fiction—that parents should be very, very open with their children and allow the children to be very open with them. My children are in their late 20s, and I’ll sit one on one with them and talk about very personal matters over drinks. I love the fact that my children know my whole life and I know—I think I do—their whole lives. It keeps me young too. I hear their tales and sometimes I proffer advice, particularly when I’m not asked.

That’s the best kind. What was it like for you to be writing about these characters who are already so important to so many people?

I didn’t think about it. I mean, at the same time as I was writing, I was getting emails; sometimes I’d look at them and I’d see somebody being a fan, which is very nice, but it doesn’t intrude in the slightest bit on what I’m writing. Knowing that people are waiting for this book doesn’t interfere in the slightest bit. I’m sure there are other writers who are totally influenced by the success of their previous novels. Not in my case. I can’t think that way. Then I don’t write. Then I’m just an order taker, and I can’t do that.

You prize openness with your friends and family, but what was it like to have strangers asking intimate questions about your sexuality and romantic life?

The first-person narrator is not me. I may borrow from my personal life, I may steal from it, I may make up things that happened to me, but I don’t like to discuss my personal life. I keep it out. People have asked me, “Who is this book dedicated to?” I say, “I'm sorry, I cannot tell you.”

There’s an iconic scene in Call Me by Your Name between Oliver and Elio and a peach. A debate has sprung up around how that scene is depicted in the film adaptation. In the book you see Oliver eat the peach. In the movie you don’t.

I do like what the film did. I liked the fact that you don’t know whether he eats the peach, but you see them struggling about it, and I think that was good enough. I think there was a degree of this thing called tact that you need to have when you’re dealing with human sexuality. You can be as bold as you want—and I’m very bold in my prose—but at the same time you need to have some tact. And even in the book itself, though he eats the peach, notice it slips right into Ovid and it evokes antiquity and so on—Tristan and Isolde. The whole thing morphs into something else because it has to. Because otherwise it’s just raw porn, and I didn’t want to do that.

I was very happy with the way the film treated it, and I think it became iconic all over the world. There’s a group of people who call themselves the Peaches. They meet around the world in various places. It’s a fan club all of its own. Of course, I’m not a Peach. I do not belong to the group. When I wrote the scene, I did think that it was way too much, but I was having so much fun. I was going to take it out, the way I was going to take out so many other things. The editor so lovingly said, “No, keep that in. Absolutely.” And I said, Okay, if he says it’s okay, then I’m going to go with it. Let’s chance it.

My children will not eat a peach in front of me, and they’re in their late 20s. I think they’re making a point just to be funny. Nobody eats peaches in our house any longer.

In Find Me, Elio and his father have a ritual they call “vigils”—they return together to places that hold meaning for them.

For one of the vigils in question—at the wall where Oliver kissed Elio—the father is trying to understand what is happening to his son as the son is staring at the wall and telling the story of being kissed. Somehow we come full circle with something very deep about us when we go to a particular place, when we revisit an old apartment where we used to live. We’re not hoping to find anything. We don’t know why we’re going there, but we keep going back. I think this is the beginnings of spirituality. It’s very important, and it’s particularly important if you are going to be, or pretend to be, an artist. An artist who doesn’t have spirituality as the foundational building block is basically a reporter.

You have beautiful settings in this book—Paris, Rome—and I know that some of them are personally important to you. Does writing about those places feel similar to the feelings you were just describing?

I know that when I write about Rome, where I lived, and about Paris, where I’ve also lived, in many ways it’s kind of touching base again, that metaphor. It’s like looking at the cobblestones and seeing that, yeah, there’s a part of me that’s entrenched in those cobblestones. I remember being on that very same road, looking at those very same cobblestones many decades ago.

I do think that the act of writing is not just evocation, but the repetition of evocations. In other words, I’ve evoked this once before, haven’t I? Yes, I have, and I’m doing it again. And I love re-remembering things. So everywhere I go, everything I touch is, in fact, not just a remembrance, but it’s, Oh, I remembered this before. Funny, I’m remembering it again. I’m remembering remembering, and you can sort of coil yourself up into a pretzel if you want. But nevertheless, I do like that particular process. Writing about Paris at night when the cobblestones are glistening because it’s just rained is coming home for me.

In 2017, after the Call Me by Your Name film came out, Luca Guadagnino expressed interest in a sequel with the same cast. You said you would be happy to collaborate. Is that a project that might still be on the horizon?

I haven’t heard from Luca. He knows about the book; he’s seen the book. I haven’t heard from him. I haven’t heard from the producers. There is nothing that is happening so far, as far as I know.

Is there anything I’ve left out?

One of the things that mattered to me the most when I was writing, and it’s always a thing that matters most to me, is style. I like long sentences. The style itself asks you to accept it for what it is and to let yourself slide into the clauses that don’t seem to want to end. And once you’re trapped in there, you begin to feel. And I think this is what has been magical in my career as a writer, is that people say, “It’s as if I was reading myself.”

What is really happening is that they bought into my style. They begin to think that my voice is their voice. People always tell me, “You’ve written my life,” and I think that one of the reasons is not because I’ve detailed certain factoids from their lives, but it’s more that the tempo of the book and the style of the book and what you might call the voice of the book has seduced them so that they now believe, and strongly believe, that it’s their own voice now. And that’s work. That’s why an author might take weeks in coming up with a paragraph.

Your novels are often concerned with the idea of trying to bridge the space between oneself and another person.

It’s funny you should say that because when I teach graduate students, I always say that the way in which a character reacts or deals with another character in a novel is exactly the same way as the author is dealing with the reader. It’s the same dynamic. If you have a character who is being very cagey, you probably have a writer who is very cagey with his reader. And if you find a character who’s desperately hoping to connect with someone else in the story itself, probably the author himself is desperately trying to connect with his reader.

Keziah Weir

Senior Editor

Royal Watch