GOES ON HOLIDAY The author on how travelling makes him feel and why he desires solitude

Call Me By Your Name

meaningful, human connections but at the same time, are too wrapped up in their own little solipsistic mindspace. In the Orvieto essay, Aciman touches upon this phenomenon by calling it “the big paradox that defines my life” — a fear of loneliness that coexists with a love of being left alone. “I think that this feeling of desiring solitude while also being quite afraid of loneliness, this is something a lot of people struggle with. During my childhood, my father kept telling me to ‘enjoy myself’ but I did not know how, at least not in the accepted or conventional sense of the phrase. We are told, we are almost indoctrinated straight from childhood, to ‘seek out the world’, to seek, seek, seek. But what about when we want to have a cup of coffee in the morning, alone?”

Longing and belonging

Aciman famously wrote Call Me By Your Name in a matter of 34 months, which was unlike him. “I had nothing to do and I wanted to get this novel off my chest. It was written very, very fast and it was almost like a vacation for me, writingwise.”

His usual method, he said, is much slower, much more deliberate. During the interview, he joked that his agent gets bored of him writing

“the same story over and over again”.

Aciman has lived in New York for over two decades now, the longest he has ever stayed in one place. And according to him, the city is ideal for someone like him, someone who revels in diversity, someone “who doesn’t belong anywhere” as he put it. “I would be quite bored and uncomfortable if New York contained people of one ethnicity or one religion. Had that been the case, I would certainly not have belonged there and I’d have been cast out.” These days, he said, he is working on “three different essays” as well as a new book of nonfiction, a memoir which will be released in October. “It is a memoir about a year I spent in Italy as a very young man, 1617 years of age. Now, I never turn down an invite to spend time in Italy, not least because I am no longer an Italian citizen. I lost my citizenship, which is so typical of my life.”

The writer and journalist is working on his first book of nonfiction.

Watch | Interview with André Aciman on magazine.thehindu.com