Andre Aciman

André Aciman – Life, Career, and Famous Quotes

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Explore the life of André Aciman (born January 2, 1951), the Italian-American author known for Call Me by Your Name, his essays on exile and memory, his style of emotional intensity—and a curated selection of his most resonant quotes and writing lessons.

Introduction

André Aciman is a novelist, essayist, and scholar whose work often meditates on longing, identity, desire, exile, and memory. He is perhaps best known globally for his novel Call Me by Your Name (2007), adapted into a celebrated film. But Aciman’s intellectual reach spans memoir, criticism, and the life of the mind—he is a writer who lingers in the emotional interstices of experience, attuned to the spaces between what is said and what is felt.

Early Life, Family & Origins

André Aciman was born on 2 January 1951 in Alexandria, Egypt. He comes from a Sephardic Jewish family with roots in Turkey and Italy. His parents, Henri N. Aciman and Regine Aciman, ran a knitting factory in Alexandria. His mother was deaf, which shaped dynamics in the household and contributed to Aciman’s early feel for silence, communication, and interior worlds.

He grew up in a cosmopolitan multilingual environment: French was often the family’s primary language, but he was exposed also to Italian, Greek, Arabic, Ladino, and English. Because his family belonged to the “mutamassirun” community (foreign or exogenous groups in Egypt), they could not obtain Egyptian citizenship despite their long residence.

Amid increasing political tensions and pressures on minority communities in Egypt, Aciman’s family left Alexandria in the mid-1960s. In 1965, he and his mother and brother relocated to Rome, where they lived while his father moved to Paris. In 1968, the family then immigrated to the United States, settling in New York.

Education & Academic Career

In the U.S., Aciman pursued formal studies in literature and comparative literature.

• He earned a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Lehman College (City University of New York) in 1973.

• He then proceeded to Harvard University, where he completed both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (the Ph.D. awarded in 1988).

As an academic, he has taught at multiple institutions:

• He taught creative writing at New York University.

• He has also held posts teaching French literature at Princeton and Bard College.

• Currently, he is Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he teaches literary theory (including the works of Marcel Proust).

Major Works & Literary Achievements

Memoir & Nonfiction

Aciman’s first major publication was the memoir Out of Egypt (1995), recounting his youth in Alexandria, the multilinguistic milieu, exile, memory, and loss. This book garnered him the Whiting Award.

He also edited or contributed to essay collections on identity, exile, and memory, such as False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory, Letters of Transit, and The Proust Project.

Fiction & Novels

His breakthrough as a novelist came with Call Me by Your Name (2007). That work won the Lambda Literary Award in 2007 (for Gay Fiction). Other novels include:

• Eight White Nights (2010)

• Harvard Square (2013)

• Enigma Variations (2017)

• Find Me (2019), a sequel to Call Me by Your Name

Aciman has said that while Call Me by Your Name is perhaps his best-known work, he considers Eight White Nights his favorite personally.

Other shorter works, stories, and contributions to literary magazines round out his writing.

Themes, Style & Literary Sensibility

Memory, Exile & Identity
Because of his own life trajectory—living through displacement, multilingual communities, migration—questions of memory, lost places, nostalgia, and identity are persistent in his writing. He often frames places and time not as fixed selves but as palimpsests layered with longing and absence.

Desire, Longing & the Unsaid
Aciman’s fiction frequently pivots on emotional tension, unfulfilled desire, longing, and the interior struggle of characters to give voice to what they feel. These elements often remain in inchoate states, hovering between presence and absence.

Interior Narration & Lyrical Prose
His sentences tend to be rich, flowing, reflective. He is comfortable with digressions, lyrical moods, and layering emotional resonance through reflection as much as through plot. In interviews, Aciman has said that he often writes in long, sinuous sentences that invite the reader to linger. (See quotes section below.)

Multiplicity of Voices & Diaspora Consciousness
Aciman does not present monolithic identity. His works often reflect multiplicity—of language, belonging, and emotional register. His background as someone who lived across multiple cultural spaces gives him a sensibility attuned to the in-between.

Time & Impermanence
Time in Aciman’s work is rarely linear. Moments echo across years; the remembered present bleeds into the actual present. The impermanence of experience is often foregrounded.

Legacy & Influence

• Call Me by Your Name has become a cultural touchstone—adapted into an acclaimed film, thereby bringing his voice to a broader audience.

• His blending of memoir and fiction, and his capacity to write emotionally vulnerable male voices, has influenced contemporary writers exploring intimacy, identity, and queerness.

• His essays and literary criticism, especially on exile, memory, and Proust, contribute to scholarly conversations on diaspora and modernist legacies.

• As a teacher, he has shaped emerging writers and scholars working in creative writing and comparative literature.

• His stylistic influence lies in how emotional interiority can be at once precise, poetic, and unsparing, showing that literary power often comes not from what is declared but from what is lived in thought and silence.

Notable Quotes

Here are some of Aciman’s memorable reflections (on writing, love, memory, identity):

1. “Don’t all writers have a hidden nerve, call it a secret chamber … something irreducibly theirs, which stirs their prose and