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André Aciman, The Meaning and Message of 'Call Me By Your Name'

Published on12 MAR 2018

Author André Aciman discusses what inspired him to write his novel, Call Me By Your Name, how readers have responded to the book, and his reaction to the novel being made into an Academy Award-winning film.

Aciman on the response to Call Me By Your Name: “I think that every father who has a gay son or a gay daughter, or every mother for that matter, would want to be inspired by the speech that the father gives. I have to tell you that I used to get a lot of mail from people in their 60s, 70s, even older, who would say, ‘I wish my father had given me that speech. It would have changed my life.’ So if there is a mission in my book, I would like that to be the mission.” 

Aciman on seeing his novel be made into a film: “This was in my head as I was trapped on 109th Street on the West Side [in New York City] one summer in 2005, and here it is being acted with all these people in production doing something that was just going to stay in my head. I was never going to show them the manuscript to anybody. So it's a wonderful moment where you see the evolution of something that is simply a little gene at the time and suddenly, it becomes this huge production that ends up in Hollywood. And for me, I never expected any of this. This was not going to happen.” 

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