I wanted to thank everyone who sent me questions to ask! I wasn’t able to get one in, but a few of the questions were asked by other fans. I recorded the entire event on my phone and just sat down to try and write it all out for everyone, so sorry if there are some spelling mistakes and what not.

Some highlights hidden under the cut:

Mr. Perlman’s speech with Elio

What was Aciman surprised by in the film that wasn’t in the book?

Ideas on ending the book a different way

Is Elio a reliable narrator?

The meaning of ‘Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine.’

Where would Oliver and Elio be in 2018?

@elio—perlman @terxture @mandyrose1984 @flyzaminelli @raraadsel @timelosserscmbynobsession @694699 @isitandwonder

Interviewer: The whole story is being told from Elio’s older perspective on his past, and I was reading one of your essays earlier this week and you talked about how memoirs rearrange memories as they please, and I wonder if that should color the way we read Elio’s take on the events of Call Me By Your Name- he’s rearranging things to remind himself of his own desire.

Aciman: That’s a good question. I don’t think he rearranges things, because the book intended to be chaotic. In other words, it’s not a chronology of how he developed- first he says this, then he did this, then that then this… it doesn’t progress that way. It’s all over the place. I wanted it to be chaotic in that way because that’s how we sort of nurture our emotions. There’s no planned coarse. So, um, in a way that’s how I reacted to it. On the other hand, memory does change many things, but I don’t think that is Elio’s case. Whatever he forgot turned out to be totally incidental. We don’t know what he forgot. In fact he doesn’t remember many things and we don’t know what he remembers- we don’t even know what happens at the end of the story. If you think ‘I don’t know what happens’ you would say, ‘What are they going to do next?’ I said, I don’t know! But, the point is… He’s writing it from the future, looking into the past, and he is nostalgic as would happen whenever we remember the past. But at the same time, he doesn’t give you an outline of what it was like, he just spills it all over the place, and so then there is this sense of disorder, completely. And that’s how memory works, I think. Whatever he doesn’t remember, we don’t know what it is.

Interviewer: It sort of feels like he’s[Elio’s] actually putting his father’s advice into practice- the advice his father gives at the end, cherishing the moments even though they may hurt after the affair is over. What inspired that conversation with the father? It’s very understanding and encouraging and moving, and I think it’s something that a lot of us latch on to, something we would have liked to have heard our parents tell us at some point.

Aciman: Well, I mean if you’re deeply shaken by an experience and then you are very hurt and your parents see you sort of pouting away and being very sad, there are parents who will say ‘well you know what, they didn’t raise the issue with me. I don’t have to talk about it. They will talk to me about it if they want to.’ There’s that kind of nonintrusive parent, which I refuse to practice. I’m the most intrusive parent in the world.

[…..]

No but, basically the father speech- It’s a father who decides he is going to take over, he’s not going to let this go away, and having begun to speak as happened between Elio and Oliver. They begin to speak and then something pushes them to the next step. And the father said, ‘Let me say something more and it will clear the air.’ There’s that sense of- Elio is scared because he thinks ‘oh they know, they must-surly know’ and uh, there’s a sense of the father’s gonna actually have a talk- but it’s not a consolation talk- ‘Things will get better son. you just wait. you’ll meet somebody else, they’ll be better’ – you know, that sort of thing. That’s not the kind of speech that the father’s gonna give. It would have been so tempting to write that. I wanted a father who would say, ‘You know what, this is the bad moment for you, I know it is. And at night it’s gonna be even worse because you’re going to miss him really badly, but don’t fight it. Don’t smother this thing- let it go where it needs to go. Because at least the next time you find someone else, you won’t have already chopped a part of your heart away.’ And then he says that wonderful thing, ‘You know what, I could have had what you had,’ or ‘I came close to what you had, but I never did. And something stood in the way.’ Now I think that is heroic of the father because the father is obviously a straight guy, he’s married, he has a son, and etcetera. And at the same time he is saying, ‘You know what, this image you have of me is not exactly the right one. And let me open up and tell you more about myself.’ And so, I wanted that and there was an impulse on my part when I was writing that scene, which was an easy speech to write because it came sort of from the heart. I wanted to push it further and see what else was there that he could say. And I did want to start writing that, but then I said ‘No. He’s just said it. Enough already.’ And what I do love in the film, and it makes any writer very happy, is that the fathers speech is exactly taken out of the book and transcribed into the film. The problem is that I never now can read out loud in public, that speech, because Michael Stuhlbarg does it so much better! (laughter)

Interviewer: It is a really fantastic speech in the film, and on page, and the exchange with the father and Elio when he admits that he’s never had a connection quite like he saw in Elio and Oliver, it really changed my perspective on his relationship with his wife- that he doesn’t consider their connection anything remotely similar to the love he saw between Elio and Oliver- the desire between them.

Aciman: Well, no he’s been married for quite a while, too. Give the guy a break! (laughter)

Interviewer: Sure! (laughter)

Aciman: I mean, they’ve been together for ages and so, something may have sort of… changed. But the intimacy of the relationship- the one thing that I was so scared that they would do in the film, but they didn’t, was that you would have a moment in which the mother and the father know about what’s going on. I wanted it to come- I’m sure the mother knows- but you don’t see them knowing. You don’t see them actively knowing. And I wanted the speech to come out as a complete surprise so that you are surprised as a reader, you’re surprised as a viewer, and certainly Elio is totally surprised. There’s a moment in which they’re playing footsies under the table in the novel, and Oliver says ‘just don’t do that’- I’m sure he knows. And so they didn’t want to push it. So the parent’s DID know, but the mother was so tactful- she seems him (Elio) almost exploding with tears and she doesn’t say anything. She just drives him back. But the father has the scene. And you never see the mother saying, ‘Are you going to talk to him about this thing?’ How gosh would that have been? (laughter) It would make it very Hollywood-y.

Interviewer: Where there things about the film that surprised you that you hadn’t thought were in the book, but there they were on screen?

Aciman: Yeah, there was one in particular and I think it’s what makes the film- the kind of genius that it is. The director told me that the film was going to close with a scene of Elio’s face crying, and I was sort of, upset- not upset, just unhappy with that, because I had misgivings. […] And then I saw the scene, and I thought it was a work of art in and of itself. Because as he (Elio) is sort of smiling and weeping and not weeping- he’s almost like recapitulating the whole story of their summer together, and as he’s doing that the music is in the background, and suddenly at some point as he’s just staring and it’s going on and on- suddenly the credits come up. And never in any film I’ve ever seen, have the credits meant anything to me. This is where you stand up and you go home. But in essence, the credits was also a way of spelling the end of something. It meant, not just that the movie is over, it was more like this is the end of their relationship, there is a finality in the moment when you see the credits, so that the act of seeing the credits was in itself significant, and it was part of the film. And this is why one should never stand up when you see the credits. From now on I always wait until the end. That was my lesion. (laughter) But I love the ending, and that was not in the book, and I told the director, I said ‘you know what, the ending of your film was SO much better than the ending of my book.’ And in a way, if I could have written that scene I would have done it, but you can’t do that in a novel. You need to do other things.

Interviewer: I agree that the credits are wroth staying for. (laughter)

Aciman: Just see the credits! Forget the movie! (laughter)

Interviewer: Come for the peaches, stay for the credits.

Aciman: That’s good, that’s very good! (laughter)

Fan Question: One of the things I love about your book is the way multilingualism is presented, and how characters slip between them. […] I’m wondering what is your experience with multilingualism and how do you choose to incorporate it into your work?

Aciman: I don’t know if you know, but I was born in Alexandria, Egypt, where essentially everybody speaks at least four languages, so that was a natural thing. In the book there was only Italian and English. But there were French actors that came on the scene and French sort of became a natural language in the family. And since they all spoke French, why not have them speak French? And so that is what happened. And what it does on top of everything else, it justifies this kind of blurry universe that we’re dealing with- many languages, many orientations, many identities, any everything. And I love that. The more the better.

Fan Question: What did you intend with the phrase, ‘Call me by your name, I’ll call you by mine.’ Because I know it speaks about their intimacy and how they love each other so much that they not only saw each other in one another, but they saw each other as themselves. Did you intend for it to have any other meaning besides that?

Aciman: No, that was exactly the meaning that I wanted. In other words, you are me and I am you, and at this point you can even take my name. I don’t know where I am and where we begin or end. There should not be a beginning and an end. It was the ultimate form of, what I call, identity- abductivity, by osmosis you become the other person.

Fan Question: I’d like to know, in your creative process, did you ever think about ending the book a different way?

Aciman: Yes. I did. In fact the book ended in manuscript form with the two of them are sitting in the bar, and they are having drinks in the college town where Oliver teaches. And I said, ‘That’s it! That’s a good ending, yeah?’ And I thought about it, ‘No… He should invite him to his house. Okay, he’s going to invite him to his house and at that point Elio is going to come out and say “I can’t come to your house”- in other words, it still hurts.’ I wanted to do that and I said, ‘Okay, we can end it now.’ And then I said, ‘No… there has to be another meeting.’ And I wanted the last meeting to be where Oliver this time, comes to the house. They’ve already had contact so the room is ready, it’s going to be the same room, and uh, essentially Elio fears the worst, that he’s (Oliver) going to leave, but there’s absolutely no reason to believe that he is going to leave. And I left it there. At that point I said, ‘Okay, enough already, You’ve tinkered enough with the ending.’ But endings are, for me, the most difficult thing to do, because you’re supposed to resolve something that is fundamentally insolvable. I was forcing and ending that was, never the less, written in the conditional mood. In other words, it’s not now, past, or present, or future, it’s just conditional.

Fan Question: How reliable of a narrator is Elio in all his contradictions throughout the book?

Aciman: I think he is reliable enough. I mean, he’s- a good narrator, if it’s a first-person narration, always makes a fool of himself. He intentionally makes mistakes so that you get to like him more. He does not know. He makes mistakes, and catches himself wanting things that he is embarrassed to want. I mean, when he goes up into the bedroom and puts on Oliver’s bathing suit, that’s a bold thing to do. God forbid he should get caught! ‘What are you doing with my bathing suit?’ I mean, it’s that sort of thing, so he’s unreliable in the sense that he makes mistakes, but he’s not the kind of nabokovian narrator who is- ‘I’m an unreliable narrator who is giving you facts that I might withdraw in a minute’- that kind of stuff, which I’ve hated, by the way. I’ve always hated that kind of writing.

Fan Question: What would Elio and Oliver be doing now in 2018?

Aciman: Uh, gosh I don’t know. (laughter) I mean, I would like to think that Oliver’s children have grown up, they’re boorish kids, as you probably can imagine, and they’re in med school or become lawyers or something, and his wife is… no longer interesting (laughs), and he is still in love with Elio. But you don’t know what happens to Elio either, you know? I think there is a sense that in life, and I’m sure many of you know this, that whatever you had in the past, if you try to resurrect it many years later, it may not be rescued that way- you can’t do that. Time has already had an effect, it has altered things- things have happened to you that the other person never witnessed and cannot catch up to. So it’s easy for me to say that I’d love them to be together again, in that house where they met, and basically have careers of some sort where they are now partners. I would love to think that! Is it possible? I don’t know… And maybe we should ask Luca Guadagnino what he has in store! Thank you.

