No one starts as a self-hater. But rack up all of your mistakes and take a large enough number of wrong turns in life and soon you stop trying to forgive yourself. Everywhere you look you find shame or failure staring back.
Catalog
André Aciman
André Aciman (born 2 January 1951) is an Egyptian-born writer, currently distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, where he teaches the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust. He is the author of several novels, including the 2007 Lambda Literary Award winner for Gay Fiction Call Me by Your Name and his 1995 memoir, Out of Egypt which won a Whiting Award. Aciman previously taught creative writing at New York University and French literature at Princeton. In 2009 he was Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University. 2Early life and education Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt, the son of Regine and Henri N. Aciman, who owned a knitting factory. His mother was deaf. Aciman was raised in a French-speaking home where family members also spoke Italian, Greek, Ladino and Arabic. His parents were Jewish, of Turkish and Italian origin, from families that had settled in Alexandria in 1905. Aciman moved with his family to Italy when he was a teenager and a few years later to New York. He obtained a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Lehman College and an A.M. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard Universit
Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.
We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.
Or are "being" and "having" thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone's body to touch and being that someone we're longing to touch are one and the same.
Everyone goes through a period of Traviamento - when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong…
I believe with every cell in my body that every cell in yours must not, must never, die, and if it does have to die, let it die inside my body.
Call me by your name and I'll call you by mine.
In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it.
If I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.
The whole thing had a mysteriously surreal quality kept intentionally opaque by both of us—not because we wanted to allow events to catch us unprepared so that we might blame circumstances and not ourselves, but because by not planning to keep things alive, we were avoiding the prospect that they…
Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away.
I pointed upstairs to the French windows of his room. Your eyes are forever there, I wanted to say, trapped in the sheer curtains, staring out from my bedroom upstairs where no one sleeps these days.
Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.
We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!
At one hundred, surely you learn to overcome loss and grief—or do they hound you till the bitter end?
Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is mockup and the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there’s the only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one…