The lives of my three characters are my escape routes. Like me, all three are lodged in multiple places. Oliver lives in New York, but his mind is headed elsewhere: one side of him is already anticipating leaving New York for New England, where he teaches in a small liberal arts college, while another is daydreaming of a possible return to Italy. Elio lives in Paris but is already planning to visit New England before hoping to move back to his family’s house in Italy. Samuel, who is himself spending time in Rome, is planning to move back to his beach house in the town of B.
My own life has been a chronicle of multiple displacements. I was born and grew up in Alexandria, Egypt. (That large house by the beach in mythical B. is in many ways a stand-in for my family’s house by the beach in Alexandria.) Like Samuel, Elio, and Oliver, I am also Jewish, though being Jewish was not easy in Egypt. Very few Jews remained when I was growing up, which is why, because of rising anti-Semitism, my family was eventually kicked out of the country. Three days after our expulsion, I landed in Italy as a refugee.
As the world knows today, there is no joy to being a refugee, and for my first six months in Rome, I’d close my window shutters and choose to read in my bedroom without letting myself stare outside. Eventually, however—it took a year—I grew to like Rome and ultimately to love it. But because I’d visit my father in Paris every time I was on a school break in Rome, I hoped that my permanent address would someday be Paris. My heart was set. My parents, however, decided otherwise when they chose to move to New York so that I could attend college in the U.S. This newer translocation was no more welcome than landing in Italy three years earlier.
I’ve lived in the United States for 50 years, and eventually grew to love New York, but France and Italy remain my imaginary homeland. And I return there, if not twice a year these days, almost every day in my written work. Indeed, one of the ways in which I’ve found it easier to make New York my home was by projecting an imaginary Rome and Paris over spots of Manhattan that could easily remind me of places in Western Europe. New York’s narrow lanes of SoHo at night are no different than the glinting cobblestone streets of the Marais in Paris (where Elio is in Find Me) or of Trastevere in Rome (where Samuel and Miranda visit). It is by returning to these cities in my writing life that I also manage to imagine spending some time each day in Paris and Rome with my own father, who died in New York 10 years ago.
It occurred to me after I’d finished the third chapter of my novel that I had set each chapter in a city that I knew well: Rome, Paris, New York. It only made sense that I should close Find Me with an “envoi” set in a city I knew no less well: Alexandria, where I had lived for the first 14 years of my life and which I consider my true home. If Elio once said that Oliver was his “homecoming,” closing the novel along the coast road in Alexandria that I used to love so much was my own.
Buy now: Find Me by André Aciman
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