Buy now: Find Me by André AcimanĪll products featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. 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. 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. 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 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. 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). 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. And I return there, if not twice a year these days, almost every day in my written work. 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.
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