André Aciman’s Theory of a Life Half Lived

In Room by the Sea, André Aciman returns with a devastating meditation on longing, and unfulfilled potential. Best known for Call Me by Your Name, Aciman’s latest novel trades the sun-drenched sensuality of Italy for a muted, melancholic New York, where Paul and Catherine, two near-strangers in their sixties, find themselves drawn together over five unassuming but revelatory days.

Marked by Aciman’s signature lyricism and philosophical introspection, Room by the Sea explores what it means to navigate love as a means of reckoning with what’s gone before.

Speaking with Aciman, it becomes clear how drawn he is to compressed timelines, to the wistful pull of nostalgia, and to the quiet, unspoken intensity of love later in life — themes that have shaped not just his fiction, but his understanding of self.

Room by the Sea unfolds over five days. What drew you to such a compressed timeline, and did it change how you approached storytelling?

AA I tend to like compressed timelines, as my stories, like the films of Eric Rohmer, take place within a very circumscribed time frame. Why? Because there is very little action in my tales; most of the action takes place either in conversation or in thought processes. Facts and plot are almost always incidental.

The novel explores fleeting connections and the tension between fantasy and reality. Do you see Paul and Catherine’s relationship as a love story, or something else entirely?

AA If theirs is a love story it proceeds in the key of regret. Many of the things they long for have never happened and here, in a jury hall, is their chance, maybe their last chance to catch up on what’s been missing in their lives. At 20 or 30, one longs for bliss, for novelty; past 60, however, one wants to make up for lost time, to catch up on what was dreamed of and might never have happened. A second chance after this one might never come.

Paul and Catherine are in their 60s, a departure from the younger protagonists of your past novels. What was it like writing about love and desire at this stage of life?

AA The desire to find happiness with another person still exists at 60 as it did at 20. One is still drawn to others. So, writing about young love or elderly love does not change; the “yen” [yearning] has not changed. But age is far more forgiving—and demanding—than youth. At 60, one overlooks many things that at 20 one might have easily overlooked and, as a result, never have discovered. 

New York plays a big role in the novel, much like Italy has in your previous works. How do you think place shapes the emotional landscape of a story?

AA New York is urban and its pace is frenetic; there is no space for distension. New York’s pleasure seekers are in for a quick fix, not for the dilation of pleasure. To find pleasure one has to move away from the city and seek out the silence of the beach, even if it’s in Long Island, as happens in Room on the Sea. But then the characters in my novel find that they long for Naples. Naples is not the be-all for them, but the painting of a room facing the sea draws them; they want to be in that room, and that room ends up charting the course of their love. 

The book leaves room for interpretation, especially in its ending. How do you decide how much to reveal versus what to leave open-ended?

AA I don’t believe in neat closure and neat endings. I prefer to leave things hanging and mostly unresolved, forever ambiguous. My endings tend to give an indication of where a character thinks he/she is headed but they seldom pronounce themselves. 

Your work often returns to the idea of what might have been. Why do you think nostalgia and regret resonate so deeply with readers?

AA Most of us never did what we hoped to do in the course of a lifetime. We’ve done quite a few things in life and accomplished several. But the things we left behind or left undone or unfinished rankle in our hearts. We know not to regret things, or not to complain too often, but looking back at the things we could have done better or taken the risks we were never bold enough to undertake… Those still hurt. At some point as we age, we understand the concept of the life unfinished and the life half lived. It’s like dying before tidying things up for those who’ll have to clean up after us. 

You’ve written memoirs, essays, and fiction. How does your approach differ when writing about your own experiences versus creating a story from scratch?

AA I think that my approach is the same for everything. I write about things that move me or, to be more precise, about the things that thrill me. I may not have lived many of the experiences I describe, but I do project myself and write as if these very things happened to me. In essence, this is why I don’t distinguish between what did happen and what might have happened. I am thrilled and energized by both. I love to revisit my past but I also love to imagine what might still happen. In the end, they are one and the same.

You’ve spoken about being an elsewhere person, never quite belonging to one place. Do you think this sense of displacement has made you more attuned to the subtleties of human connection?

AA I was always fascinated by how people are constantly trying to outdo one another. They could be negotiating the terms of their friendship, and they may not even be conscious of this. But they are constantly double guessing and being devious with each other, even when they are desperately in love. As Nietzsche said [in his novel The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs] there may be a footbridge between them, and that footbridge may be extremely frail, and the tension between two beings may be intense, but the sympathy that connects them is still very, very real. My experience in life has taught me that the ground under my feet is never as solid as I hoped, and that my foothold in all human affairs is never as permanent or established as I hoped. 

Displacement has taught me not to trust what the world offers, even when it proves it meant no harm. I have become diffident not only with others, but with myself as well. I don’t readily trust people, which may be why I don’t trust myself; or I no longer trust myself, which is why I don’t trust others. Sometimes I find it is easier not to trust anything, not even love. And that comes from displacement too. Unless, of course, I never trusted life and blamed displacement instead, so as not to blame myself or others.

Your prose has a musical, almost poetic quality. Do you have any literary or artistic influences that shaped this style?

AA Actually, I was a poet once upon a time (when I was 10) and it’s a good thing that I gave up poetry at around 20, because I was a terrible poet. But if I gave up poetry, it sneaked its way back into my prose, which is where I can be as poetical as I need to be without being poetical in my prose. My favourite rhetorical trope is the anaphora, the repetition of a phrase that almost, almost but never slips into poetry.