André Aciman on how a writer reads memory and love at the Forum of the Future in Porto

"Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between."

This quote by writer André Aciman is quite revealing of the writer's method, so to speak, as he "deals with many levels of identity, many of which will never resolve", allowing Aciman to "never take a position, to always be ambivalent".

In an interview to Vanity Fair, André Aciman says that "cinema can be an entirely magical medium. What I do as a writer, and what Guadagnino does as a film director, is more than speak two different languages. What I do is chisel a statue down to its finest, most elusive details. What a film director does is make the statue move".

"I am an American citizen, I was an Italian citizen, my mother spoke French, I was born in Alexandria; everything about me is a mess, so confusing, conflicted, multitiered so when I wrote "Call be by your name" I wanted to express that", Aciman reveals.

For this American Writer, who was raised in a family who spoke French, Italian, Greek and Arabic, writing is "a way of liberating many things but in a way, it can also be a way of inhibiting so many other".

Aciman also wrote "Out of Egypt", "False Papers: essays on exile and memory" and "Eight white nights: A Novel", and his novel "Call Me by Your Name" is both "on the page and on the screen", under the direction of Luca Guadagnino, who won best adapted screenplay in the Academy Awards, USA, in 2018.

André Aciman will be in Porto to talk about "Eros Unlimited: Excavating Desire", on 10 November at 7 pm, at Rivoli.

The Forum of the Future kicks off this Sunday, 4 November.

See here the full programme.