The story continues, after all

ANDRÉ ACIMAN WASN’T ENTIRELY HONEST with us. In late 2017, around the release of the film adaptation of his cherished 2007 novel Call Me by Your Name, he indicated that he’d closed the book on his characters Elio and Oliver, the star-crossed lovers at the center of the story. “I’ve said what I had to say,” he told a reporter, when asked about a potential sequel. But Aciman had been working on a follow-up for over a year.

Now, as he prepares for the Oct. 29 release of Find Me, his new book set in the world of Call Me by Your Name, Aciman settles in his New York City apartment to come clean. “I wasn’t sure,” he says. “And I didn’t want to use the word, which became poisonous, sequel.”

It’s easy to see why Aciman might be wary of the pressure that not wanting to be influenced by Guadagnino’s storytelling, and was able to do so because so much time has passed in Elio and Oliver’s world.