Find Me

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1 Summary: “Tempo”

On a train to Rome, Samuel Perlman introduces himself to a striking, much younger woman deep in thought named Miranda. He tells her that he’s on his way to Rome to visit his son but is worried about imposing on him. He describes how he and his son take long walks around Rome together, visiting sites of personal significance in a kind of pilgrimage. Miranda tells him about her own father, who needs constant care but whom she loves. Samuel worries that a lost and intense love from his past has made him either averse to serious love again or constantly in love—Samuel can’t tell which. They discuss the fleeting nature of passion, how difficult it is to stay in love with someone once the mystery of getting to know them is over. Samuel reveals that he is divorced, but that the woman he loved the most, Miss Margutta, was not his wife. Miranda reveals that she has a difficult time in relationships because she soon tires of a man’s ways and need for her.

Samuel and Miranda discuss the value of their therapists. Samuel likes to talk to his therapist about missed opportunities, all the chances he didn’t take in life. Samuel doesn’t consider his ex-wife one of these wrong turns in his life; he believes they had a good marriage for a while, until their son moved to the United States, and was actually happy for her when she left Samuel for his best friend. Samuel’s son, Elio, calls to tell him he has to delay their meeting by a day—he has been called in to replace a concert pianist in Naples. As he talks to Elio, he gazes at Miranda and fantasizes that she’s attracted to him too.

As their train pulls into the station in Rome, Miranda invites Samuel to lunch with her father. He hesitates, but she insists. They shop for fish, flowers, and wine together. He asks her why she invited him, and she says she wants to get to know him better. Miranda’s father lives in a penthouse looking over the Tiber River. He’s surprised to hear that Samuel and Miranda have just met each other on the train. Miranda and Samuel’s banter makes them feel that they’re similar. Samuel reflects, “I loved our playful sparring and her unwillingness to let anything slip by if it came from me. It made me feel unusually important, as if we’d known each other forever and our familiarity in no way diminished our mutual regard” (39).

Samuel discovers Miranda is a talented career photographer. He tells them about his work as a classics scholar and his new book about the fall of Constantinople, for which he has a reading that evening in Rome. Miranda’s father is a retired professor who does side work advising on and editing dissertations. He is particularly interested in a recent dissertation that explores the meaninglessness of time, a theory that engages him because he knows he is dying. Alone in the kitchen, Samuel strokes Miranda’s lip.

After lunch, Miranda walks with Samuel toward his hotel. Though they don’t speak directly about their desire for one another, they both understand each other’s meanings. Their age difference doesn’t obstruct their understanding of one another. Samuel points out the building he lived in many years ago, before he was married and a father, before Miranda was even born. Samuel arranges a viewing of a rare collection of Roman statues at the Villa Albani, a private estate. After, they have coffee at a café. Miranda tells Samuel that she feels she’s known him forever and wants to keep on knowing him. She kisses Samuel.

All through his reading he finds himself thinking about Miranda, who has agreed to join him at his seaside house after their city sojourn. Because she is hidden among his colleagues and admirers after the reading, he assumes she changed her mind and chides himself as he heads back to his hotel. He finds Miranda waiting for him. They go out to dinner, and then pass by his former building again. He contemplates the young man he used to be, a young man who was always waiting for a woman like Miranda. They go into the building’s lobby, where Miranda takes pictures and they kiss passionately.

On the way back to his hotel, they pause to kiss, and then exchange secrets they’ve never told anyone before: One of his deepest regrets is how things ended with Miss Margutta. On a night when their passion was missing, Samuel accidentally called her the name of his girlfriend and future wife. They stopped seeing each other after this night, even though Miss Margutta tried to stay friends with him. Decades later, when she was dying, she tried to get in touch with Samuel again, but he never responded to her. Miranda’s secret is that when she was 15 years old, she was hanging out with her brother and her brother’s friend, when her brother’s friend started groping her. Her brother groped her too. In the same bed with her brother, Miranda and the brother’s friend had sex. Miranda told her brother to have sex with her too, but he refused. Miranda’s brother refuses to be alone with her to this day, and Miranda resents him because she actually did have desire for him.

Miranda makes a quick phone call to break up with her boyfriend. They go up to Samuel’s hotel room and remove their clothing. Miranda says she doesn’t want either of them to brush their teeth or do anything else that hides who they truly are. They have passionate sex. Afterward, Miranda tells Samuel that she wants to have his child. They go for a late-night walk around deserted Rome. He asks Miranda, who has been calling him Sami, to call him by the nickname that only his old relatives and long-ago friends call him, which is not revealed to the reader.

The next morning, they meet with Miranda’s father, and Miranda tells him she’ll be staying with Samuel. Privately, Miranda’s father warns Samuel about her impulsiveness. Miranda and Samuel buy matching coffee mugs, one initialed “M” for Samuel, the other initialed “S” for Miranda. They try to get matching tattoos, but the parlor is closed. They declare they want to know each other’s thoughts as though those thoughts were their own. Samuel feels grateful that he’s found Miranda and started a new chapter, just when he thought his life would never be interesting or passionate again.

Miranda and Samuel meet with Elio. She introduces herself as the woman Samuel picked on the train and slept with. Elio doesn’t seem annoyed that she has joined them, but Samuel worries that he should keep these visits with his son, which they call vigils, between the two of them. In a moment alone with Elio, they discuss how Elio kept returning to Rome during his school vacations after his trip at age 17, with his lover, Oliver, 10 years before. Samuel tells Elio that he had found his son’s relationship with Oliver inspiring. An intimate part of their vigils is that Elio brings his father to all the sites in Rome that Elio associates with his past loves, because he and his father share everything. Today, Elio brings Miranda and Samuel to a new spot: a corner where he threw up 10 years before, with Oliver holding him and comforting him. Before Elio leaves Miranda and Samuel, he tells them what Samuel once told Elio about his relationship with Oliver: that he envies them and hopes they will not ruin their love.

Part 1 Analysis

Find Me opens with a structural device that allows for deep revelations of character interiority: Two strangers meet on a train. The train boxes them into a tight physical space, in which they can ignore one another or engage in conversation. Their roles as strangers in one another’s lives paradoxically open avenues of deep conversation because they have nothing to lose; they can reveal their innermost depths and never see one another again. There is a magnetism about this narrative structure as well, a connection that brings two strangers together in ways that are mysterious. Had Miranda sat down next to another passenger, she likely wouldn’t have engaged in conversation, given her preoccupation, but these two characters feel placed in the right place at the right time. The end of the journey offers two distinct opportunities. One is that the two strangers will part with the pleasant memory of their conversation. The other is that they will continue building their connection. That Miranda extends the branch that brings her and Samuel closer together highlights both her impulsiveness and Aciman’s overall message about the mysterious and invigorating excitement of sudden love. Both Miranda and Samuel take a risk in spending more time together. The path they choose is the more complex one, particularly because they have both established, in their conversation, that falling and then staying in love is a rare and difficult thing to do.

Aciman’s characters are interested in the fallibility of love as an inherent part of the human experience. Both Miranda and Samuel have experienced the fleeting nature of love, noting that falling in love can be beautiful and passionate but that it is also easy to fall out of love when that initial magic ends. This speaks also to the question of people’s knowability; it is rare for an individual to feel truly seen, much less truly understood, by another. Their discussions touch on the idea that people turn to others to fill the void of inherent loneliness—and that relationships fail because asking true understanding from another is too ambitious. Love then becomes going through the motions of a relationship. Miranda is hyperaware of this and quickly grows bored with the men she falls in love with, noting that she breaks up with them on impulse. This foreshadows her future breakup with Samuel, whom Miranda warns directly that she fears she is incapable of continuing love. Samuel is divorced, and his decades-long relationship with his wife is characterized by this falling out of love, by the disappearance of the magic in a relationship. Moreover, Samuel didn’t end up marrying the woman he most loved in his life, emphasizing the doomed nature of his marriage and implying that it was always bound to fail. Notably, Samuel’s ex-wife left for another man, revealing her courage in love. This fallibility of love extends to Samuel’s son, Elio, about whom Samuel worries because of Elio’s past heartbreak. Samuel wonders if Elio has many partners or doesn’t see anyone at all. Love and aloneness have a difficult relationship because neither is the answer to the conundrum of life as a human being.

Loves gained and lost can also represent missed chances, notably symbolized by Miss Margutta. Samuel was more in love with Miss Margutta than he was with his future wife, but they didn’t leave their significant others to be with each other, and ultimately, he couldn’t even continue a friendship with her. Samuel feels sure his life would have been very different with her. In this part, the scope of Samuel’s life is associated with the lovers he has or hasn’t stayed with, emphasizing the idea that the people who come into one’s life characterize its value. His advancing age prompts him to reconsider his youth to interrogate how his adulthood might have been different.

This brings up another important idea in this section: The Passing of Time and its meaninglessness. Miranda’s father describes a dissertation he is interested in that interrogates the idea of time as a construct that is powerfully meaningless in a human’s life. Time can go quickly or slowly, but it doesn’t affect one’s monumental moments. People rely on the idea of time to make sense of their fleeting lives, but it is nothing but the background of reality. Miranda’s father takes a liking to this dissertation in part because he is dying—his time is running out. It is a comfort to him to think of time as meaningless. The fleeting nature of time is also part of what inspires Samuel to pursue an impulsive relationship with Miranda. Samuel wants to feel that life is exciting again; he previously believed that at his age, life would hold no more passion or surprise. By going along with Miranda’s idea to get to know each other better, and by escalating their relationship within a few short hours, Samuel decides to live happily in the moment, proving that he can live without consideration of time. This is further emphasized by the title of Part 1: “Tempo” is the Italian word for time, used to mean the pace of a piece of music. This title metaphorically captures the speed at which Samuel and Miranda fall in love. Their tempo is quick because their passion is important in the moment of time they’re together, not in hindsight or foresight.

Another societal construct that becomes meaningless in Part 1 is the dichotomy between youth and age. Samuel tries to talk himself out of falling in love with Miranda because he assumes that a woman so young can’t truly fall in love with a man so much older. But Miranda and Samuel have a connection like two familiar souls coming together again, obliterating the meaning of their ages. Their love transcends their age. Passing by his former apartment building, where he lived before Miranda was even born, symbolizes the chasm of time between them but also highlights the importance of forgetting about that disparity. As a young man, Samuel dreamed of finding a connection between souls like the one he now finds with Miranda. Back then, he couldn’t have known it was decades away. This emphasizes the importance of seizing love when it is available—and also highlights the way in which society’s conception of time can be limiting instead of freeing.

Samuel’s job as a classics professor reinforces Aciman’s messages about time and age. As a scholar, Samuel is immersed in stories and facts from centuries ago, so long ago that much is still unknown about that time period. Samuel searches for clues in the subtext of classic texts to put larger puzzles of society and theory together. In some ways, his job feels futile; he wonders what he has to gain by discovering such ancient secrets. Samuel’s job emphasizes his concern about the past and his fascination with both what was and what could have been. The passage of time is a journey Samuel wrestles with in his personal life, but it is also representative of his scholarly work.

The nature of Samuel’s passionate connection with Miranda is characteristic of Aciman’s novels, which often explore Different Types of True Love and Desire. Aciman repeats tropes from his novel Call Me by Your Name, the novel that first introduced Samuel and Elio. In this precursor, Elio falls deeply in love with a man named Oliver. Their connection, like Samuel’s connection with Miranda, is inexplicable and intense. Their desire is characterized by an imperative to dissolve all physical and emotional boundaries that keep lovers at a distance even within their intimacy. Names are therefore important in both novels. The title Call Me by Your Name is an homage to an intimacy between Oliver and Elio, in which they call each other by their own names to represent that they are one and the same. In Find Me, Miranda immediately gives Samuel the nickname Sami. When they grow closer, he asks her to call him by the nickname his old friends use for him, a nickname Aciman keeps from his reader to protect their new level of intimacy. In Call Me by Your Name, Oliver and Elio have a romantic and adventurous couple of days in Rome, in which they stay in Samuel’s favorite hotel room (presumably the same room Samuel still stays in during Find Me, a nod to the novel’s theme of Memory and Nostalgia). Elio shares his treasured spots in Rome with his father, locations that map his relationship with Oliver, now a decade gone. Readers of Call Me by Your Name will recognize these cafés and street corners, but readers of only Find Me can read this map as indicative of the close relationship Elio shares with his father. What’s more, Samuel and Miranda’s lovemaking is minutely physical, echoing the physicality between Oliver and Elio in Call Me by Your Name. In the earlier book, Samuel championed Elio’s relationship with Oliver because he recognized their love as exceedingly rare and special. Now, in Find Me, Elio repays the support to his father, whose new relationship with Miranda is unconventional and intense, just as his relationship was in Call Me by Your Name.

As romantic as Part 1 is, Aciman laces it with the potential destruction of Samuel and Miranda’s relationship. When Miranda breaks up with her boyfriend so she can be with Samuel, she does so in a brief phone call, and Samuel can envision her doing the same to him one day. Miranda’s father warns Samuel about Miranda’s impulsiveness and counsels Samuel to be patient with her. Because Part 1 is told exclusively through Samuel’s first-person point of view, the reader has access to Samuel’s emotions but is kept at a distance from Miranda’s feelings. This serves the purpose of veiling Miranda in the mysterious passion that attracts Samuel to her in the first place. But the foreshadowing of their future breakup only reinforces Aciman’s message that time and love are fleeting.