Adelaide: A Novel

Content Warning: This section mentions suicide and mental health conditions.

André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me by Your Name serves as a symbol of Adelaide’s idealized idea of love. The book is one of Adelaide’s favorites, and she has long desired a relationship like the one between Elio and Oliver, the novel’s protagonists. The novel instills in her a longing for a “full, unconditional, romantic, apodictic” romance that she can believe in (71). In her relationship with Rory, she hopes for pure and unadulterated love in which she can exact “every childhood fantasy” she’s had about intimacy with someone she cares about (72). In these ways, the novel embodies Adelaide’s romantic ideals and gives her an aspirational sense of what she wants with Rory. However, the love story in Call Me by Your Name is fictional, and the version of love it portrays lives outside reality, giving Adelaide false expectations of what love should be like.

Adelaide gives Rory her copy of Call Me by Your Name for his birthday, inscribing a hidden love message in it. The gift communicates her deep feelings for him because the book is “immensely special to her” (136). Giving him the book is her way of showing Rory how significant he is to her life.