The Romance of Belonging Nowhere

“You’re romanticizing,” André Aciman’s brother unfailingly points out to his dreamy, bookish, struggling sibling over the course of the author’s new memoir, Roman Year. The context of the remark is, by turns, both intimate and heartbreaking as the two teenagers, along with their mother, attempt to find their footing in Rome after having been forcefully kicked out of their home in Alexandria, Egypt.