"Authors use 'almost' to avoid stating an outright fact, as though there were something inauthentic, dishonest, unfinished, undecided or even unwholesome - some might say repulsive, tacky, snub-nosed, too direct - in qualifying anything as definitely a this or a that."
Andre Aciman is an Egyptian-born Italian-American novelist, essayist, and memoirist. He is best known for the novel Call Me by Your Name and for the memoir Out of Egypt. He teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center as a distinguished professor of comparative literature.