I literally laughed and cried, and cheered hard throughout for our intrepid narrator, who has gifted us an incomparable tale – one notable for its singular portrait of a place, sensibility and time, and for its unruly contributions to the timeless problem of how we become ourselves, survive and thrive.” –Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts and On Freedom

A moving and wickedly funny memoir about one woman’s life as the daughter of a Warhol superstar and the intimate bonds of mother-daughter relationships.

Alexandra Auder’s life began at the Chelsea Hotel – New York City’s infamous bohemian hangout – when her mother, Viva, a long-time resident of the hotel, went into labor in the lobby. These first moments of Alexandra’s life, documented by her filmmaker father Michel Auder, portended the whirlwind childhood and teen years that she would go on to have.

At the center of it all is Viva: a glamorous, larger-than-life woman with mercurial moods, who brings Auder with her on the road from gig to gig, splitting time between a home in Connecticut and Michel’s loft in 1980s Tribeca, then moving back again to the Chelsea Hotel and spending summers with Viva’s upper-middle-class, conservative, hyper-patriarchal family.

In Don’t Call Me Home, Auder meditates on the seedy glory of being raised by two counterculture icons, from walking a pet goat around Chelsea and joining the Squat Theatre company to coparenting her younger sister, Gaby and partying with her mother in East Village nightclubs. Flitting between this world and her present-day life as a yoga instructor, actress, mother, wife, and much-loved Instagram provocateur, Auder weaves a stunning, moving, and hilarious portrait of a family and what it means to move away from being your mother’s daughter into being a person of your own.

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Shelf Life Books | Calgary Public Library | Audible

BE CURIOUSER

• Learning How to Parent from a Warhol Factory Girl at the Chelsea Hotel – The Cut
• Alexandra Auder’s Debut Memoir Finds Her at the Nexus of Fame, Family, and Finding Art – Shondaland
• Alexandra Auder on Her Freewheeling Childhood at the Hotel Chelsea – and Growing Up the Daughter of a Warhol Muse – Vogue
• Growing up in the shadow of a Warhol superstar – The Washington Post
• A Daughter of a Warhol Superstar Tells Her Story at Last – The New York Times