Don't Call Me Home: A Memoir

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 longtime resident of the hotel and one of Andy Warhol's superstars, 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 Alexandra with her on the road from gig to gig, splitting time between a home in Connecticut and Alexandra's father's loft in 1980s Tribeca, then moving back again to the Chelsea Hotel and spending summers with Viva's upper-middle-class, conservative, hyperpatriarchal family of origin.

In Don't Call Me Home, Alexandra 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, with her mother and partying 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, Alexandra 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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking
Published: 05/02/2023
ISBN: 9780593299951
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.23lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.84d

Review Citations: Library Journal Prepub Alert 11/01/2022 pg. 17
Kirkus Reviews 02/15/2023
Publishers Weekly 02/27/2023