Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published May 2023
336 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
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.
"Vibrant.... Auder's vivid writing illuminates a deep and sparkling trove of storytelling riches.... Auder makes the most of her magnificent mess of material, celebrating her bohemian upbringing and her crazy mother in style."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Enthralling…Funny, bracing, and compulsively readable, Auder's memoir resists juicy gossip in favor of hard-won truths. This story of fraught but unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters is a gem."
—Publishers Weekly
"Auder's frustration comes through loud and clear, but so does a deep and abiding love, and she manages to reflect on her chaotic and unconventional upbringing with a refreshing lack of prejudice and judgment. In many ways, it seems, her mother raised her right." —Booklist
"Don't Call Me Home is about madness and love. Alexandra tells the best stories about her extraordinary childhood as she travels the world with her mother Viva. Wit and wisdom wrapped and bound with love."
—Debbie Harry
"Alexandra Auder's Don't Call Me Home is thrumming with life, in all its absurdity, vividness, and gunk. 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
"I think this book is hearty and breathtaking. Life is a pure risk in this telling of growing up in an avant garde family. Alex Auder is the most natural organic page turner of a writer – because her visual memory feels flawless and as a kid she was already everywhere and the opportunities for experience endless and psychedelic and yet she was completely awake in it and grows up not sad. Kind of thrilled, in fact, and that's the hearty and breathtaking part."
—Eileen Myles, poet and author of Chelsea Girls
"In Don't Call Me Home, Auder renders her unique mother-daughter relationship with feeling, clarity, humor, and honesty. Through her adventures in the city and her unusual family, Auder also gives us a fascinating and vivid cultural history of New York in the 1970s and 1980s. Don't Call Me Home is lively, wise, moving, and wonderful reading."
—Lynne Tillman, author of Men and Apparitions and Mothercare
"Gut-wrenching and gut-busting in equal measure, Don't Call Me Home is a moving and hilarious memoir that portrays fascinating, unique people caught in circumstances and dynamics many of us might recognize. As Alexandra Auder demonstrates, you can't pick your parents, but maybe after a lot of struggle you can choose to come to terms with who they were, what they passed onto you, and what else you might need to become."
—Sam Lipsyte, Author of No One Left to Come Looking for You
"There is much to envy in Alexandra Auder's wonderful, complicated, and vivid memoir, including the bohemianism that made her. In our increasingly corporatized world, Auder's portrait of her large extended family, primarily of her mother, the legendary performer and artist, Viva, makes one long for those days when art making wasn't so much about a career, as an aspect of self-expression. And joy. A book to be treasured."
—Hilton Als, author of The Women and My Pinup
This information about Don't Call Me Home was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Alexandra Auder is a writer and actress. Born in New York City to mother Viva, a Warhol superstar, and father Michel Auder, an award-winning filmmaker who directed Chelsea Girls with Andy Warhol. Alexandra has been a featured character in HBO's High Maintenance and has acted in the films of Wim Wenders and Jodie Foster, among others. She resides in Philadelphia with her two children and husband, filmmaker Nick Nehez, with whom she co-produces and collaborates.
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