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

Alex 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 Alex's life, documented by her filmmaker father, Michel Auder, portended the whirlwind childhood and teen years that Alex would go on to have.


At the center of it all is Viva: a glamorous, larger-than-life woman with mercurial moods, who brings Alex with her on the road from gig to gig, splitting time between a home in Connecticut and Auder's father's loft in 1980s Tribeca, 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, Auder meditates on the seedy glory of her childhood 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 in the Chelsea Hotel and partying in East Village nightclubs. Flitting between this world and her present-day life as a yoga instructor, actor, 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.