Don't Call Me Home

A Memoir

By: Alexandra Auder

Narrated by: Alexandra Auder

“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.”--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 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.

Beautiful and Entertaining

When you listen to this memoir, you will fall in love with Auder’s delivery both in narration and writing. If you want a study in hilarious and honest dialogue, this is the book for you. I enjoyed the leaps between past and present that help the reader understand the weight of each timeline. All killer no filler.

So fun!!!

Thrilling trip, enjoy the ride. What an adventure. Must read. Well done!! Would read/listen again. Bravo.

Great listen

Loved this memoir. I could relate so much as a child of the 70’s and 80’s. Well written and kept me interested.

Tighten Your Seatbelts

I was riveted for the entire story. Her intelligence and coping skills are drawn out in colorful detail Alexandra balances and manages all the balls in the air of her extraordinary out-of-the-box life and her full spectrum brilliant mother. Brutally honest, shameless … bravo!!! Captures NYC in the 70’s and 80’s, and others locales. Loved every chapter.. what a movie this will make!

What lives they lived !

Things mundane and not so much,lived in one of the last decades when downtown meant something in New York. Things that have been mythologized,seen through the unblinking eyes of a growing girl. Well done !