Don't Call Me Home

A Memoir

By: Alexandra Auder

Narrated by: Alexandra Auder

Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

“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.

©2023 Alexandra Auder (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“[Auder’s] ability to hear her own voice through the noise of Viva’s is the key to this book’s charm and success…Don’t Call Me Home is very funny. Auder has the sense of humor of a person who became an adult as soon as they were born. In other words, she is a natural writer. And her honesty in not knowing the solution to a problem like Viva is comforting in its familiarity.” --The Washington Post

“As the daughter of one of Andy Warhol's superstars, Alexandra Auder was born into a life of art, excitement, and exceedingly blurred boundaries. Here, she tells the incredible story of what it was like to grow up surrounded by some of the 20th century's most creative minds, and how a world that spawned a legendary moment in culture wasn't exactly designed to be child-friendly.” --Town and Country

“This memoir of [Alexandra’s] roller-coaster childhood, growing up at the Chelsea Hotel, making the scene as a teen in ’80s Manhattan, regularly visiting her mother’s wealthy, bickering family, is the best kind of train wreck.” --Oprah Daily

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.

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.

So fun!!!

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

Best read in a very long time!

What an amazing and interesting life! The bond between mother, daughter, sisters , cousins! Strong women. The author does a superb job of reading the book with inflection, bringing it all to life. Paints such a vivid picture….very sad when it ended.

Fantastic Meditation on Women, Children, and Mothers

Hilarious, poignant, insider New Yorkisms abound. Alex is an amazing reader and captures the granular details of a life lived with a legendary diva. Mike Ortiz, it was never for you.

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 !

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!

Wild, messy, fascinating coming of age tale

An evocative, often hilarious and beautifully written window in to a chaotic, bohemian upbringing surrounded by fascinating and storied places and personalities. Having the author read her own work made so many details just sing.

Great

I love hearing the stories of nonconventional lives. We see glamorous people in magazines and on the screen but really don’t know what their life is like.

More than Viva!

Brilliant reading and unmatched uncensored situational storytelling viva is literally too much will be waiting for a maybe less fraught but just as interesting other characters in a singular life.