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.

PRAISE

“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

MORE PRAISE

“The daughter of Andy Warhol’s fave muse, Alexandra, fondly remembers growing up in the infamous Chelsea Hotel. With a mother with a vivacious attitude and a father with workaholic tendencies, childhood was unpredictable and inconsistent. Sometimes, her mother would drag her up and down the country or leave her at her conservative grandparents’ house for weeks. Alexandra doesn’t recall much normalcy in her childhood years, only chaos and mayhem like raising her baby sister or spending nights with her mother at East Village clubs. In her debut novel, the singer, songwriter, and actress describes the absurd, bizarre but ultimately charming moments of her extraordinary childhood.”— Cosmo

“Don’t Call Me Home is fully cooked, wicked in its humor and often heartbreaking.”— The New York Times

“Gutsy…impossible-to-put-down…[Auder’s] childhood memories sparkle.”–Associated Press

“Don’t Call Me Home is an ode to hard-won resilience, life in the margins, and a fraught, entangled, but deeply loving relationship between a mother and daughter.” — Vulture

“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

“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, 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

“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