Don't Call Me Home

Reviews

"The daughter of Warhol superstar Viva (and older sister of actor Gaby Hoffmann) recounts a chaotic and colorful childhood at the Chelsea Hotel, home to New York’s artistic demimonde in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Auder writes with total honesty and humor about her mother’s antics—and her own. Neither an accusation nor an absolution, Don’t Call Me Home is a stunner."— Kirkus Reviews

“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

“[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

“Don’t Call Me Home is a love letter to an era of New York City that has since passed; but more importantly, it is a story of the messy and imperfect yet loving missteps that bond a mother and daughter over a lifetime.”—Vogue

“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

"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

“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

“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

“In this sparkling debut, a grown-up Auder tells those million stories with delicious prose, sharp satirical humor, and cheeky whimsy. A seasoned raconteur, she has a way of plopping us into her life with a clear voice that relays the complex and sometimes heartbreaking travails of sharing a claustrophobic apartment within the walls of New York’s infamous Chelsea Hotel with a much younger sister and a single, struggling-artist mother in the ’70s and ’80s. It’s a casually hilarious, decidedly feminist recounting of a family of women told with an unflinching eye” --Shondaland

“Don't Call Me Home reads acutely; Auder's descriptive account is visceral and not withholding. However, it is not a simple indictment of negligent parents or an airing of dirty laundry. Auder holds space for her mother as a woman in an era freshly one generation removed from women's traditional roles. The memoir is reflective, looking back at certain life events from the perspective of the girl who lived it, and has grown up to become a working mother and wife herself.” --New York Journal of Books Expand reviews