This article was originally published at Shondaland.com
The “Don’t Call Me Home” writer talks to Shondaland about what went into writing her excellent debut memoir, her childhood in the Chelsea Hotel, and growing up in the outlier creative class.
Against an acid yellow backdrop, the title Don’t Call Me Home in its neon pink font is practically audible in its vibrance. Equally loud is, sandwiched between the title, a tinted childhood photo of author Alexandra Auder at maybe all of 4 or 5 years old, steadying herself in the back seat of a car behind her mother, Viva Superstar, the artist, writer, and an actor in Andy Warhol’s Factory films. As Viva gazes away from the camera toward some impossible-to-discern person or horizon, Auder implores us with an innocent yet piercing glance that tells a million stories without words.
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 — just like Auder’s on the cover.
The morning after a wee-hours arrival back home in Philadelphia from a yoga retreat she led in Costa Rica, Auder hops on a Zoom with me and warns me she’s a little under the weather, but from her breezy, cheerful demeanor, you’d never, ever know. For decades, teaching yoga was Auder’s day job; she (and her husband, filmmaker Nick Nehez) owned and/or ran yoga studios in upstate New York, Manhattan, and Philly, occasionally leading retreats like this while picking up and putting away drafts of what would become her memoir. The New York Times even covered Auder as a well-respected celeb yoga teacher who sharply mocked the wellness explosion on Instagram.
Don't Call Me Home: A Memoir
Through sharing a few laughs, it quickly becomes apparent that the masterfully executed penchant for the absurd that dictates Auder’s memoir matches her actual demeanor. I dive right in, asking her about the unique challenges of writing a memoir about a family who already have some kind of narrative attached to them. “I honestly didn’t worry that much about people’s reactions when I wrote it,” Auder says. “But now I’m letting that come in a little bit. I guess [it’s about] treading the line of wanting to be transparent and truthful and have it serve the elements of the story, but also not wanting it to be a burn book or something — wanting to really chisel out the full-fleshed people.”
Overall, the book is a brave contemplation of the mother-daughter relationship in all its complex glory. Auder deploys solid pacing to stride across a tightrope of sometimes difficult but always frank revelations and intimate confidences. She never overtly name-drops but rather chooses to preserve her subjects in their humanity. Her mother is simply Viva, her father is filmmaker Michel Auder, her stepmother just so happens to be prolific photographer Cindy Sherman, and her sister happens to be the talented Transparent actress Gaby Hoffmann. They exist as Auder experiences them: a loving yet struggling, sometimes abrasive, scattered, put-upon single mother; a loving, sometimes absent yet philandering father who struggles with addiction; a determined and loving stepmother; and the smart little sister she knew she wanted. Throughout the narrative, they revolve as planets, some farther aloft in the stratosphere (like Viva’s siblings and parents), some bumping up against and scraping Auder at the nexus — especially Viva.
“Obviously, the elephant in the room is primarily my mother,” Auder says. “I’m sure some people will take it personally. We didn’t put an addendum or little note, but I always want to say this is my version [of what happened], through this lens of this particular theme of the book. I could’ve written the whole story a different way if I wanted to have a different tone and different theme.”
Auder continues, “Every story is sort of serving this reveal of different layers of my relationship with Viva,” noting that her mother was indeed a force to be reckoned with. When describing her mother's nature in this memoir, she writes: “I’m certain that if she and the Dalai Lama were locked in a cell together, and she turned the screw on him, he would crack within the hour. He might even try to kill her because he has been kowtowed to his whole life and never forced to contend with a Viva.”
If you aren’t familiar with her art, writing, or Andy Warhol’s Factory films, Viva Superstar — as christened by Warhol but born Janet Susan Mary Hoffmann — is something of a legendary bon vivant. In the ’60s, after appearing with tragic Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick in Ciao! Manhattan, she became a key player in Warhol’s clothing-optional coterie, starring in racy films like Tub Girls, Bike Boy, The Nude Restaurant, and the infamous Blue Movie, which was once seized by the New York City police for obscenity. Viva also starred in Lions Love, a film by acclaimed French New Wave icon Agnès Varda, and in the ’70s and ’80s went on to score parts in Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam and art films like Paris, Texas. Though Viva continued to act here and there, Auder describes Viva as always writing; her novel, Superstar, was a fictionalized account of her Factory life, and she also wrote a column for The Village Voice. Today, the 84-year-old paints in Palm Springs — and Auder says Viva has written a draft or two of her own memoirs.
Don’t Call Me Home was first born as Auder’s senior thesis at Bard College. “It was a learning process, writing the book,” she says, explaining the differences between the final product and early drafts. Back then, it was a fictionalized account of her life that so enchanted her professor, they offered to help her further develop the draft to share with their agent — who didn’t bite. But Auder was advised to make it a memoir, an idea that didn’t click with her at first. “In the mid-’90s, I discovered Mary Karr and stuff, but in my mind, memoir was kind of cheesy to me. It was more celebrity memoir,” she admits. “I put it [the draft] in a drawer for a long time, maybe 10 years. Then, I pulled it back out and turned it into nonfiction — my daughter is 19, and she was 2 at the time.” Auder tried to find representation of the revised nonfiction draft to no avail. She shelved it again until a year before the pandemic, using both early drafts as a sturdy springboard for a revision that finally landed representation.
The result is a triumph full of rich details that plop the reader into Auder’s adventures and misadventures. In addition to those earlier drafts, she had many handy prompts of recollection at the ready: “Sometimes I’m transcribing directly from my father’s videos, so when there is dialogue of me when I’m 8 years old in my father’s loft in Tribeca, I’m talking to him,” she says. “He had a camcorder going all the time. Sometimes my mother repeats something so many times, it is indelible in my brain. Some [of the dialogue] is creative license — not so much the who, what, where, and when.” She cites Karl Ove Knausgård’s extensive use of dialogue as an example of how she conjured her own when necessary. “He clearly doesn’t remember the exact dialogue of his entire childhood, so I just felt like it’s okay to do this. But the old manuscript was really, really helpful.”
Alexandra Auder
Nick Nehez
Auder says the process of choosing which childhood stories to include was intuitive. “I didn’t consciously think, I’m not going to talk about that,” she says. “I might refer to more intense, more convoluted stuff as an adult, and you’re trying to negotiate the dynamics of these difficult relationships and people.” Throughout the writing and editing of the book, she remained fiercely protective of her sister, Gaby. “I try never to tell her story — just her story through me as her sister. I never speak for her or how she felt about mom. Any story that started to feel like I was giving Gaby a voice that wasn’t hers or that was her story to tell, I stopped when I would feel myself doing that.”
Auder is now a fiercely protective mother of two herself — with a daughter and a son. She counts her sister, her husband, and 19-year-old daughter, Lui, as early draft readers with full veto power. “I said I’ll change whatever you want me to change, but I really didn’t do that with anyone else,” she confides. “My daughter, Lui — there are some delicate areas I tread with her, but she read it, loved it, and thought it was so funny. I definitely had stuff in there that I took out because I’m not going to expose my 19-year-old daughter.”
When it comes to Viva, Auder says she has yet to read the book. “She’s definitely not happy about it, but she hasn’t read it. She read an old draft and loved it, but over the years, I don’t know what exactly changed, but she definitely got it into her head that this was not kind towards her — I think; I’m not sure,” Auder explains. “It’s a little bit of the big unknown going forward. There are some aspects of the teenage years — every daughter has repulsion toward the mother, and that’s a normal thing — but that’s something she doesn’t like to hear about. I can see it’s hard to read. If it were not [about] her, or if she was able to see this snapshot of one part of our lives together, she’d be cackling and laughing hysterically — the way daughters hate the mothers and it’s the father’s fault, but you know, we get blamed!”
Auder feels compelled to share this about her mother, for the record: “I helped raise my sister, but Viva really was an attentive mom. That’s the one thing, sometimes, I can imagine her bristling about. She’d be like, ‘What’re you talking about? Alex didn’t raise her; she just helped me out.’ It wasn’t like when a child has to raise her sister because her mother is a drug addict or something like that.”
As crazy as things were in the family or could be, I definitely found a sense of core confidence, somehow. As nutty as things could be — and I’m sure people can look at the story as, sometimes, even one of abuse on some level — I really felt that she gave me a sense of deep self-love.
Naturally, Auder’s story is deeply entwined with Viva’s. Blurry parent-child boundaries are depicted as an innate part of their dynamic, but sharing a bedroom with her mother and sister in the Chelsea Hotel all but made them impossible. Auder felt it important to paint an honest picture of what it was like to live there during such a glamorized era of creativity in what she calls the “outlier creative class.” She explains: “I really wanted the city to be a mirror of the intensity of the inside of the Chelsea apartment. It was such an intense, verging on claustrophobic at times, vibe. I felt so comfortable in the city, and so at home roaming the streets, and so free from the mother-daughter intensity of the apartment — I really, really tried hard to evoke that.” Auder is keenly aware of how her privilege allowed her to do so: “I feel the need to point out, obviously, as a white, privileged, outlier artist-class girl, there wasn’t a lot of danger for me. Of course, the New York of the ’70s and ’80s for a young Black kid is going to be very different.”
There are also the various privileges that adjacency to fame and notoriety bring, but they don’t always add up to a paycheck. As such, it was important to Auder to depict that her upbringing was hardly affluent. “What I wanted to show was truly the Chelsea of people who really were truly broke,” she explains. “If people call it glamorous — that’s the word some people use — that’s the glamour of, I guess I’ll use the word bohemianism, not boho-fronting bohemianism. There was actually no money coming in, and definitely, it’s an outlier class, this class of some of the people at the Chelsea. Clearly, we were also traveling to Europe sometimes and having a tab at a Japanese restaurant, and my mom would have a wealthy friend that would send us a check. Meanwhile, she’s trying to make enough money to buy food for the week. Even with the bellman at the Chelsea — if you looked at our bank account, it might actually be less than the man who was bringing us ice cream. It’s totally f--ked up that she got no money whatsoever for all of that Warhol work. Of course, at the time those movies weren’t making money, but after the fact, Warhol could’ve given all those actors and actresses some dough.”
When it comes to her own art, almost ironically, Auder is just now gaining comfort with considering herself an artist. “To my detriment, I have an allergy to saying, ‘I’m an artist,’” she explains. “When you’re living in it in the moment, you don’t think about it at all — it’s just what’s happening. It’s only in retrospect I was living in this incredible time in New York with these incredible artists. I think the act of my father filming everything; of Cindy living her life in this way where she had all of her costumes and stuff going on all the time, and she would just go into the studio and make work; and my mother always writing and typing on the typewriter or painting a picture — I think that did give me the confidence to be a storyteller. Every time she’d go out and come back home, there would be a story to tell, and really funny too. I think of her as extremely funny! And I never questioned that — I never thought I can’t do that. As crazy as things were in the family or could be, I definitely found a sense of core confidence, somehow. As nutty as things could be — and I’m sure people can look at the story as, sometimes, even one of abuse on some level — I really felt that she gave me a sense of deep self-love.”
Now that Auder is set to birth the fruits of her labor, she realizes the gestation process was somewhat cathartic. “Writing this story made me actually empathize more with my mother, you know? Even talking to you about it, I always thought it was so cheesy when people ask if it was therapeutic writing the thing, and I’m like I don’t know — whatever — you just write it. But actually, I do find that in discussing with people — literally as we speak right now — I guess it is therapeutic.”