DON’T CALL ME HOME is an uproarious and heartfelt memoir, think Priestdaddy meets Just Kids. Alex’s life began at the Chelsea Hotel—New York City’s infamous bohemian hangout—when her mother Viva, a Warhol superstar and longtime resident of the hotel went into labor in the lobby. These first moments of Alex's life, documented by her filmmaker father Michel Auder, portended the whirlwind childhood and teen years that Alex would go on to have. At the center of it all is Viva: a glamorous, larger-than-life woman with mercurial moods, who brings Alex with her on the road from gig to gig, splitting time between a farm in Connecticut and her father's loft in 1980s Tribeca, and spending summers with Viva’s upper-middle-class, conservative, hyper-patriarchal Connecticut family of origin.

Auder meditates on the seedy glory of her childhood being raised by two counterculture icons, to co-parenting her younger sister actress Gaby Hoffmann, to eventually finding her own way and starting her own family. Flitting between this world and her present-day with an aging and always difficult Viva, Auder weaves a stunning, moving, and hilarious memoir of a family, and what it means to move away from being your mother's daughter into being a person of your own. Alex was profiled in the New York Times for the book, which has received rave reviews from the Washington Post, and Associated Press.

A conversation with Diana Welch