Alexandra Auder on Her Freewheeling Childhood at the Hotel Chelsea—And Growing Up the Daughter of a Warhol Muse

Alexandra Auder’s Don’t Call Me Home: A Memoir opens with memories of the author’s difficult birth, milking, and bonding with her mother in their Hotel Chelsea apartment, of flying to exotic places, watching her mother apply makeup, and masturbating to her plush toys. As she soon reveals, however, these early moments are not her own recollections, but images recorded obsessively by her filmmaker father. Replayed over and over again at home, the documented scenarios meld themselves with Auder’s own memories until the two become indistinguishable. 

“I will watch my life come into being, on loop, on a little black-and-white video monitor,” she writes. “For any of this to happen—to matter—the camera will always be recording, the moment of my mother’s water breaking just another in a string of documented moments between brushing her teeth and arguing with the cops. This is a video memory.”

This is only the start of Auder’s fascinating story, which begins in the rooms of the Hotel Chelsea, New York City’s infamous bohemian landmark. The Chelsea served for many decades as the home, laboratory, and playground of the downtown art world’s demimonde before its controversial renovation and reopening in 2022. Perhaps best known as the setting of Andy Warhol’s cinematic paean The Chelsea Girls, the hotel’s many famous residents included Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Edie Sedgwick, and Nico, while its deaths were equally legendary—Dylan Thomas lapsed into a coma in Room 205 and Nancy Spungen was murdered by her boyfriend Sid Vicious in Room 100. But the building was also the setting for much of Auder’s childhood. She, her mother—the actress, writer, and Warhol muse Viva Superstar, née Janet Susan Hoffmann—and eventually Auder’s younger sister, the actress Gaby Hoffmann, resided in the 23rd street hotel periodically between the early 1970s and the early ’90s—though, as Auder admits, they were often in danger of eviction for avoiding the rent, or because of Viva’s quarrels with the hotel’s longtime caretaker Stanley Bard.

Now 52, Auder, an actress and yoga instructor living in the suburbs of Philadelphia with her husband and two children, first began documenting her own story of the Chelsea almost 30 years ago, during a senior writing project at Bard College. Since then the manuscript has gone through numerous iterations and revisions, the prose seeming to grow up beside her as she carried on with life’s rites of passage from young adulthood to middle age. No doubt, it is the wisdom of age and delay that imbues Don’t Call Me Home with a whimsical and wistful retrospection and weaves a precious fairy tale out of a fraught, and sometimes painful, childhood. 

As Auder describes it, her codependent relationship with her mother (whom, even as a child, she often referred to by her stage name, “Vivah Supehstahhhh”) begins in earnest as soon as her father, Michel Auder, leaves them following a particularly violent marital fight. The young Alexandra, only five, refuses to go with him, and instead, as she writes, “My mother and I fused.” She and Viva become inseparable, bonded by blood and the volatility of a hand-to-mouth existence. They take up residence where they can: LA roadside motels, a house in West Hollywood, a house in Miami, the family house in the Thousand Islands, an aunt’s house in Argentina, a guesthouse in suburban Connecticut. When they finally land back at the Chelsea, Auder is eight years old and yearning for her first experiences of urban freedom. For her, wandering the labyrinthine hallways and hand-painted rooms of the hotel feels like “Dorothy stepping into Technicolor Oz.” 

“All of this is right and good; we were in the center of things; the rhythm of NYC was in my bones,” she writes. “The Chelsea felt like mine…. [I] prided myself on how I fit in there, how I knew every nook and secret spot of the hotel.”

The wild panoramas of downtown New York in the 1980s gives the budding teen a taste of adventure that she savored, from the artists lofts of Tribeca to grimy bars in Alphabet City and the dance floor of the Palladium. Her talent for performance also lands her in several underground films, from her father’s A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking with Gary Indiana and Taylor Mead to Wim Wenders’s The State of Things.

But alongside Auder’s precocious experiences of the outside world come the growing pains of separating from her mother; and much of Don’t Call me Home explores her conflicting desires to be both an adolescent rebel and a dutiful daughter. Although Auder can roam the city streets with abandon, at home her mother’s increasingly histrionic behavior compels Auder to declare her allegiances: against her father, extended family, boyfriends, and eventually even her own husband. The depth and complexity of this sometimes beautiful, sometimes traumatic mother-daughter bond is thrown into stark relief by the book’s fugal interludes, set in the present day, in which Auder has invited her mother, now in her 80s and living in Palm Springs, to an extended family holiday in Philadelphia. As the stories of childhood come flooding over both of them, Auder questions her own philosophies about family and motherhood.

Along the way, Auder also entertains with personal stories about countercultural icons like Wenders, William Eggleston, Paul Morrissey, Shirley Clarke, Eszter Balint, Cindy Sherman, and Vincent Gallo, all of whom she describes with the wide-eyed perspective of a young girl thrust into an extraordinary time and place. 

In the end, 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 recently chatted with Auder about it.

Vogue: It was fascinating to read a perspective of the Hotel Chelsea, a place so often romanticized in popular culture, through a child’s eyes. I think some people will come to this book after hearing that it’s set in the Chelsea, but, ultimately, I think they will discover the memoir is actually the story of a childhood and a mother and daughter. It’s almost like a fairy tale.

Alexandra Auder: I agree with you that the Chelsea is almost another being on some level. It’s almost another body, another living, breathing, warm or cold or happy or angry body. I felt that close to it, to the building itself, but I agree that at the same time that it’s not so much about the Chelsea. This book has gone through so many lives, because I started it so long ago. And by the end of it, I realized there’s not that much about the Chelsea. It was so painful to me—and now I’m jumping ahead—when I first walked inside [the building] after it had been renovated. I actually felt a little bit nervous: What have they done to it? So, I do feel…it is more about this mother-daughter relationship and coming-of-age story.

You write in the book’s acknowledgements that the project was a long time in the making and was developed over numerous versions and drafts, including a novel. Can you tell me about the roots of the memoir and how it found its final form?

It started as a sort of autofiction—although I didn’t know that word at the time—as my senior project at Bard College, where my 19-year-old daughter is now, funnily enough, and where I met my husband. A professor of mine had asked me if I wanted to edit this and work on it a little more. This was in ’94, when I graduated. That draft had a different title but the themes were very similar. My mother read it back then and she said she really loved it. Then, the agent my professor had sent it to said, “This is a big caveat, but I think it should be nonfiction.” I think at the time I probably said, “Memoir?! Are you kidding? No way!” So, I just put the draft away. And I didn’t bring it out again until I had my first kid—so, like 2004—and I decided I was going to try it again. We were living in LA at the time, where my husband was doing some movie editing. I pulled it out and started going to a café every day and turned the fictional version into non-fiction. I couldn’t get an agent then. Nobody really wanted it. Then I went to New York and tried another draft. I remember my agent at the time sent me some feedback. I got some pretty harsh comments. It was a little misogynistic as well. It was like, “She just wants to ride on the coattails of her parents.” And I was like, “What coattails, honey? My mom has no money and lives in a shack in Palm Springs!” So I just put it away. I got embarrassed. I stuck it in a drawer. So, another 10 years passed. The time is crazy. Then I pulled it out again. I think this time I had a little cachet because I had had this profile in The New York Times. And I guess as I approached my 50s, I thought, Well, last chance, bitch. 

And what became of all the old material?

It was actually wonderful having the old stuff. It was almost like this very detailed diary. Because I had written it in my 20s, the memories were very close because I had just been a teenager. I could just pull these pages and get the detailed stories, but hopefully with a more mature voice. And there were some stories I was really in love with that ended up taken out of the book, which is fine. I learned so much in the process about letting go. If it’s not serving the story, let it go. 

You’ve said in a previous interview that the Hotel Chelsea was a tender community and that New York in the ’80s was the most fun and safest time of your life. I think that sentiment would surprise many people who think of the 1980s as one of the most dangerous and crime-ridden eras. Reading the book, you describe the Chelsea almost like a castle that allowed you to live this very magical existence in the city. 

I think that’s true. Even through New York in the ’80s, which people tend to think was the most dangerous time—I was actually shocked, because I didn’t know that. Needless to say, I was a white girl and while we weren’t rich, we could move through the city in a way that a lot of people couldn’t. So certainly it was dangerous for different communities. But as someone in the downtown arts community I felt like it was truly my playground. It felt very welcoming and warm and friendly. Even going to the clubs, oddly—I don’t know what it was. We just somehow didn’t get involved in dark shit. Even to this day, people assume I’ve just tripped out and done so many drugs just because I’m weird and wild. I’ve never taken acid or done coke. It’s weird that growing up in that time, I somehow didn’t do that. And I agree that in the Chelsea it was…there was a mystery behind each door. And it was like a fairy tale. You could knock on a door or open a door and it would be some other world. Like Vali Meyers and Shirley Clarke [were there]. You would open the door to these little one-room apartments and they were painted in completely different colors. One room is black-and-white with Felix the Cat dolls everywhere. Another is covered with psychedelic colors and beads and coffee cans everywhere. Even the bad shit, I never really saw it. There were cops, and some yelling and screaming behind doors. Maybe there was some bloody scene once. But somehow it didn’t seem threatening to me. It seemed more fun and exciting.

I also love the way in which you delved into these intimate scenes between you and your mother in bed when you were a child. It seemed that living in these small apartments and having to share a bedroom had a profound impact on how you bonded with your mother and experienced your own sense of embodiment and physicality. I wonder if these kinds of intense experiences of intimacy, which have almost a performative quality, might have been what led to your interests in acting and yoga?

I think the bond between my mother and I was a true bond in that somatic sense. I often think that even kids who have had truly horrible childhoods—anyone can determine whether or not [my childhood] was that; whether it was abuse or not abuse will be up for a discussion by other people—I think if a kid experiences that somatic connection with another person, whether it’s a birth parent or not, I think it’s deeply therapeutic. And Viva was really good at doing that. My sister and I are both grateful for that. We always felt, from a young age, secure in our physical selves, which was truly because of my mom. I think that I recognize to this day why I was a successful yoga teacher—whatever that means—like, the ability to be free physically and also show somatic empathy. And when you say “performative,” that’s interesting, because at the end of the day I actually am allergic to intimacy. So, when I’m alone at home with my poor husband who has to suffer through this, I’m really hands-off. I don’t talk a lot. Even my husband will say, “You give everything to the other people. What’s left here?”

I also want to ask you about the persistent role of home movies in your childhood. In the beginning of the book you describe your early childhood as a collection of imagined memories, or what you call “video memories,” from your father Michel Auder’s home movies. What sort of impact do you think your father’s obsessive need to document your early life on film had on you?

I think the act of writing a memoir—while there are so many different ways to do it, I did have those movies. Some of the scenes from the book are directly transcribed from the movies. Like the conversation between Andy Warhol and Viva after I was just born is right from the video, word for word. So, in the same way that I had the old drafts of the book to work out the new draft, I also had these videos to cull from. I’ve always been obsessed with how we start thinking: like, what are our first thoughts? Maybe the theory has changed, but what I once read was that the toddler starts to speak out loud mimicking the mother, the father, the parent, whomever, and somebody says “Shush!” and the child begins to figure out how to internalize that dialogue. I think that happened to me through my father’s videos. I think I had my mother’s dialogue in my head as my own internal thoughts, but I also think it happened through the videos. And I think that became part of my compulsion to document as well. But my dad would film everything—so you’d also get these fights on video, and it’s a pretty harsh reality at times if you watch them. He would keep filming even when Viva was screaming at him. Even in the aftermath of fights, when things were thrown all around the room, and you would see the apartment trashed. 

There is a subcurrent throughout the book of a lament for the collapse of the 1960s counterculture—the promise of cultural and sexual liberation that seems to have fallen in on itself a generation later and produced so much resentment and anger. This clearly comes across in figures like your mother and also the political activist Abbie Hoffman, who appears briefly towards the end of the book. 

I’m glad you mentioned that about Abbie Hoffman. I had a much bigger section about Abbie, because he and his partner at the time lived in the Thousand Islands, right down the river from my family. So, we spent quite a lot of time with him and his lovely son America. So he was actually more of a character in a previous draft. I almost cut that out, because I thought it might be weird to suddenly have Abbie Hoffman in there. But I felt I had to put him in, because my mother was quite close to him. So, yes, I think I inherited from my mother that lament. Everyone has become so uptight about their bodies and making money. Maybe it’s the loss of bohemianism, even though I don’t know what that means—everyone, including myself, is so faux-boho. I think maybe [the counterculture] was a failure—nothing lasts, everything falls apart. And I have a nostalgia for something—but it’s so ephemeral, I’m not even sure what it is. But just recently I saw a picture of my mother and father that I hadn’t seen. They’re at the Thousand Islands, they were still together at the time—it might have been before I was born. Brigid Berlin is there, she’s naked, probably shocking my mother’s parents. I guess maybe you just had to live in that time, in that moment. The dynamic was right. I do think it failed in many respects. Like, many of those people ended up being vicious right-wingers. I can’t wrap my brain around it. 

There is a passage in the memoir in which you describe how horrified you were to discover your mother reading through your journal and learning all these details about your private life. How aware was your mother of all the stories that you would be sharing in this book, and what was her ultimate opinion of it—or have you not shared the book with her yet? 

My answer is that I shared nothing of this book with her. She has not read it yet. But there are a lot of stories in the book that she’s read before in previous drafts and thought were very funny. And over the years she has jokingly, but maybe also not jokingly, said it was the Mommie Dearest book. It’s the sections [about the modern period] that I’m probably more…I hope that she sees the love in it. But I don’t know how she’ll react. Nobody ever knows how she’ll react. That’s what I love about her: she’s really fucking funny and really smart. And I think if she could see the book as an entity in itself and herself as a persona, then I imagine she would like it. But I really don’t know. If I were her and my daughter Lui were putting out a book, it would be really hard for me. I just got a box of books; I’ll probably send her a book and say, “If you’re ready to read this, here it is.” But I’m a little on edge. I guess on some level I’m still that little kid.

This conversation has been edited and condensed. Don’t Call Me Home is out from Viking on May 2. 

Don’t Call Me Home

$26 at BOOKSHOP

$28 at AMAZON