Alex Auder ’94 Profiled in the New York Times and Interviewed on Fresh Air for Her New Book, Don’t Call Me Home
Alex Auder ’94. Photo by Nick Nehéz MFA ’04
What began as a Senior Project is now Don’t Call Me Home, a new book by Alex Auder ’94 chronicling her relationship with her mother, Viva, the larger-than-life personality and Warhol superstar. “Don’t Call Me Home is fully cooked, wicked in its humor and often heartbreaking,” writes Penelope Green in a profile of Auder for the New York Times. Auder began the manuscript while a student at Bard, but put it away for years, returning to the project in 2019. The memoir explores her life with Viva and their bohemian lifestyle in the Chelsea Hotel. Auder ultimately sees the book as a “feminist story.” “It’s about women!” Auder said. “Strong women, crazy women, women in love, women in rage, women in despair, birth, desire, sex, single mothers, friendships only women can have, women trying to make art and raise a family at the same time, women trying to do it all and failing. Women enduring … each other.”
Speaking with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Auder was asked about her relationship with Gaby Hoffman ’04, her half-sister and fellow Bard alumna, for whom Auder “became like a second mother,” and her father Michel Auder, photographer and filmmaker, whose film of Auder’s birth features in the memoir. When Auder was three, she asked to watch the film. She permitted to do so, and her reaction itself was caught on film. The experience of watching herself watching herself being born was difficult for Auder to sum up in words. “It’s a long video, with the camera just trained on my face watching the video,” Auder said to Gross. “And you can see every expression sort of across my face as each moment in the birth video happens.”
While Don’t Call Me Home is in part a reflection on the difficulties of Auder’s relationship with her mother, it is also an ode to the woman, for whom Auder holds a great deal of love and admiration. “She was a trailblazer,” Auder said to the Times. “Ahead of her time in many respects. Too ahead of her time in the sense that she was considered crazy before she was revered. She was outspoken when being outspoken was not hip. Nude, when nudity was not hip. Raging against the machine before the machine created a platform, the internet, from which to be raged about.”
Post Date: 05-08-2023
Speaking with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Auder was asked about her relationship with Gaby Hoffman ’04, her half-sister and fellow Bard alumna, for whom Auder “became like a second mother,” and her father Michel Auder, photographer and filmmaker, whose film of Auder’s birth features in the memoir. When Auder was three, she asked to watch the film. She permitted to do so, and her reaction itself was caught on film. The experience of watching herself watching herself being born was difficult for Auder to sum up in words. “It’s a long video, with the camera just trained on my face watching the video,” Auder said to Gross. “And you can see every expression sort of across my face as each moment in the birth video happens.”
While Don’t Call Me Home is in part a reflection on the difficulties of Auder’s relationship with her mother, it is also an ode to the woman, for whom Auder holds a great deal of love and admiration. “She was a trailblazer,” Auder said to the Times. “Ahead of her time in many respects. Too ahead of her time in the sense that she was considered crazy before she was revered. She was outspoken when being outspoken was not hip. Nude, when nudity was not hip. Raging against the machine before the machine created a platform, the internet, from which to be raged about.”
Post Date: 05-08-2023