Don't call me home A memoir

Actor and performance artist Auder debuts with an enthralling account of her childhood and adolescence living in the Chelsea Hotel with her mother, Andy Warhol superstar Viva, and sister, actor Gaby Hoffman. Auder's narrative features cameos from downtown New York artists including her father, filmmaker Michel Auder, and stepmother, photographer Cindy Sherman, but the core is Auder's messy, chaotic relationship with Viva. As a child, Auder fended off the hotel management's demands for late rent, served as Hoffman's caretaker, and acted as her mother's confidante and adviser on everything from cosmetic surgery to romance. At times, the author's love for her mother "burned the inside of my chest," and at others, she longed to "hit her over the head with a cast-iron frying pan." Auder braids these recollections with a present-day Christmas celebration shared with an 80-year-old Viva, after Auder has had children of her own, ultimately agreeing with her mother that "raising a daughter does feel like a crucifixion." 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. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Apr.)

This memoir from actress, producer, and survivor Auder, oldest daughter of one of Andy Warhol's superstars Viva Hoffmann, is surprisingly candid and scorchingly observant. Auder entered the world on film: her father, French filmmaker Michel Auder, recorded the event, from Hoffman contracting in the Chelsea Hotel lobby to the birth hours later in the hospital. After her parents split, Auder and her mother and later, her half-sister, actress Gaby Hoffmann, lived a seemingly adventuresome bohemian life in New York City. As a child and teen, Auder hung out with downtown New York's finest and most outlandish, traveled with her bright and unstable mother from Chelsea to Connecticut, California, Mexico, and the Hoffmann family compound, where high drama and family fights were daily occurrences, and contended with her mother's many moods. Escape to her father's Tribeca loft was no less confusing. He fought drug addiction for many years and often left the parenting duties to his wife, artist Cindy Sherman. Despite all this dysfunction, or perhaps because of it, Auder carved out a life of her own, with a supportive husband and two kids. VERDICT With humor, love, and some giddiness, Auder tells her singular survival story.--Liz French

A memoir by the daughter of Warhol superstar Viva and big sister of actor Gaby Hoffmann. "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," writes Auder about her mother. "He might even kill her because he has been kowtowed to his whole life and never forced to contend with a Viva. I've always suspected I'm more patient and loving than the great masters because I've been in a cell with her for a lifetime and have physically attacked her only twice." Auder's vibrant memoir of her larger-than-life mother alternates between the present, as she and her husband and child host the aged diva at their home in Philadelphia, and her roller-coaster childhood. The author, a performance artist and actor, spent much of that time living frugally at the Chelsea Hotel and hanging out around the corner at the Squat Theatre. Her childhood also featured regular visits to her mother's family home on the St. Lawrence River. Auder's vivid writing illuminates a deep and sparkling trove of storytelling riches. Especially memorable is her description of her mother's meeting of her father, which occurred "on the streets of Paris, just after she'd filmed the sex scene in Warhol's Blue Movie that would make her both superstar and criminal"--and just before "she and Michel made off for Rome (both draped in ruffled silk shirts, jewel-toned velvet blazers, capes, beaded necklaces, and chunky silver bracelets) to make their own movie." In Quebec, Viva's extended family sometimes devolved into bloody brawling; other times, the author's five tall, slender aunts, dressed in tiny crocheted bikini bottoms, flocked sweetly around her like birds. In the acknowledgements, Auder reveals that she has "been writing versions of this memoir for over twenty-five years." The work has paid off. Auder makes the most of her magnificent mess of material, celebrating her bohemian upbringing and her crazy mother in style. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.