Alexandra Auder’s Don’t Call Me Home: A Memoir opens with memories of the author’s childhood. However, she soon reveals these early moments are not her own recollections but images recorded obsessively by her filmmaker father.
But alongside Auder’s precocious experiences of the outside world come the growing pains of separating from her mother; and much ofexplores 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.
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.
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.
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.
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