#Cat walks on old manuscript movie

I pulled it out and started going to a café every day and turned the fictional version into non-fiction.

#Cat walks on old manuscript movie

We were living in LA at the time, where my husband was doing some movie editing. 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. 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. My mother read it back then and she said she really loved it. That draft had a different title but the themes were very similar. A professor of mine had asked me if I wanted to edit this and work on it a little more. 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. Can you tell me about the roots of the memoir and how it found its final form? 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. 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. It was so painful to me-and now I’m jumping ahead-when I first walked inside after it had been renovated. And by the end of it, I realized there’s not that much about the Chelsea. This book has gone through so many lives, because I started it so long ago.

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. It’s almost another body, another living, breathing, warm or cold or happy or angry body. 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.Īlexandra Auder: I agree with you that the Chelsea is almost another being on some level. But the building was also the setting for much of Auder’s childhood. 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.

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. 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.