Camerota ties up ‘loose ends’ from high school in memoir
Wandering the former site of New York’s famed CBGB nightclub, pointing to familiar names on band posters spread amid carefully preserved graffiti, is like being transported to a life that CNN’s Alisyn Camerota has long since left behind.
The high-end apparel store there has kept some of those artifacts to appeal to rock ’n’ roll pilgrims, like one wearing a Ramones T-shirt who wanted to see where the quartet got its start. The room is far more polished than it was four decades ago.
So is Camerota. Her recent visit isn’t the only time-traveling she has done lately. The Jersey girl has written “Combat Love,” a memoir that focuses on sex, substance abuse, effective abandonment by her parents and even brief homelessness all before she graduated high school, and the family she found with followers of a local band, Shrapnel, to help cope.
“People would ask me about my high school life, and I would tell them, and they would sort of blanch,” she said. “I thought that everybody in the 1980s had my experiences ... I guess not everybody was in a car surrounded by skinheads or in a lot of car accidents and had friends really wrestling with drug addiction and alcoholism.”
An only child, Camerota was 8 years old when her parents divorced. An already distant dad largely disappeared from her life, while her mom chased one failed relationship after another, moving her daughter cross-country to Washington for one. Both parents hid secrets that explained, if not excused, their behavior.
Her mom set out for
Pittsburgh in her junior year, leaving Alisyn behind to stay out West with friends. She moved back to New Jersey for her senior year in high school, stayed at the home of another friend, then was kicked out and slept briefly in her car or on the beach before finding someone who would board her.
Despite her experiences, “I wasn’t really a wild child,” she said. “I was searching for belonging.”
She dreamed from age 15 of being in television news. She still went to school and did the work. When Camerota earned a scholarship at American University, she applied herself toward achieving her goals, getting serious at a time many peers were ready to party. She’d already been there.
Now a successful, 57-year-old newswoman with stops that included “America’s Most Wanted,” Fox News Channel and CNN, Camerota is married with three children and a comfortable home in a Connecticut suburb. But her high school experiences never left her.
“I had just a lot of loose ends emotionally,” she said. “I moved to six different houses in two years. I left sometimes before saying goodbye and certainly
left before having closure. Writing helped me put it in chronological order. Some of these stories kind of, not haunted me, but definitely followed me around begging for more attention.”
She’s still friends with some of the people she knew from high school, and though Camerota disguised names for the narrative, people who know the stories know who she is talking about.
Camerota regrets how she treated old boyfriends and contacting some of them again was tough. She felt she was in survivor mode those days and not attentive to the feelings of others. It took her longer to achieve a stable, lasting relationship than to become successful professionally.
She hopes the book can be more than a personal therapy session.
“Everyone has a survival story of some kind, and that can be a bridge,” she said. “For a long time we’ve been divided in this country, and I always looked for a bridge. And I think if we share our individual stories, we would find that we have a lot more in common.
“People can be inspired by survival stories,” she said. “I know I am.”