Sex, drugs and CBGB: Camerota ties up ‘loose ends’ in memoir
NEW YORK — 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 now has kept some of those artifacts to appeal to rock ‘n’ roll pilgrims, 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-trav- eling she’s done lately.
The Jersey girl has writ- ten “Combat Love,” a memoir that focuses on sex, sub- stance abuse, effective aban- donment 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.
“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 sur- rounded by skinheads or in a lot of car accidents and had friends really wrestling wi h drug addiction and alco- holism.”
From ‘searching for belonging’ to veteran journalist
An only child, Camerota was 8 years old when her par-
s divorced. An already dis- tant dad largely disappeared from her life, while her mom chased one failed relationship after another, moving her daughter cross-coun- try to Washington for one.
Her mom set out for Pitts- burgh in her junior year, leav- ing Alisyn behind to stay out West wi h friends. She moved back to New Jersey for her senior year in high school at the home of another friend, then was kicked out and slept briefly in her car or on the beach before finding some- one 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 Cam- erota earned a scholarship at American University, she applied herself toward achieving her goals, getting serious at a time when 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 and CNN, Camerota is married with three children and a comfortable home in a Con- necticut suburb. But her high school experiences never left her.
“I had just a lot of loose ends emotionally,” she said. “I moved to six differ- ent houses in two years. I left sometimes before say- ing 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 wrote “Combat Love” when her children were teenagers and worried about what they might think. But the kids — twin girls who just started college and a son still in high school — are so absorbed in their own lives, she says, that they haven’t expressed much interest in reading the book.
Navigating the people in her past
Others from her past weren’t so thrilled. She’s still friends with some of the people she knew from high school and, though Camerota disguised names for the book, people who know the stories know who she is talking about.
Camerota regrets how she treated old boyfriends, and contacting some of them was tough. She felt she was in survivor mode in those days and not attentive to the feelings of others.
Her father is dead, but Camerota’s mother is 84 and lives in a nearby Connecticut town. She struggled with the idea of the stories becoming public. Camerota had talked about her resentments at an earlier time, a difficult conversation that was recounted in the book.
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. “People can be inspired by survival stories,” she said. “I know I am.”