Combat Love: A Story of Leaving, Longing, and Searching for Home

by Alisyn Camerota

Overview

CNN Anchor Alisyn Camerota’s memoir Combat Love is her story of growing up longing for stability and attachment as the foundation of her family crumbled. Set on the Jersey Shore in the free-range 1980s, Camerota finds the belonging she craves courtesy of a local punk rock band named Shrapnel and their diehard fans. Combat Love chronicles her near-misses and misadventures at clubs like CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, coupled with the sex, drugs, and punk rock of 1980s New Jersey. By the time she leaves home at sixteen, it feels like home had left her long ago. 

Combat Love is also the story of two women, mother and daughter, trying to forge their own paths and independence, and find their own happiness, success and wholeness. Camerota’s story searches for the linebetween shelter and risk, nurture and neglect, parenting and personal freedom. What are we willing to sacrifice for self-actualization and happiness? What if the answer is your mother, or your daughter? 

The two-time Emmy-award-winning Camerota retraces her steps down an often gritty path toward her dream of becoming a journalist. At times heartbreaking and pulse-pounding, Combat Love is an inspiration for anyone who’s ever searched for that elusive place called home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644284384
Publisher:	Rare Bird Books
Publication date:	03/26/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	356
Sales rank:	44,589
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Alisyn Camerota is a journalist, author, anchor and correspondent for CNN. In her three decades in journalism, Camerota has covered stories nationally and internationally, earning two Emmy Awards and the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award. Alisyn’s debut novel, Amanda Wakes Up, was selected by National Public Radio as one of the best books of 2017, and by Oprah Magazine as “a must read.” Her memoir Combat Love is set to be published in March 2024.

Editorial Reviews

"Combat Love is far more than an audacious coming of age story. It’s a reminder that beneath a successful adult’s polished exterior is the wildness of youth, vulnerability and loss. Camerota shows us the hard-earned work of finding your voice. So, while you might pick up Combat Love because of the author’s familiar face, you won’t be able to put it down for her candor, wit, and storytelling. In an embarrassment of riches, Alisyn Camerota is as singular a writer as she is a broadcast journalist."—Adrienne Brodeur, bestselling author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me

"A candid chronicle of hard-won survival."—Kirkus Reviews

"Combat Love transcends Alisyn's personal journey to serve as a powerful reminder that our deepest wounds can become catalysts to chase our wildest dreams and seize life's opportunities—and that confronting those wounds can lead us 'home.' And, yes, that route may be through sex, drugs, and punk rock."—Stephanie Szostak, actor and author of Selfish

"Combat Love is a compelling and candid account of a time in Alisyn's youth where risk and danger were more present than security and comfort. It’s a heartbreaking and raw account of living on the cusp of things going very wrong. Readers will reap the rewards of Alisyn's story of survival." —Jake Tapper, CNN Anchor and author of The Devil May Dance and The Hellfire Club

From the Publisher

2024-01-17
A journalist recounts emotional wounds.

Emmy Award–winning CNN anchor Camerota chronicles the loneliness, betrayal, and abandonment that led her on “a lifelong search for that elusive place called home.” The only child of divorced parents, she grew up living with her mother in suburban New Jersey; her father was a mysterious presence even before he left the family. Though she adored her mother, she never felt she was really the center of her mother’s life. Describing herself as an “endearing misfit,” Camerota became passionately enamored with the punk rock band Shrapnel, whose music—especially the song “Combat Love”—and performances dominated her adolescence. “I knew Shrapnel was more than just music,” she writes. “Shrapnel was an aspiration, an identity. Shrapnel became my ticket to tribal belonging.” She was wrenched from her tribe, though, when her mother uprooted her to move to Olympia, Washington, to follow a man. Camerota was desperately unhappy—until she met her handsome next-door neighbor. The author reveals years of difficult relationships, her struggle to find a place to live after her mother left Olympia with yet another man, and her constant feeling of hunger. “But was it true that I didn’t have enough food?” she reflects. “Or was the insatiability about something else entirely?” After college, she “relentlessly chased” two goals: becoming a reporter and finding love. She worked for Ted Koppel’s production company, where her boss was a cruel narcissist; became a reporter for America’s Most Wanted; joined a “merry mix” of young staffers on a new morning show—until it was canceled; and then took a job with Fox News, which ended, unsurprisingly, in a bitter showdown with Roger Ailes. Now at CNN, married and a mother of three, Camerota is where she has always wanted to be: at home.

A candid chronicle of hard-won survival.

Kirkus Reviews