NEW YORK — Wandering the former grounds of New York’s famed nightclub CBGB, pointing to familiar names on band posters scattered among carefully preserved graffiti, is like being transported to a life that CNN’s Alisyn Camerota has long left behind.
The high-end clothing store there has now kept some of those artifacts to appeal to rock ‘n’ roll pilgrims, one of whom was wearing a Ramones T-shirt and wanted to see where the quartet started. The room is much more polished than it was four decades ago.
This also applies to Camerota. Her recent visit isn’t the only time travel she’s done lately.
The Jersey girl has written “Combat Love,” a memoir that focuses on sex, substance abuse, effective parental abandonment 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.
Camerota, posing for a photo under a street sign marked “Joey Ramone Way” outside the old club, even describes a cringe-inducing backstage encounter with the punk pioneers.
“People asked me about my high school life and I told them, and they kind of paled,” she said. “I thought everyone in the 1980s had my experiences…I guess not everyone sat in a car surrounded by skinheads or had a lot of car accidents and had friends who really struggled with drug addiction and alcoholism.”
Camerota, an only child, was 8 years old when her parents divorced. An already distant father largely disappeared from her life, while her mother pursued one failed relationship after another and her daughter moved abroad to Washington for once. Both parents hid secrets that explained, if not excused, their behavior.
Her mother left for Pittsburgh her freshman year, leaving Alisyn to stay out west with friends. She moved back to New Jersey for her senior year of high school to another friend’s house, got kicked out, and briefly slept in her car or on the beach before finding someone willing to board with her.
Despite her experiences, I wasn’t really a wild child, she said. “I was looking for belonging.”
She dreamed of being in television news since she was fifteen. She still went to school and did the work. When Camerota earned a scholarship to American University, she dedicated herself to achieving her goals and got serious at a time when many peers were ready to party. She had already been there.
Camerota is now a successful 57-year-old journalist whose credits include “America’s Most Wanted,” Fox News Channel and CNN. She is married with three children and a comfortable home in suburban Connecticut. But her high school experiences never left her.
“I just had a lot of loose ends emotionally,” she said. “In two years I moved to six different houses. I sometimes left before saying goodbye, and certainly before closing. Writing helped me put it in chronological order. Some of these stories didn’t haunt me, but they certainly followed me around begging for more attention.
She wrote “Combat Love” when her children were teenagers and worried about what they would think.
“I sat them down a few times during the writing process and said, ‘Guys, you know the ’80s were different than today, right?’” she said. “You know Mom didn’t have much supervision, right? You had helicopter parenting. I was the opposite.”
Now the children — twins who have just started college and a son still in high school — are so wrapped up in their own lives, she says, that they haven’t shown much interest in reading the book.
Others from her past were not so happy. She is still friends with some of the people she knew from high school and although Camerota disguised names for the story, people who know the stories know who she is talking about.
Camerota regrets the way she treated old boyfriends, and it has been difficult to reconnect with some of them. She felt like she was in survival mode those days and had no regard for the feelings of others. It took her longer to build a stable, lasting relationship than it did to become professionally successful.
Her father is dead, but Camerota’s mother is 84 and lives in a nearby town in Connecticut. She struggled with the idea of the stories becoming public. Camerota had previously spoken about her grudge, a difficult conversation recounted in the book.
“My mother asked me repeatedly over the last 10 years as I wrote this, ‘Can’t you wait until I’m dead?’” she said. “I needed her help and I wanted her blessing. I told her, ‘You know, Mom, I have the right to tell my story. I lived it.’ And she said, ‘Of course you are. But it’s also my story.’”
She hopes the book can be more than a personal therapy session.
“Everyone has some kind of survival story, and that can be a bridge,” she said. “We have been divided in this country for a long time, and I have always looked for a bridge. And I think if we share our individual stories, we would discover that we have much more in common.
“People can be inspired by survival stories,” she said. “I know I am.”
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David Bauder writes about media for The Associated Press. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, at @dbauder.