Meet Alisyn Camerota when her memoir, Combat Love, launches at The Westport Library. Alisyn will be in conversation with fellow memoirist and Westporter Gabi Coatsworth.
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 16, 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 line between 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.
"A candid chronicle of hard-won survival." —Kirkus 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
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. Her 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.”
Gabi Coatsworth is the author of a memoir, Love's Journey Home (May 2022), and a novel, A Beginner's Guide to Starting Over (April 2023), as well as a contributor to several anthologies. She runs monthly meetings for writers at The Westport Library.
