About this item
Highlights
- Alisyn Camerota's memoir Combat Love is her story of growing up longing for stability and attachment as the foundation of her family crumbled.
- Author(s): Alisyn Camerota
- 356 Pages
- Biography + Autobiography, Editors, Journalists, Publishers
Description
Book Synopsis
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 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.
Review Quotes
"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