By Eileen Moon
SHREWSBURY – Shrewsbury Borough Hall was full last Friday night as old friends and former neighbors of CNN broadcast journalist Alisyn Camerota welcomed her back to her hometown.
Camerota visited Shrewsbury on a book tour supporting her new memoir, “Combat Love.”
It is, she said, the story of a girl who loved a band. But it is also an exploration of the meaning of home, the importance of belonging, and a testimony to the fact that even rocky roads can lead in the right direction.
Taking a seat at the front of the room across from her childhood friend and now-Shrewsbury mayor, Kim Eulner, Camerota fielded questions from Eulner and the audience in a casual back-and-forth conversation. It resurrected a Shrewsbury childhood as it was in a time long past, when The Grove Shopping Center was a cornfield and kids could ride their bikes to Friendly’s ice cream shop (now a Five Guys restaurant) on Broad Street to share the sweet delights of a honeysuckled summer afternoon.
While her current book tour has taken her coast to coast, Camerota noted, “This is the highlight. This is the one I’ve been looking forward to for weeks.”
A two-time Emmy award winner for her breaking news coverage of George Floyd’s death and Roger Stone’s arrest, Camerota, 58, began her professional broadcasting career after graduating from American University. She worked as a self-confessed incompetent researcher and supplier of Diet Cokes to broadcast journalist Ted Koppel, then-host of ABC’s political commentary program “Nightline.”
A CNN anchor and correspondent since 2014, she is also the author of “Amanda Wakes Up,” a novel Camerota said was inspired by her 16 years at Fox News where she co-hosted “Fox and Friends Weekend,” among other assignments.
Her fascination with television broadcasting began in the TV room of her family’s home at 923 Broad St., where she made friends with a cast of characters that included Marcia Brady, Keith Partridge and Lucy Ricardo.
When she discovered Phil Donahue, host of a daytime talk show that engaged its audiences in the issues of the day, Camerota knew what she wanted to do.
“I had a big dream and my dream from the time I was 15 was to be a TV reporter and anchor like Phil Donahue. That was my North Star. I’m very, very proud of myself that I made that dream happen.”
It wasn’t an easy journey.
She was halfway through fifth grade at Shrewsbury Borough School when her repeated run-ins with authority inspired her mother to send her to private school.
“I was headstrong,” Camerota said. “I was sort of challenging authority. Why do I have to write on the board 50 times, ‘I will not use inappropriate language’?’’
For the next three years, Camerota attended the New School of Monmouth County, which she described as “an uber-progressive, small, private school” where smart and quirky kids found a haven of their own.
“That was where we were allowed to grow into whatever our destiny was,” she said.
In eighth grade, she attended a concert by a local punk band, which would play a pivotal role in the direction of her life. A friend’s older brother “drove us to the wonderland of Red Bank Regional,” she remembered. “I knew it held this garden of teenage delights.”
A band called Shrapnel played in the RBR cafeteria, a raucous event that ultimately had the principal calling the cops. Members of the band went on to successful careers in the music business, two of them as founding members of the band Monster Magnet.
For Camerota and many other teens who attended, the concert at RBR was a life-changing moment. “People remember it as a peak experience. It kind of changed my life.”
It also inspired her choice of a title for her memoir: “Combat Love” is the name of one of the group’s songs, part of the soundtrack to a time in Camerota’s life when the idylls of a suburban childhood gave way to a far more perilous adolescence.
From after-hours beer parties and bonfires on Sea Bright beach to walks on the wild side at CBGBs, Camerota’s book recounts the adventures and misadventures of her youth with a journalist’s attention to detail.
“I felt like I had a lot of unresolved history,” she said. “There would be nights that were very vivid to me. It was important for me just for my own history, to put it down.
I treated it like a journalistic assignment,” she said.
In addition to her own notes and journals, Camerota interviewed many of the people she grew up with, from band members to best friends, double-checking the details she remembered as those long-ago teen years unfolded. In recounting her experiences, Camerota created aliases for some of the friends who shared in her adventures while others are composite characters that represent a few childhood friends who were better left unnamed.
Despite the many positive aspects of growing up in Monmouth County, Camerota said, “there was this ‘shady side’ of so much substance abuse. I do feel lucky that I dodged that bullet. I don’t think I had better character. I don’t think I had better discipline. I just think that wasn’t my predisposition.”
In the years after her parents’ divorce, Camerota’s life was further uprooted when she became a reluctant transplant to Bellingham, Washington, where her mother moved to be with a boyfriend. While she soon found a circle of friends, she missed the life she’d known. When her mother decided to move to Pittsburgh to pursue a teaching job, Camerota refused to go with her and worked to find a way to return to New Jersey.
“I missed the rules of what I knew here,” she said. “I missed the sense of belonging.”
Eventually, after reaching out to her old school, she found a family willing to take her in and returned to Red Bank Regional.
But at 17, Camerota was less than the ideal house guest, and her host family situation quickly fell apart. “I was kicked out,” she said. She was on her own.
There were nights when she slept in her car or on the beach, brushing sand off the uniform she wore as a waitress at Friendly’s because she had no place to shower.
Eventually, she asked her high school drama teacher, Rene Maxwell, if she had a room that Camerota could live in. Maxwell said yes.
“I consider that a life-saving moment,” Camerota said. Today, Camerota lives in Connecticut with her husband and their three children. Their twin daughters are freshmen in college and their son is a junior in high school. She is grateful for a successful career and a stable family.
“I feel like I won the brass ring,” she said.
Signed copies of “Combat Love” are available at River Road Books in Fair Haven while supplies last.
The article originally appeared in the June 20 – June 26, 2024 print edition of The Two River Times.
