COMBAT LOVE

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.