Don’t forget to check out video from Alisyn Camerota’s cover shoot HERE!
“One of the nicest, patently sincere, most fun people we have ever had in New York Moves Magazine… ”
Moonah Ellison, Publisher
“It was an absolute pleasure to host her photoshoot… ”
Spencer Heyfron, Photographer
Interview by Moonah Ellison
Story by Bill Smyth
I’m at a photoshoot in the heart of New York City during the winter—Fifth Ave Midtown, a penthouse to be exact—and the cover we are shooting, CNN’s Alisyn Camerota, is outside braving the elements. Even though it is cold. She always has a smile. That smile. The smile that millions of viewers have seen for so many years, it’s infectious. And she’s excited—excited for this cover shoot, and excited for her new memoir, Combat Love, out this March from Rare Bird Books.
For me, it was a chance to see Camerota be herself. We see her on TV, on the network, doing her thing, and you often don’t expect the person in real life to be as playful and genuine as they seem on TV. But she is! It’s been a pleasure…
“Even when I’m delivering the news, I try to inject some levity,” says Camerota.”To be a little playful because I feel these times call for it, and so I’m always really flattered when somebody says I am like that in real life too and they can see both.”
In her three decades in journalism, the Edward R. Murrow Award and Emmy Award-winning Camerota can quite frankly own the phrase “Been there, done that”. Having covered some of the world’s and country’s biggest events over the past 30 years, from her breaking news coverage of the death of George Floyd and her coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, to the Parkland, FL school shooting in 2018, Camerota has had a front row seat to breaking news.
Camerota’s career in journalism began after she graduated from the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C., graduating cum laude in Broadcast Journalism then starting in local news, working for various stations, including WHDH in Boston and WTTG in Washington, D.C. She joined Fox News Channel in 1998. During her time at Fox, she served in several roles, including as a correspondent and as co-host of the morning show Fox & Friends Weekend and the late-morning news program America’s News Headquarters.
After 15 years at Fox, Camerota decided to join CNN in 2014, quickly establishing herself as a key figure within the network. She co-anchored various shows across the network, as well as numerous primetime specials, including Tipping Point: Sexual Harassment in America and The Hunting Ground: Sexual Assault on Campus. She is on the national advisory council of The News Literacy Project, which works to teach kids how to spot misinformation and fake news. She’s also an Advisory Member of Press Forward, working to combat sexual harassment in newsrooms.
Which takes us to current day Camerota. Author. A memoir. A book about her. I can feel the excitement when we dive right into it. I can also immediately tell this is something true-and-dear to her heart, and she just cannot wait to talk about it. There’s that smile again. To talk about her journey, the exposure to so many life changing moments she’s had in the world of news. So I don’t get in her way. I wanted to know so many things, including the reason behind the title, Combat Love.
“Combat love, I realized, there’s a double meaning,” said the New Jersey born-and-raised Camerota. “And so to combat something is to fight against something but also, okay, you combat love and I just kind of think it’s a cool, compelling concept. “When I was thirteen, I fell in love with a local punk rock band from New Jersey called Shrapnel. And their first 45, their first single that they released, was called “Combat Love.” And I played it over and over and over again, in my bedroom, as a thirteen-year-old girl, picking up the needle, putting it back down and playing it over again and hoping that someday, somehow, I could meet Shrapnel and become friends with them. So it’s [the book title] really just kind of a symbol of what that thirteen-year-old girl wanted and the journey she was going to go on to get it.”
The chapters of the book are song titles, an ode to how much music has played a key role in Camerota’s life, having made a number of exploits and adventures at clubs like the legendary punk palace CBGB in the East Village and the Warhol-esque nightclub Max’s Kansas City in Gramercy. Chapter names are straight out of a rock ‘n roll tome, like First to Flee Shrapnel, Chop Up Your Mother, and Skidmarks On My Heart. “I connect with music on a very deep level, and it is a crying shame that I have no singing voice and can’t play an instrument,” Camerota laughs. “So I can truly only be a music fan, and I am a hardcore music fan. I always looked to lyrics for life guidance. I learn lyrics very quickly. I know the lyrics to hundreds of songs and they’re playing in my head at all times. So a lot of those chapter titles are song titles that were playing at that moment in my life. So there’s also a playlist for the book, and it’s basically the soundtrack of my life.”
The memoir flows and everything is intertwined with storylines overlapping. Moving onwards into her journey. Love. Writer’s note, I wear my heart on my sleeve for everything; it can sometimes be a blessing or a detriment depending on the day and who you ask. If you’re not going to do it for love—or anything for that matter—what’s the point? But I wasn’t feeling love while reading Camerota’s memoir. In fact, as I read Combat Love, I felt a lot of pain. I felt a lot of unshared pain, bleeding out on the page, a person trying to squirm through and come out on the other side of it.
“I feel like I, for a long time, was the opposite of you. So you say you wear your heart on your sleeve, and that it’s all about love, and you’re able to kind of be open about what you love,” said Camerota. “And I feel like starting from when I was young, I thought that was just too vulnerable and too dangerous. Shut it down. Don’t let anybody know you really love them. That’s just a position of weakness. It took me a long time, decades, to work my way around, through pain, that actually, loving somebody fully and unconditionally, is a position of strength. And it’s brave. But I didn’t get there until my thirties, because when I was a kid and I did that, I felt like it didn’t pay off, I felt like my heart got squashed. So it took me a long time to work my way back around to being vulnerable enough to love fully.”
Camerota talks in detail about how her mother and father’s relationship were pivotal points in her life; she talks about the Valentine’s Day card she wrote to her mom and dad at the age of 6 telling them not to fight all the while knowing their marriage is unraveling. Being so close to Valentine’s Day during this interview, I couldn’t not bring that up. But I thought it was very important that at the age that she was at, as an only child, as somebody that’s actually kind of really feeling something, being exposed to at an age where you’re too young and still growing up. All reasons why Camerota grappled with trust and why love was so hard.
“No child wants their parents’ marriage to unravel. And even then I didn’t know what that was, I was six years old, I couldn’t tell you what was happening, but I knew it wasn’t good and there was tension. So I’m writing this Valentine’s card to remember love basically. I’m asking them to not be angry with each other and don’t be annoyed. I just thought, when I found that Valentine’s card—I have a big tin that I keep with different mementos in it— I thought it was so touching that six-year-old Alisyn says to her parents, “and remember it takes two to tango. (laughs)
“I didn’t have a role model of a happy marriage, and, or a committed marriage. So I didn’t really even believe that that was possible for a long time, and I didn’t know what that looked like. And I think both my parents were protecting themselves.”
Camerota is happy at CNN as an anchor as well as a correspondent for The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper; her memoir is a labor of love, yet this isn’t her first foray in writing a published piece of text. Camerota’s debut novel, Amanda Wakes Up (Viking, 2017), was selected by National Public Radio as one of the best books of the year, and by Oprah Magazine as “a must read.”
For now Camerota will hit the streets, a book tour for Combat Love to tell her story and inspire others who have had a rough go at life. Meeting fans, sitting in on empowerment panels, hearing stories of other women who share similar childhoods. It’s a story she had to tell, wanted to tell and get off her chest.And through it all she will handle it head-on, strong and flash that oh-so-familiar signature Camerota trait.
There’s that smile again.
Credits:
photography by Spencer Heyfron
Styling by Alison Hernon
Grooming by Mariana Jimenez
Location 724 Fifth Ave, Penthouse