Jersey Shore, Punk Rock, and a Whole Lot of Journalism with Alisyn Camerota

0:04Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:47My guest today is CNN anchor Allison Camerata, who I am proud to call a friend. When Allison set out to put her life in writing with her new memoir, Combat Love, there was no question that it would be phenomenal. There's love. There's heartbreak. There's loss, struggle, family, resilience, and so much more. Allison shares it all with us on today's show.

1:19I'd like to take a second to recommend my friend Andy Ostroy's great podcast, The Back Room. Every episode is a fun, incredibly honest take on our society and the political situation, along with some brilliant guests. I've been honored to join Andy on the show, and you know anywhere that accepts me with no filter deserves a shout out.

1:46It's an amazing book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. The title of the book is Combat Love, which is an awesome title. We're going to get into the title in a second. It's the lovely Alison Camerata. She's a CNN anchor, and she's also an author. she's written several books, but this was very personal. This was a very real, you could feel a heartbeat coming out of the book. So, so it's great to have you tell us where it all started. Like, where did you get this drive and where did you get to become Alison Camerota? What, what happened? Well, first of all, it's great to see you. Um, it's been too long and, uh, I know everybody calls you Mooch, but do people at home call you Antony?

2:28Is that people call you They call me Antony. You know I've been called a lot worse than Antony and Mooch in my life. You know that, okay? For sure. But I just didn't know if your Italian peeps say Anthony or Antony, like my parents. It was funny. I was apparently in the transcript at the court, and they said, oh, did Anthony Scaramucci come to visit you? I guess they were trying to besmirch him by saying I was up there trying to help him get his sentence commuted. So I got asked about that. I said, of course I went there. You think he's the first person I visited in prison? I grew up in an Italian neighborhood.

3:01It's your home away from home. Right. I mean, what are you kidding me? Right. This book is so real. We're going to get into it. So tell me to start. Tell me the ambition arc. And how did you, you know, when did you know you were going to be Alison Camerota? What did you know? Well, OK. I mean, what I tell people is that my ambition grew out of hunger. And so I was always hungry. I had a kind of deprivation model from, you know, childhood on. I wanted more. I wanted more of my mother's attention and love. I wanted more validation. I wanted more recognition. I wanted to be seen and heard. And so mine is completely from hunger.

3:43And I think that, I don't know, I mean, I don't know what your impression is, but I think a lot of people who are on television, you know, crave being seen and heard and are filling some horrible emotional void. it wasn't until very late in life very recently after i got married my husband said i said you know ambition is from hunger like our kids aren't going to have hunger you know our kids are privileged kids so what are they going to do they're not going to have hunger and he was like yeah alson you're a freak of nature not all ambition he went to yale he knew kids who were silver spoon kids who were trust fund kids he were like some people have ambition just built in and they just want to do things that are good for the world it doesn't all have to be out of deprivation.

4:21I was like, you're full of shit. Like, I still don't even know if I believe that. But you, I mean, are you, was your, was your ambition driven from hunger or something else? No, my father was a crane operator. We had tremendous economic anxiety in the house. Yeah. There was domestic violence in my house, which I've written about and talked about, which, you know, I've been open with. And as a result of which it causes trauma. And so you're trying to heal the trauma. Now, you know, television personalities and politicians, they are looking for some sort of attention. I think it's watered down for TV people.

4:55The politicians are way worse. They have no self-awareness. Very few politicians can write this book, OK, because maybe they're told by their political consultant, oh, you know, try to write a book like this and try to be authentic in the book. Very few politicians can write a book this real and this raw. Well, thanks for saying that. I mean, also their handlers would tell them not to talk about their past if there was drug use or skeletons or, you know. You can't do that. But then again, it's like women in Europe tell me that American women stop at nine. They say, what do you mean? She, well, they've slept with 30 or 40 people, but they always tell their spouses nine people because they can't go into double digits due to the white Anglo-Saxon nature of America.

5:41So you're laughing. That's hilarious. I've never heard that. I always just heard you weren't supposed to sleep with more than your age. Oh, okay. well you see that okay well so then you you're you're just fine but you're saying you know at nine obviously anyway i've made my point but this is so real there are two women in this book there's a mom and there's a daughter but she's also like a uh it's also you're a mother actually weirdly you're a mother too in this book even though you're a daughter you're a mother so explain to my viewers and listeners what i mean and how you described your mom and your relationship so i was an only child and I was a product of the eighties.

6:20You know, I was a teenager in the eighties. And that was a particularly, if you'll recall, free range, unparented decade. We were out doing whatever we were doing. And obviously there were no cell phones and obviously no one kept track of where we were. You recognize this? Action park. Thank you. I went there. I have pictures. That was called class action park. Okay. How many burns you got on your back from falling off the alpine slide. Right. A million. I have, I'm going to pull up pictures of me in my bikini, if you can handle it, Anthony, at Action Park, because that was a rite of passage growing up in New Jersey.

6:57And that was just one day. You know what I mean? Like just going to some shoddy amusement park on some rickety ride that was, you know, just waiting for a class action suit. That was what we did every weekend. Completely unsafe. Probably being sexually harassed by 20 adults there. We're trying to give you free tickets. We're trying to give you a wet t-shirt without the contest. They're spraying cold water on you and your friends. Correct. I lived it with you. I lived it. This is why the book is so good. You know, this is the thing about you that your kids are going to help your kids. They eventually read, you know, my kids won't read my books for so many different reasons.

7:32Well, I think that they're not old enough yet. You know, they haven't gotten to the point of humbling. You know, I've had my ass kicked by life, society, late night comedians. And so what ends up happening is you have this humbling that happens. Then a result of it, you know, like they, they start out idolizing you to kids, right? And then they demonize you and then they humanize you, right? So it's idolize, demonize, humanize. You do that with your mom, by the way. I mean, this is what's so beautiful about this book. And I want you to talk, not me, but when you get to the humanize, then people open up the book.

8:07They'll start reading the book because they want to learn about their very human mom. Yeah. Tell us about your mom, by the way, your 84 year old, beautiful mom. Yes. So my mom's 84 now and she didn't want me to write this book. And I can tell you all about that in a minute. But first she was a very, very elegant, very beautiful, very intellectual, incredibly bright woman. And I was very, very honored to have her as my mother. I loved being her daughter. She was a high school teacher. When I was growing up, she taught English and drama. And I loved holding her hand and going into the high school and all of the high school kids, you know, making a big deal out of Mrs.

8:45Camerota, bringing her, you know, daughter to class. And it was a real honor. And so I was quite, because I was an only child, we were very symbiotically connected. And then my parents got divorced when I was eight. So we were really attached. I was very attached to her. You know, she was my only other family member, immediate family member. And then, you know, she was, when my parents got divorced in her late 30s, you know, so, or I mean, mid 30s. So she went back to school to get her PhD. She began dating. And I felt abandoned by both of these things. She would go to school at night, go to night classes.

9:23I was sometimes alone. Sometimes I would stay with friends. She would go out on dates. I was left behind. And I really longed for more attention from her and she just couldn't give it to me. And at some point, probably when I was around 11 or 12, I just started substituting friends in for family. And so I had all of these, I had these surrogate families and I would spend, you know, nights and weekends over at my best friend's houses. And that stayed, that continued basically throughout my teenage years. I just stopped kind of needing my parents or stopped craving attention from my parents because I didn't think that they were capable of giving it to me.

10:00They weren't. And, you know, that's around the time that I started just doing riskier things. I don't want to give up the whole book because the book is so good, but give us a few risky things. So when I was 13, I fell in love with this local punk rock band named Shrapnel. And Shrapnel was the older brothers of some of my friends from Shrewsbury, New Jersey. Shrewsbury is a very tiny little one square mile town in Monmouth County, New Jersey. So Shrapnel were like our hometown heroes because they were about to put out an album. They opened for the Ramones. They were going into CBGB all the time and playing at CBGB.

10:31They were like on the cusp of this really exciting musical career. And we were all so excited. And I just really fell in love with them. I saw them live for the first time at my future high school when I was in eighth grade. I was 13. And from that point on, I just I I had it like I had shrapnel fever and I just started trying to figure out how I could ever see them and where I could see them live. And so the only way to do that was eventually to end up starting to go to CBGB and some of these, you know, punk rock clubs in, as you well know, Anthony, like the most burned out part of New York, the Bowery in New York in 1981 and 82.

11:09too. I lived it with you. If you were from Long Island, you would have been listening to like Mazarin, which is the same sort of band. Yes. Yes. Except Shratton was so much more talented. But anyway, so I was just going like I was doing it. I wasn't doing it for the sake of just risk taking and I wasn't doing it for the sake of danger. I was a scaredy cat. I didn't like being in all of these dangerous situations. There was one night where I was tired. I was still, you know, going to high school the next day and I would have like a history test. So I would be tired at midnight after shrapnel set.

11:42And I, the, the, the general practice among my friends is if you were tired, you had to go out to the car and sleep by yourself. Like nobody was going to leave the show, you know, just because you were tired. So I went out to my friend's car in the Bowery at midnight and got in the car and I fell fast asleep. And I awoke to punk rock skinheads with baseball bats breaking open, shattering the passenger side window of the car right in front of us and all of this like horrible sound and glass shattering. And they were stealing stuff, as you remember from 1981, out of the car in front of us. And I pout my head up and I saw what was happening.

12:16And I ducked down into the stairwell and just covered my ears and sat there and prayed that I would make it home that night and that I wouldn't be, you know, killed by skinheads. And that was just one night. I mean, you know, there was danger lurking around those times. And so I was pretty, I was unsupervised and I got myself into various pickles like that. And then the upshot is that at 16, I finally, I left home because, you know, I didn't feel like my mother's, I felt like my mother's path and my path were diverging. And I left home at 16 and things, spoiler alert, did not get easier from there.

12:49And it took a long time for my mother and me to work our way back around to each other. It's an amazing real story. And, you know, one of the problems is like, you know, Taylor Swift has a new song out called Cassandra. And I was trying to explain to my kids who Cassandra actually was, the great literary figure from Homer who's blessed with clairvoyance, but she's cursed with nobody believing her. And what Homer's trying to say with Cassandra is that is all of us with the truth, Alison. We can't handle the truth. Cassandra was the first Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. And so when we shed our denialism and we can look at the truth in our own lives or we can look in the truth in our society, we get happier.

13:33We make things better. This book had to be therapeutic for you, I believe. Am I right in that? Oh, gosh, yes. Oh, my gosh, yes. Very therapeutic. Tell us why. Tell us why. Because these were I had a lot of unfinished business. And so for me, it gave me a lot of closure. These things were rattling around in my head. You know, when you get an earworm of a song and you just, it just plays over, it's like stuck in a needle and it plays over and over and over in your head until you either hear the song again, or you can somehow banish it. I had an earworm of my past. These stories played on this loop in my head all the time.

14:06And the only way that I was able to exercise them ultimately was to write them down like this. I always wanted a chronology. They were bouncing around in my head and I couldn't remember exactly what happened first and what happened, you know, last. And so finally, I just treated this book like a reporter. You know, I wrote down everything I remembered. And then I went back to my journals that I kept as a teenager and 20-something-year-old young woman and cross-referenced it. And then I went back to all the people in the episodes that I write about and asked them what they remembered of these nights.

14:38There's a night that I sneak backstage at a Ramones concert. And I was with a friend of mine who I call in the book Tom. And I hadn't talked to him for, you know, 35 years. and I found on Facebook and said, hey, can I call you for a minute? He was like, sure. And I said, can you tell me what you remember about the night that I dragged you backstage at the Ramon's show and we snuck backstage and he told me everything. And like it gelled with mine and it supplemented some of my memory. And then I was able to add some of that into the scene. So I did a lot of research for the book and that helped me so much tie up loose ends from the past.

15:08And they don't haunt me anymore. I mean, it really gave me more bandwidth, more mental bandwidth. When I read the book, I was like, good for you, Alison Camerota, because when I finished the book, I was like, well, I thought I knew you. And, you know, I consider you a friend. You've always been great to me. And I hope you feel likewise. But I feel like I was more connected to you. I feel like I got you more. And I got the tenderness of you through the life experience that you've run the gamut of. Let's talk about something fun for a second. I want to talk a little bit about America's Most Wanted.

15:39But before I get there, I want to talk about your love life for a second. Okay. because this book, okay, Combat Love, I mean, you're doing fabulously with this love life of yours. You're dating. You're going to all the best restaurants. You were, you know, you're sitting next to like all-star people. And then all of a sudden, this curveball comes into your life at age 26. You run into it. What happened? Something happened to you. What happened? You ran into somebody and everything changed. That's so funny. Well, I mean, look, well, a couple of things. I am glad that you are heralding my love life because I...

16:16You were heralding the love life. I didn't. You were heralding. Yeah, yeah. I'm with you. All I'm doing is reading and reflecting. Part of why I was willing to share very personal, intimate things in the book was because I feel like I wanted to let teenage girls know that it doesn't have to be all about sexual harassment, sexual assault, campus sexual assault, binge drinking. You know, there was around the Me Too movement, there was rightfully, I think, a correction where people finally women, young women started talking about some of the experiences that they'd had that they had kept secret about sexual assault or whatever.

16:53And that was long overdue, for sure. But that also has a way of like then becoming the narrative where sex seems scary and having a love life and a boyfriend and everything can seem scary. And I just wanted to remind people, everyone, that like teenage girls can have a lot of agency. Teenage girls, you can have a very positive love life. I did for a long, I mean, I feel like I have in my life and I feel like my boyfriends were a big part of my life and I'm so glad that I had them. They were kind of protective of me. So it was a different narrative and I felt like I should share that for my own teenage daughters that it can be super positive too.

17:28But all that said, you know, I basically combat love has a double meaning and one is that it was a shrapnel song, combat love. Another was combating, you know, when you combat something that you're afraid of. And I was keeping a lot of things at an arm's length because I had been so, I guess, trained from childhood not to trust anybody and that I would be abandoned. And I had so many abandonment issues that I was kind of keeping everybody. I wasn't being vulnerable. I didn't allow myself to be vulnerable in my 20s. And so I just, you know, got myself into some trouble with mental health and with relationships because I thought I wanted love, but I was doing everything possible to combat it.

18:14And in the story, you hear about how I wasn't able to have a real committed relationship and what I ended up having to learn in order to do that. Right. So, I mean, the book is fabulous. Okay, so let's go to America's Most Wanted. You were nervous. I don't see you as nervous. Well, I was only nervous because I didn't know what I was doing. I was hired as an off-air reporter. So that basically meant like a field producer. So I was hired to go out and find these unsolved murders and mysteries and go and figure out how we would tell them on America's Most Wanted in these little recreations, these little mini movies.

18:50And I had never done that before. And I just took to it right away. So the first day, I was nervous. I went in, you know, bright eyed and bushy tailed and couldn't wait to start my new job. And the producers pulled me aside and they were like, oh, just wait till the nightmares start. And I was like, nightmares? What do you mean? They were like, oh, yeah, all the blood and guts and gore. It's going to really seep into your psyche and haunt your sleep. I was like, oh, I hadn't occurred to me. And then what ended up happening was I loved that job. I bonded with it. I love the criminal mind, you know, finding out about the criminal mind.

19:23I loved getting justice for the victims. Like it ended up being extremely empowering for me, that job, even though people had predicted that it could haunt you. It had the opposite effect on me. It actually made me feel safer that I was going to be able to go out and get the bad guys. All right. So your mom's doing good. I mean, everybody that reads this book wants to know about your mom. I know. It's true. Is your mom doing good? What's going on with her? She's doing really well. She really didn't want me to write the book as I alluded to. Is she dating? No, she has. So her husband, my stepfather, died 10 years ago, and she has, I think, retired her dating life.

19:59And she's just, you know, 20 minutes ago, she was out in the kitchen with my kids helping my son with a book report for school. So she's just a grandmother who's hanging out with us. She's still executing on that English teaching. Absolutely. Having a grandmother who was an English scholar is very helpful, yes. And she's doing great, Anthony. Like she really, as I said, she said many times, can't you wait till I'm dead? Or I told her I wanted to write the book. And I'm so glad that I didn't because it ended up working out. Like she. I think if she reads this book, I think she's very happy about it now because.

20:34She's happy with how it ended up for us after, you know, a lot of turbulence. She knows there are seven real plots as an English major. And she knows that there's a hero's journey in here. And she knows there's a rite of passage. And what is, what is our life? It's a collection of memories, but it's also these experiences shape us, you know, and they and also this is a book that your children will read and you have created space in their lives for their own failure, which is very, very important. You're a super, you don't mind me saying so, you're a super successful person and you don't want that to eclipse any of the ambition of your children.

21:12And this book is so real that you've created now open territory for your children to live and explore their own lives safely. And this is a reason why I gave the book to my daughter. I wanted her to read it so that she could get a sense for trials and tribulations of what happens. And the good news for my daughter and our children, they missed Action Park because Because we almost died at Action Park, right? You know that you and I almost died. We were probably there at the same time. I don't know if I almost died, but I almost got maimed. Like something had to have been amputated. Exactly. Nobody can understand this.

21:44I have this. The Mobile Hills sent this to me because I commented about it on CNBC one night. It was called Class Action Park. Okay, so we're down to the five words. I have what I call my five famous words. We read your book. You come up with five words. I want you to react to those words. you give me a sentence, a word, whatever comes to your head, okay? I'm going to say the word shrapnel. I say fabulous. I mean, I write Anthony in the book about how it doesn't have a negative connotation for me. And I want to be sensitive because I know for most human beings, it does have a negative connotation.

22:18This is the rock band that you were hanging with. Yeah. So for me, shrapnel is just the most nostalgic, warmest excitement. That's my world association with it. All right. And I love that. Okay. So I say the word home. What do you say? I would say, you know, warmth. I would say warmth and safety. Safety, safety. See, both said it at the same time because when I hear you in the book, home is safety. Home is a safe zone. Yes. Okay. Want to say the word family? Gratitude. Yeah. Yeah. I'm so grateful. I'm so incredibly grateful, eternally grateful that I've been able to have this family that I have and create this family.

23:00I desperately wanted to have a happy marriage. I achieved that. I wanted to have children. I achieved that. I'm very, very grateful for that. God bless. When I hear the word family, I see that there's perfection in the imperfection. I think it's very important for people to know that, that every family has its own facets and it's like a jewel. There's always a little bit of a dent in the jewel, but it's beautiful. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's good and bad. Okay. Why do you say the word loss? I would just say universal. You know, I think that that's something that we, that all of us have. And I think that part of the reason, another part of the reason I wrote the book is because I think it's a bond that we can talk about.