Tough Love (A Lesson in Mentorship and Submission)

For fans of Melissa Febos and Leslie Jamison, this dazzling memoir probes the cultural myth of mentorship, the author’s pursuit of a series of domineering mentors, and what it took for her to break the cycle.

In this electric memoir, Tajja Isen recounts her artistic coming-of-age through the charged mentorships that defined it. Growing up, Isen was unusually susceptible to the idea that excellence depended on pleasing her superiors and submitting to their influence. Her taste and talent for obedience propelled her into situations that blurred desire, discipline, complicity, and coercion in the name of ambition. This pattern fueled her success as a child actor, her obsessive dedication as a student, and her eventual emergence as a writer—even when it did more harm than good.

With unflinching honesty and a forensic attention to power dynamics, Tough Love interrogates Isen’s attraction to authorities—the visionary directors, charismatic teachers, and hard-driving bosses—who seemed to hold the key to who she was, until she learned to step outside the seductive scripts of domination and submission. Entwining her journey with psychoanalytic theory and cultural criticism, Isen probes the places where mentorship intersects with desire, inequity, identity, kink, and labor to expose the anxiety and erotics of influence. The resulting memoir reckons with the boundaries that separate us from our mentors and the reasons why we might be tempted to cross them. Tough Love is a revelation for high achievers, people pleasers, former teachers’ pets, and anyone who has ever been unsure of who they want to become.