Tough Love
Some of My Best Friends
Books
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.
A fearless and darkly comic essay collection about race, justice, and the limits of good intentions.
In this “inspiring, determined work of personal narrative and cultural criticism” (Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives), essayist and award-winning voice actor Tajja Isen explores the absurdity of living in a world that has grown fluent in the language of social justice but doesn’t always follow through.
These nine daring essays explore the sometimes troubling and often awkward nature of that discord. Some of My Best Friends takes on subjects including the cartoon industry’s pivot away from colorblind casting, the pursuit of diverse representation in the literary world, the law’s refusal to see inequality, and the cozy fictions of nationalism. Throughout, Isen “shows a bracing willingness to tackle sensitive issues that others often sweep under a rug” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
In the spirit of Zadie Smith, Cathy Park Hong, and Jia Tolentino, Isen interlaces cultural criticism with her lived experience to explore the gaps between what we say and what we do, what we do and what we value, what we value and what we demand.