“A riveting exploration of idolatry—its alluring gifts and ultimate perils, told by an astute and sympathetic narrator. Tajja Isen is a phenomenal writer, and every page of Tough Love brims with intelligence, heart, and stunning prose.”

– Melissa Febos, bestselling author of The Dry Season and Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

“Supple and precise, Tajja Isen’s Tough Love is a page-turner animated by the electricity of insight, tracing the contours of yearnings and pleasures not often plumbed with such depth: submitting to rules, surrendering to power and its capacity to outline the edges of a self, catching glimpses of our possible selves in the gazes of others. It bristles with the complexities of scene and situation, the striated layers of connection and friction that, in Isen’s gloriously lucid prose, get clarified into gleaming shards of wisdom. Tough Love renewed my faith in personal writing as a place of abundance, humility, and rigor, a form that—at its best—hums with the strange, reverberating music of being alive.”

– Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of Splinters and The Empathy Exams

“Tajja Isen’s Tough Love is a vivid and nuanced dissection of the mentor-mentee dynamic, written with remarkable lucidity and a generous refusal to preach, prescribe, or judge. With empathy, vulnerability, and tremendous insight, Isen examines ‘the protégée’ and her desire to ‘be good’ from every perspective, probing and excavating the messy, complex, erotic, painful, naïve and agency-granting dimensions of such desires. Tough Love is truly a rare achievement: as propulsive as it is profound. Isen is a writer of extraordinary talent.”

– Chloé Cooper Jones, author of Easy Beauty, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

“As a retired dominatrix, I know something about how power works in dyads. Isen nailed it. Tough Love made me think anew about every mentorship relationship I’ve had . . . I wish I’d read this before I went to high school and college and my first job. I hope my kid will read it.”

– Margo Steines, author of Brutalities: A Love Story

“If I wasn’t an Isen-head already, Tough Love would have launched me into full-on parasocial obsession. Tajja Isen excavates the psychosexual elements of mentorship with the precision of a surgeon and the voice of your funniest friend on their best day. I highlighted and annotated this book like I was going to be tested on it. Isen’s vulnerable portrait of herself as someone white-knuckling her way to excellence is the best kind of ouroboros: In creating this perfect book, she might be undercutting her message about letting go of perfection . . .”

– Ruth Madievsky, bestselling author of All-Night Pharmacy

“One of many things I admire about Tajja Isen’s writing is how deeply she trusts those who engage with it: never preaching or prescribing, but rather encouraging us to read and think alongside her. Sharp, funny, and unfailingly generous, Tough Love is both a page-turning personal narrative and an invitation to reflect on broader cultural questions of work, desire, fulfillment, and growth. This book is Isen at her absolute best.”

– Nicole Chung, author of A Living Remedy and All You Can Ever Know

“Tough Love is not merely a unique, incisive, and self-implicating memoir with relevance far more broadly, but also a rigorous, impassioned, original, and accessible study of power and desire. It holds up from start to finish and never flags. I can’t stop thinking about how brilliant it is and have already raved about it to friends who I know will love it.”

– Maud Newton, author of Ancestor Trouble

“Tough Love is a bracing, unflinching examination of mentorship as a site of power, desire, and self-construction. Tajja Isen writes with extraordinary clarity about the costs of excellence, and the quiet seductions of submission, offering language for experiences many readers have lived but never named.”

– Thao Hà, author of Love Letters to the Dirty South