From the author of the critically acclaimed Some of My Best Friends (a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year) comes a brilliant, incisive and unforgettable memoir that illuminates one of the most significant archetypes in our culture: the mentor—and the dynamics it breeds.

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Tajja Isen was young when she realized that she responded well to authority. She was a classic overachiever, even as a child—but something happened when someone "in charge" turned their gaze to her: she lit up, she stood straighter, she listened carefully, she followed direction. She wanted to earn their approval. She wanted to please them.

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Decades later, as an adult, Tajja realized that this is a pattern for her, and it's been an undercurrent to her personal and professional life: a ruthless tendency to seek—and often lose—herself in intense, complicated bonds with figures of authority. Tough Love braids personal narrative with cultural critique to explore the cultural significance of the mentor—the complex role they play in the myths of mastery and meritocracy, and why she has spent decades buying into those narratives, even when she ought to have known better.

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In investigating her own life and relationships, Tajja traces the path of these relationships from a familiar, comfortable set of variables—older patron, good intentions, benign attention—to the any number of directions they shoot off in: the erotic, the competitive, the exploitative. Parsing her own ambition, including what spawned it, what fed it and all the suspect things it's made her do, Tajja explores the wider intersection of power, submission, influence and the formation of the self.

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At once dazzlingly original and utterly relatable, Tough Love is a crystalline examination of power, ambition and the road to becoming the person you want to be.

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Tough Love

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