Jessica Tarlov is putting her first book into readers’ hands on Sept. 15, and the timing fits the job she already has. On ’ The Five, where she is the lone liberal cohost, she spends most nights going toe-to-toe with Emily Compagno, Greg Gutfeld, Dana Perino and Jesse Watters.
The book, I Disagree: Winning Arguments without Losing Friends, is part memoir and part guide to hard political conversations. Tarlov says she hears constantly from people on the right and on the left that they wish they were talking more with people they disagree with, because too many people are siloed and too hyper-partisan. That pitch is built for a moment when political arguments are not just loud but routine, and it gives her first book a clear purpose beyond the usual cable-news memoir.
Her route to that point has been anything but typical. Tarlov was raised in New York City by parents in the film industry, studied public policy and research at the London School of Economics, and earned a PhD in political science and government. She later worked for a conservative in London during Boris Johnson's mayoral reelection campaign, then joined a prominent democratic polling and consulting firm before becoming a contributor at in 2017. By 2022, she had moved up to cohost on The Five.
That background helps explain why she fits a show built on collision. Tarlov says she is outnumbered by a 4-to-1 dynamic on the table, but she does not treat that as a problem. She said she still does well, and that an employer telling her, “You take as big of a swing as you want,” gave her room to say what she thinks even when the argument gets hot. She also wears Converse sneakers on the show, a small signal that she is not trying to dress the part of a machine-made TV foil.
The bigger friction is obvious: she is a liberal voice on a conservative-leaning panel, yet she says the mismatch does not faze her because she wants to win elections and believes a Democratic administration would improve quality of life. That makes the book less like a side project than an extension of the role she already plays on television, turning the nightly clash into a set of rules for viewers who want to argue without shutting people out. The unanswered question now is whether I Disagree will be read mainly as a memoir from a familiar Fox face or as a usable manual for conversations that have gotten harder to have.
