Getting Even/Letting Go - by Julian Tepper (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Getting Even/Letting Go is a taut, darkly comic novel about money, memory, and the psychic wreckage of a marriage long after love has ended.

On a single spring afternoon in New York City, Gene Mills--a once-successful writer now living on fumes--hosts friends in his apartment while waiting for an art auction that could change everything. The paintings on the block were made by his ex-wife, now a global art star. They depict her affair, her ambition, and the life she detonated when she left him. Gene believes selling them is justice. Or survival. Or both.

As the clock ticks toward the auction lots, Gene spirals through old resentments, legal threats, parental guilt, financial desperation, and the corrosive pleasure of retaliation. What unfolds is an intimate portrait of a man trying to convert emotional injury into cash, to reclaim dignity through ownership, and to convince himself that getting even might finally allow him to let go.

With biting wit and relentless psychological precision, Julian Tepper explores the moral gray zones of divorce, custody, authorship, and art-world power--where love becomes leverage, memory becomes inventory, and victory may cost more than defeat. Getting Even/Letting Go is a novel about what remains when intimacy turns transactional, and whether freedom can ever be purchased without exacting a final, private price.

Review Quotes

"Darkly comic and razor-sharp, Getting Even/Letting Go is a novel about divorce, money, the art world, and the risks of settling old scores."----Svetlana Satchkova, author of The Undead

"In 'Getting Even/Letting Go, ' Julian Tepper gives us Gene Mills, a man desperately trying to squeeze the last morsel out of his failed marriage to a famous painter. Whether that morsel is money, power, something that passes for dignity or his own precarious foothold in the bourgeoisie, Gene isn't quite sure. Whether you ought to be rooting for him as he rushes toward his ending is never quite settled, either. The one thing certain is that you can't look away."----Will Heinrich, author of The King's Evil and From Darkness to Darkness

"Julian Tepper is New York City's Sally Rooney, once again bridging the gap between contemporary auto-fiction and what was once called autobiographical fiction with Getting Even/Letting Go, his fifth novel based in his hometown. He is a treasure of a chronicler, a younger, less caustic Philip Roth, a writer who writes each new book as an enticing invitation to witness him unravel and attempt to make sense of his life. Getting Even/Letting Go is Tepper in his best form, traversing the art world of our country's greatest city, and cautiously, gingerly, exposing his protagonist's familial travails. It's both funny and vulnerable, exposing the dark side of an art auction and a family divided. No one moves a story along like Tepper. His writing is so deceptively light and fast, that we don't know what has hit us until the end. Tremendously fun and absolutely heartbreaking."

----Paula Bomer, author of The Stalker and Inside Madeleine

"Julian Tepper's Getting Even/Letting Go is like a modern-day Zuckerman novel--as acerbically observant as Roth about divorce and fatherhood and failure and the vagaries of the art market, yet shot through with unexpected pathos. Gene Mills, tragically self-justifying--but maybe justified--will stick with me for a long time, as will the devastating ending."----Teddy Wayne, author of The Au Pair and The Winner

"Offering a pitiless dissection of a modern relationship, Tepper shows himself an expert at orchestrating scenes of domestic carnage. This plays out like a hipster Brooklyn version of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road."-- "Publishers Weekly on Cooler Heads"

About the Author

Julian Tepper's fifth novel, Getting Even/Letting Go (Rare Bird), will be published in the fall of 2026. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Playboy, Brooklyn Rail, Zyzzyva, Daily Beast, Bomb, Tablet Magazine, The New York Review of Architecture, and elsewhere. His essay, "Locking Down with the Family You've Just Eviscerated in a Novel" was a "Notable Essay of 2022" in Best American Essays 2022. He was born and raised in New York City.