Another Cursed Corner: Julian Tepper Interviewed by Jamie Kahn
Julian Tepper is an American novelist and essayist. He has written four novels: Balls, Ark, Between the Records, and most recently, Cooler Heads. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Playboy, The Brooklyn Rail, Tablet, and elsewhere.
Jamie Kahn is a Brooklyn-based writer whose work has been featured in Glamour, The Evergreen Review, Epiphany, Brooklyn Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, and others. She serves as the contributing features editor for Epiphany, and is the Programming and Development Manager for The Urbane Arts Club.
Jamie Kahn: How was the process of writing Cooler Heads different from that of Balls, Ark, and Between The Records?
Julian Tepper: Well, for one thing, I wrote the first draft of Cooler Heads longhand, something I had never done before. I had gone out to Los Angeles to begin a book promotion tour for Between the Records, and this happened to coincide with the pandemic and the first week of the world shutting down. I ended up staying in Los Angeles at my father’s home for the next three months, and with my laptop back in New York, I resorted to pencil and paper. It was a beautiful experience, truly. I fell hard for the touch of the lead on paper. That said, as soon as I returned home, I resumed writing on a computer. But the shape of the sentences was no doubt affected by this difference of longhand versus computers. Otherwise, I don’t know if I’m getting better with each book, but I do like to think I’m being more honest, both with myself and my reader. That difference—that progression from one book to the next—feels very real to me.
JK: Cooler Heads is such an emotional and intense novel. Did the project of writing it feel intense and emotional too?
JT: Yes and no. There are parts of the book—the very dramatic birth scene, the closing moments in the Polish countryside outside Krakow, Westhampton, the son biking off and getting lost—that brought out a lot of emotion in the writing itself and each time I reread it, the hundreds of times there in the editing process, I really did feel it hard. Swelling heart, tears, all of it. But on the whole, after that first draft, the emotion gets replaced by the thought of, How can I make this work? How can I make it better? I would say a kind of technical focus takes over for the emotion.
JK: I really love the classic quality that this book has. It’s a tangle of lovers having their dramas—and so few people write that story anymore! What made you want to go for it?
JT: Thank you, Jamie. I had a story to tell, and that’s really why I went ahead and told it. But I am with you there in the sense that I was sometimes thinking the same thing to myself along the way, that I was quietly pleased to have a love story to work with, these themes and dynamics. I wouldn’t have ever forced this kind of story. It was in the vault, ready to come out of me.
JK: If I may ask: how do you feel about polyamory?
JT: I feel much as Paul, the protagonist, feels, and I suppose I’ll open the book now and quote from it: “…it doesn’t work. It’s too painful, honestly. You and your wife will just end up hurting each other. If you still care at all about this person—if you care at all—then these actions are going to cause pain. You can either choose to ignore that pain or you can confront it. But either way, it’s going to be there, burning a hole through your life.” I stand by that. Nevertheless, I also understand why people seek out other forms of being together in a relationship, trying to work out the constraints of monogamy and so on. Is there a better way? Another way? What we know for sure is that in the total history of our civilizations, no one has really figured any of it out. But then there’s no reason to stop trying, either!
JK: How does it feel to have a project like this out in the world? Has the reception surprised you?
JT: It’s been a very good experience so far, the best of my four novels. I don’t know if I’m just growing up and have a better head about these things, but I have a lot of peace around this book, personally. None of the usual existential grasping that comes with the publishing experience where you’re saying to yourself, Okay, now what’s going to happen? What next? What next! I am feeling oddly calm and at ease. I am probably most grateful at this point in my life just to be here with a new book.
As for the response, you’ve pointed out that the novel is an emotional one and that’s also meant a bigger emotional response from readers with a lot of people turning to me and opening up, wanting to talk about their divorces and sexual/romantic needs, aspirations, issues. I am happy to engage.
JK: I have found that your writing often surprises me with the whimsical, imaginative quality in the details. A column about cursed corners, for example, and the scenes with his mother in the hotel where she lives. Is there anything in particular that inspired elements like these?
JT: That’s very kind, thank you. Well, on one hand, this is just me, how my brain works. But the cursed corner column was the result of a lot of time spent jogging around New York City and simply looking and becoming fixated on these corner commercial spaces that couldn’t sustain a business and why that was. I would take a photo of a particular building and write a mini-essay, many which made it into the book. Also, I grew up in New York on 94th Street between Lexington and 3rd, and it was as if I had been tracking a lot of these sites for decades. (I turned forty-five this year and have more or less lived in New York my whole life.) Now I didn’t invent the term cursed corner—and I’m not sure who did—but I learned it from my mother, and it kind of grabbed my imagination from a young age. Cursed? How so, and should we be afraid? And the word itself invites an element of the whimsical and fantastical. So I give a lot of credit to that word, cursed, and the built-in generosity of it as far as creativity is concerned. And I can also see that in the response to the cursed corners, which has been tremendous. It seems to be a circumstance that we all can recognize and have a feeling for. People in every part of the world write to me about their cursed corners now. I absolutely love it.
JK: Speaking of—who are some of your influences?
JT: My favorite author, the last of them who can still make me think, Oh god, if only I could ever make someone feel as I feel when I read this book, if only I could carry the heaviness and the lightness of being so deftly on the page, if only, if only, is Saul Bellow. I just love him so much and cannot recommend a book like Herzog or Humboldt’s Gift or his short stories enough. For me, they are pure joy. I reread a lot of Thomas Mann and Joyce. Fitzgerald, too.
JK: I’d also love to ask about your transition from writing music and playing in a band to being a novelist. Did you always see yourself writing? Do you want to make more music? How have these mediums influenced each other for you?
JT: The day I graduated college, I had a conversation with my brother in which he told me he was starting a band and did I want to be in it. I hadn’t played music at all in college, hardly picked up an instrument, but it’s something that I had done from a very young age until eighteen and I knew how to do it, felt connected to it. It was an easy yes. I had a manuscript at the time and had spent college writing very intensely, but I didn’t know what it meant to even try to be a published author. I had no sense of that. And so off I went with my brother for four years and we did well together. I’m proud of what we made in that time. I learned how to start something, how to finish it and the process of putting art into the world, and just how thick a skin is needed. It was a crucial piece of the education. I do think music absolutely has a place in my writing, as far as the rhythms there in the sentences. In the editing, when I reread my own work again and again and again, for instance, I hear the dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah—try to lock it in—and can tell when a single syllable is throwing off the balance of a sentence and when a new word has to be put into place to correct it, at least to my own sense of musical rhythm.
JK: What books are you loving recently? What music?
JT: Woman of Interest by Tracy O’Neill, Amphibian by Tyler Wetherall. I’ve also been very excited by the criticism of Merve Emre. As for music, it’s hard to get my hands and ears on the new stuff, but my thirteen-year-old son just turned me onto this band called, Mustard Service, who I really like. And my favorite non-canonical act of the last few years would have to be Cate Le Bon. Otherwise, I jog daily and it’s a lot of XTC and Squeeze in the headphones. Nothing new, but still my faves.
JK: Do you have a cursed corner that you left out of the book that you’d like to share?
JT: Oh my goodness, yes. Thank you for asking! There were so many cursed corners left on the editing room floor, and I really have been hoping to do something with them one day. This, right here with Epiphany, is a great start.
TOWER RECORDS - BROADWAY & EAST 4th STREET
It is difficult to convey just how important the Tower Records at the corner of Broadway and East 4th was to the feel and pulse of downtown New York, especially in its early days when there wasn’t much of either south of 14th Street. The store opened in 1983 and like the red and yellow neon sign of its name spanning the windows, the Tower Records at Broadway and 4th had real pop and a clear understanding of the larger-than-life ethos to the music it sold. High ceilings gave it a cathedral air. The place was jammed. It wasn’t uncommon to see a line snaking around the corner of East 4th Street with fans lined up for an in-store appearance by legit top-of-the-chart musicians. Again, there wasn’t much in the area then—and this store was nothing less than modern-day downtown’s opening salvo.
But then, in 2006, with CDs Napster-ed into near oblivion, Tower closed both on East 4th and at a second beloved location adjacent to Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side. The curse came hard and furiously. First, the storefront on East 4th remained empty for years. Then, oddity of oddities, a Halloween pop-up store appeared, that bottom-feeding retail phenomenon which should be banned by city ordinance. The pop-up kept popping up until a more long-term opportunity came along called MLB Fan Cave whose mission was as disturbing as the name suggests—and the Cave was gone after just a few “seasons.” Build Studios, a Verizon-owned Media company then occupied the location. “Build” described itself as “a live interview series where fans sit inches away from some of the biggest names in entertainment.” No surprise, Build Studios shuttered after only a brief stint and the location has remained empty ever since, some six years. Curse, you are cruel!
