Today we’ll talk with Stephanie Clifford about her new novel The Farewell Tour. It’s 1980, and Lillian Waters is hitting the road for the very last time. Jaded from her years in the music business, perpetually hungover, and diagnosed with career-ending vocal problems, Lillian cobbles together a nationwide farewell tour featuring some old hands from her early days playing honky-tonk bars in Washington State and Nashville, plus a few new ones. She yearns to feel the rush of making live music one more time and bask in the glow of a packed house before she makes the last, and most important, stop on the tour: the farm she left behind at age ten and the sister she is finally ready to confront about an agonizing betrayal in their childhood.
Stephanie Clifford is an award-winning investigative journalist and bestselling novelist. As a New York Times reporter for almost a decade, she covered courts, business, and media. She now writes long-form investigations about criminal justice and business for the Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, The Atlantic, Wired, Elle, Marie Claire, Bloomberg Businessweek, and other publications. Her accolades include the Loeb Award in investigative reporting; the Deborah Howell Award for Writing Excellence from the News Leaders Association; the Society of American Business Editors and Writers in explanatory reporting; the Deadline Club Award in Magazine Profiles; and others. Her magazine articles are frequently adapted for film, TV and streaming, including for Netflix, Lifetime and other media companies.
Everybody Rise, her first book, was a New York Times bestseller and editors’ choice. Her second book, The Farewell Tour, will be published in March 2023 by Harper. She grew up in Seattle and lives in Brooklyn with her family
