Stephanie Clifford is an investigative journalist and a 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 Atlantic, Wired, Elle, Bloomberg Businessweek and other publications. Her accolades include the Loeb Award in investigative reporting; the Deborah Howell Award for Writing
She grew up in Seattle and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Country-western star Lillian Waters
has lived large: performing in front of packed houses with a chaser of hard
partying. She came of age with the big
names—Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette—but by 1980, they are still
charting and her career is on shaky ground.
Out of the public eye for five years,
Lillian’s now on a farewell tour, playing honky-tonk bars, backed up by a
ragged band comprised of some of her oldest bandmates and some new additions,
with no time for rehearsal. She’s also
traveling with her secrets, like nursing a diagnosis of cancer that will
silence her eventually. Tired of running
from her real history—some of which she rewrote to fit country music stardom,
some too deeply buried for her to remember—she’s planned her final performance
to be in a far corner of Washington state, the place where she was born. It’s time to go home and face her sister Hen,
the pain of a terrible betrayal, and the impoverished farm no one knows she
came from and left, alone, at age 10.
THE FAREWELL TOUR (Harper;
On Sale: March 7, 2023; Hardcover) by Stephanie Clifford is a
full-throated ballad. It encapsulates two stories: an intimate portrait of the
indomitable Lillian and a panoramic of our culture—from the West’s
near-mythical histories of explorers, loggers, trappers, farmers laid out in
textbooks and county fair’s Pioneer Days, to the negative spaces where the
stories of women are left out.
Clifford, a reporter for almost a
decade at The New York Times, brings her reporter’s skills to conjure
the rich and complex story of Lillian Waters, aka Lena Thorsell, the second
daughter of two defeated immigrants struggling in a country that promised so
much. She deftly moves between the eras
that defined her tart-tongued heroine’s life: the Depression and the Second
World War; her budding career and the rise of Nashville’s male-dominated
country music business scene; and the humiliation of aging out in the late
70s. There are hard choices for Lillian
every step of the way: of her music, her
heart, her soul. Clifford weaves a mesmerizing portrait of one woman’s
creativity, ambition and sacrifices in a business made for men.
As the tour brings Lillian finally
home, she is forced to reckon with a tragedy she was not prepared to remember.
Clifford asks if we can ever be free of our true history: she makes us love her heroine for what she
chooses to do with hers—an anthem, a chorus, for the West’s forgotten women.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stephanie
Clifford
is an investigative journalist and a 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 Atlantic, Wired, Elle,
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. Everybody Rise, her first book, was
a New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book
Review Editors’ Choice. She grew up in Seattle and lives in Brooklyn
with her family.
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/stephcliff
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/cliffordwrites/
