On Saturday, March 18th at 10:00am PDT Warwick's will host Stephanie Clifford as she discusses her new book, The Farewell Tour, in conversation with V. V. Ganeshananthan. 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.
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.
As the novel crisscrosses eras, moving between Lillian's youth - the Depression, the Second World War, the rise of Nashville - and her middle-aged life in 1980, we see her striving to build a career in the male-dominated world of country music, including the hard choices she makes as she tries to redefine music, love, aging, and womanhood on her own terms.
Nearing her final tour stop, Lil is forced to confront those choices and how they shaped her life. Would a different version of herself have found the happiness and success that has eluded her? When she reaches her Washington hometown for her very last show, though, she'll undergo a reckoning with the past that forces her to reconsider her entire life story.
Exploring one unforgettable woman's creativity, ambition, and sacrifices in a world - and an art form - made for men, The Farewell Tour asks us to consider how much of our past we can ever leave behind.
V. V. Ganeshananthan is the author of the novels Brotherless Night, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and is currently a member of the board of directors of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota and co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.
