THE FAREWELL TOUR

The story of a flawed, spirited female country music singer navigating the troubled history of her own past and of the American West, spanning the 1920s through the 1980s in Washington State and Nashville.

THE FAREWELL TOUR is about flawed, spunky, honky-tonk singer Lillian Waters, who leaves her Depression-era farm at age 10 for reasons she won't explain. (The origin story was patterned on Clifford's own grandmother, who left her Northwest farm at the same age to become a "hired girl" for a rich family, and never talked about what made her leave her home and start supporting herself so young.) Spanning the 1920s through the 1980s in Washington state and Nashville, Lil navigates poverty, abuse, and sexism as she tries to figure out what her art should and can be within music and in a place where a male point of view is assumed. In two timelines, with the vivid backdrops of the Depression, WW2, and the rise of Nashville, Lil scrapes her way to success, often getting her hands dirty in the process, trying to redefine music, love, aging, and womanhood on her own terms.

THE FAREWELL TOUR explores the meaning of regret against success, and how much of our past we can ever leave behind. It's inspired by writers like Marilynne Robinson and Wallace Stegner and works like Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan, but also brings a literary modern lens to the mythology of the West and its complex and often troubling history, along the lines of Téa Obreht in Inland, Elizabeth Wetmore in Valentine, and C. Pam Zhang in How Much of These Hills is Gold.

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, with regular front-page stories about wrongful convictions, Mafia trials, fraud investigations, and gangs, among others. She now writes long-form investigations about criminal justice and business for the Times, the New Yorker, The Economist, The Atlantic, Wired, Elle, Esquire, Bloomberg Businessweek and other publications. Recent stories include "The Journalist and the Pharma Bro," which went viral, was Elle's most-read story of 2020, won the 2021 Deborah Howell Award for Writing Excellence from the News Leaders Association, and has been optioned for film; "When the Misdiagnosis Is Child Abuse," for The Atlantic, which received an honorable mention from the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public-Interest Magazine Journalism; "The First Year Out," for Marie Claire, which won the Deadline Club award for best magazine profile; and a Wired story about small-town girls whose lives were upended by a mysterious cyberstalker (rights optioned for both tv and documentary). Other awards include the Loeb in investigative reporting; the Society of American Business Editors and Writers in explanatory reporting; and a New York Press Club award.
Everybody Rise, her first book, was a New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review editor's choice, with movie rights optioned by Fox 2000. She grew up in Washington state, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.