Fame, Family & the Cost of the Spotlight: Juliet Izon's The Encore

This week, I talk with Juliet Izon about her debut contemporary fiction novel The Encore.

Listen now to hear about:

• How Izon, a longtime journalist pivoted into fiction, writing secret scenes at night, cold-DMing composers on Reddit for research, and building a debut novel from pure creative obsession
• Fame, artistic ambition, and complicated family dynamics, especially the mother-daughter tension between Anna and Lottie, and what happens when talent and identity collide
• The craft details that make this fictional music world feel real: tour bus logistics, conservatory life, perfect pitch, scoring scenes with playlists, and why the book’s title changed from Arpeggio to The Encore

The Encore Synopsis

In 2003, at the prestigious Brookfield Conservatory in Boston, a chance encounter sparks an inimitable friendship between driven pianist and singer Anna Buckley and composer wunderkind Will Pendleton. Over the next four years, as they strive toward careers as professional musicians, their bond deepens both from shared prodigious skill and the inexplicable sense that they’re kindred souls. But on the precipice of graduation, one night forever alters the trajectory of their lives, destroying their relationship in the process.

Twenty years later in New York, 16-year-old piano virtuoso Lottie Thomas is grappling with the rigors of her elite prep school and the confounding disappearance of the woman who gave her up at birth. When Lottie suddenly discovers the startling truth of her identity, the revelation catalyzes a chain of events that not only reunites Lottie with her birth parents, but forces them together on a careening, cross-country rock and roll tour-bus journey. And it is there, trapped in these tight confines, that the three must finally reconcile with the irrevocable choices made a decade-and-a-half earlier.

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