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

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

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. Check Out Author Social Media PackagesCheck out the Bookwild Community on PatreonCheck Out My Stories Are My Religion SubstackGet Bookwild MerchFollow @imbookwild on InstagramOther Co-hosts On Instagram:Gare Billings @gareindeedreadsSteph Lauer @books.in.badgerlandHalley Sutton @halleysutton25Brian Watson @readingwithbrianMacKenzie Green @missusa2mba 

This week I got to talk with Julia Eason about her debut contemporary fiction, The Encore. It is a very emotional character-driven story. If you love stories that are adjacent to music, if you enjoyed Daisy Jones and the Six. If you also enjoyed Ashley Winsteads of Future Saints, I think you will also enjoy this one. This is what it's about. In 2003, at the prestigious Brookfield Conservatory in Boston, a chance in California, sparks an inimitable friendship between driven pianist and singer Anna Buckley and composer Wonderkind, 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 their 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 ando 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. Like I said, this one is very emotional. The characters are very well drawn out. And you really fall in love with the characters pretty immediately. And I also loved how many musical details were included in this book. So now let's hear from Juliet. So I am super excited to talk about your debut novel The Encore. It was so much fun to read for myself and audiobook or at least. It was really cool via audio. But I do always want to get to know a little bit about you first. So what was your journey to writing like? Sure. So I have been a journalist pretty much since I graduated college. So I've always been a writer, but I've never been a creative writer. And I never

thought I would be either. I think I thought if I ever wrote a book, it would be ghost writing someone's travel book or interior design book or maybe even a cookbook. Yeah. But these characters kind of just popped into my head, I guess, around three years ago now. Yeah. It's getting to the point where it was keeping me up at night. And so there was one day when I'd finished all of my articles and I think it was pretty late at night.

And I was like, you know what, screw it. I'm just going to write down a scene with these people that have like taking up residence in my head. and it felt very self-indulgent and silly, and I didn't tell anyone I was doing it. But then I had so much fun with it because as a journalist, you're writing all the time, but it's based on research and interviews

and the work that your editor needs and a deadline, and it's a very structured form. And so to allow myself the chance just to use my imagination and write for however long I wanted, or in whatever form was so freeing. So then I just kept going back and back, and it was all out of order,

and it was just random scenes. And then after a while, you know, I had tens of thousands of words. And I was like, what's going on here? Yeah. Am I going to, is this something? And so, you know, luckily I have a lot of friends who have sort of made a similar pivot,

journalists who have on the creative side of things. So I texted one of them and I was like, I honestly feel like I'm losing my mind because this is all I'm thinking about. What do I do? And she was like, I knew this was going to happen to you one day. Oh, I love that. And send me what you have. I can't wait to read it. And I was like, to be honest, it's totally fine if it's terrible.

You know, I'm enjoying this just as a creative outlet. But then she read it and she was like, this is fantastic. You have to keep going. and you know i'll help you find an agent and we'll we'll make this work for you and at the time that seemed just so unbelievable to me but you know long story very well long story long that's what i did i finished it and um i got an agent and then we got a publishing deal and now we are exactly one week out from publication today yeah that is such a cool story i do i have had a few different people who were journalists who then did go on to write fiction. And I did see that you

mostly wrote in like entertainment and culture for your journalism. So did any of like what you wrote about as a journalist inspire the parts of this book? Definitely there's some overlap, although I think not as much as people who know me as a journalist might expect. Because a lot of people are like, oh, is your book about travel? Is it about food? I write about those topics a lot. And, you know, maybe one day we'll get there. I don't have an idea for those topics just yet, but we'll see what percolates. But, you know, this book takes place squarely in the world of music and in many platforms. However, I think my very first gigs as a journalist were in that sort of gossip, celebrity news, nightlife.

Oh, yeah. which was, you know, its own crazy, bizarre world because this was, like, the late, you know, probably starting around like 2008, 2009. So it was really the height of that sort of frenetic paparazzi, you know. Yes. So there's definitely elements from that where I wanted to think about fame from different angles and what it means to have sort of a public and a private persona. and how just being exposed in that way might lead you to make certain decisions over others, that kind of thing. Yes.

Yeah, I feel that. I love stories that explore fame for a lot of the reasons you just mentioned. So, yeah, that was probably part of why I really enjoyed this one as well. So you said the characters kind of came to you. And it sounds like maybe that was your starting point, Were the characters like the initial inspiration or did you have like another moment that like inspired the plot? So it was a little bit of both. I think the first seed of an idea was I was thinking a lot about during COVID, which was before I started writing this,

what it would have been like to be a performer and what it means to not be able to do that. right so whether that's a singer or a stage actor um you know if you're if you derive the majority of your passion and your pleasure from that sort of live interaction right someone and then you're totally prevented from doing that what does that do to your happiness and your creativity and so i started pulling at that thread and then i was thinking more broadly about okay if you know that the only thing that, you know, sustains you is being out on a stage. What might you do in order to make sure that it doesn't go away? Yeah.

Sort of challenges or deals would you make with yourself in order to keep it. And so that's where it's sort of snowballed from. Yeah, that makes sense. So it follows all musicians. really. And there were some really specific details in there every now and then that there were details that I don't always hear in book because like I definitely have read a few other music adjacent fiction as well. So what kind of research did you do to like really make it feel like all of these characters were real musicians? I think as a journalist, that was one of my

favorite parts because I didn't want to phone anything in and I certainly didn't want to get anything wrong. So sort of once I wrote the initial first draft, then at that point I started reaching out to friends to say, you know, do you know any composers I can talk to? Do you know any indie rock musicians, conductors, tour managers, sound engineers, that sort of thing. And I basically would go through the manuscript and figure out what I needed fact checked and I'd have a whole list of questions when I get these people on the phone and you'd be like okay what kind of software were you using in the year oh yeah 2007 to to write a score because in my head of you know the initial draft was like someone handwriting it and then I spoke to somebody who was a composer and he was like no of course we weren't

handwriting it like 1960 like we were we use you know sebelius or we use whatever this program is I'm like, oh, right. I think part of it is being vulnerable enough to say, like, I don't know this, right? And I want to get the details, right? And so even if I sound really dumb asking, you know, someone who has perfect pitch, like, is this how it works? Like, I'd rather just ask and hopefully get the details right. So there's one of interviews with people, there was a lot of also just like going on Reddit. And I think I'm, you know, I think.

found the composer subreddit. And I was like, if anybody was in conservatory between these years, like, here's 10 questions. And a lot of people, I think, are really happy to talk about their perfumes. Oh, yeah, because they're probably passionate about it. Yeah, exactly. And then I watched a bunch of YouTube videos, too, which was really fun of people who are, you know, on a tour bus for a giant music tour. and students who are at Juilliard or at Curtis or at Berkeley, that kind of thing, just to get a sense of like, well, what does somebody's day look like? And how are they practicing? And what time are you loading in all the equipment at an arena? And, you know, there's a lot of people who have done very granular videos. It's like, I'm a tour manager and like starting at the day, yeah, like, this is what we do for the next 12 hours. So all of them is super helpful. That's awesome. So it takes place kind of, no, it does take place into kind of two timelines.

And some of the story is told through the eyes of a teenager, Lottie. So when you started, did you know that you were going to kind of be telling Lottie story at present and then kind of like catching us up with the past time or did that develop as you were writing it? Sort of developed as I was writing it because I wrote so much of it out of order. So there were a lot of sort of the most interesting scenes to me were the ones that I wrote first. And those just sort of made sense from one perspective or another. And so once I realized that, I was like, okay, so this is going to be a dual narration. And then I think from there,

it sort of also became a dual timeline just how I wanted that narrative to flow. So yeah, I mean, there was at some point when I was like, okay, I'm actually writing this. I needed to like, look at the whole document and be like, right, what is the actual order that all these scenes need to happen in? And then like, what do I need to write in between? Different gaps. I mean, literally, I knew so little about creative writing that I was Googling like how many words is a novel. I get that. I need to end up, you know? Yeah. I had no idea. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you've never done it before, you're not going to know. Right. So then kind of the other thing with the dual narration, and if this is like a spoiler, I can remove it. But we are in Lottie's perspective and her mom's perspective, Anna. And I just thought,

the dynamics between the two of them were so fascinating. Again, I don't know what all I should talk about, but I think even if you don't know all of their background, people have probably read books where there is like a daughter and a mother perspective. And you really understand Anna's perspective and you can really understand Lottie's perspective and why they're unaligned and why they clash a little bit. So what was it like or like what kind of drew? you to writing like really complicated family dynamics um those are the sorts of stories i like to read as well um you know the and it's not you know family dynamics and also like fraught relationships too right tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow was definitely one of the comps i used for that

drawn out friendship slash love situation yeah um but i think you know, the idea of fractured dynamics in any way, whether that's with a friend or a lover or family member, there's just material there. And I love the, you know, big emotional scenes. And so I also just love the idea of sort of like reconnecting after a long time because, you know, how do you come back to someone that you knew once? got all these years in between and how does that fracture a relationship you had before just i don't know it felt like very right yeah territory i just thought it was fun to yeah i always enjoy that especially when you're actually in their pov like it makes for it like an even more engaged reader experience

in my opinion this is like a totally different book but there was a fantasy that i read that was like that where like you're with all these characters not knowing that they're about to like face off with each other so then once you get to that moment you're like whose side am i on like i love them all so i feel like it keeps really locked in as a reader too absolutely and then the other thing that's like something i kind of mention i do love books that talk about fame and the many different experiences that come with it but also um anna and will and lottie are all like very ambitious artistically even though it's kind of in their own ways um so can you kind of talk about what was interesting to you about like writing about like intense artistic ambition um i think what's

really interesting about the three of them is that yes they're all extraordinarily gifted musically but they have it in different ways and i think music to all three of them serves a very different purpose. You know, Anna is our indie rocker, and it's pretty clear early on that music is the escape for her. Like being on stage allows her to forget about everything else that's happening offstage. And so it's what she needs to survive, essentially. And I think Will, who is a classical musician and a composer and a conductor, he finds a lot

of joy in it, but I think it also comes very easily to him. Yeah. So there's a less complicated relationship to music. And then Lottie is a piano prodigy. But she's young. But I also think she doesn't know, at the beginning of the story, she doesn't know where she comes from. So it's like this perfect pitch and she's always been extraordinarily talented at the piano,

but she's unaware of sort of the generational link to her own skill. And so I think when she finds that out, it sort of makes her reexamine her own relationship to it, which is something that sort of she alone possessed. And now she sort of realizes that there's other people out there that have sort of given this to her in a genetic sense. And so like what's for her own identity and her connection to her parents? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The perfect pitch thing, kind of how you were talking about like Will just kind of comes by it naturally is always so fascinating to me that there's just like,

something in someone's brain that just like can know almost without being taught it's fascinating to me totally fascinating is bananas i watched a lot of videos of jacob collier who has not only does he have perfect pitch but his is so refined that he can tell the difference between microtones and he can sing them he's a really talented singer as well um and so and i think there's a lot of jacob i don't know how familiar you are with his music or not, but he's this, you know, this proper polymath and he's, he's brilliant, but he's also like kind of all over the place. Yeah. I had already, I think, finished the book when I started watching this videos, but I was like, oh, there's a lot of will in here, just that sort of like nutty professor type. Yes. But yeah, there's a lot of videos of

him talking about music theory on YouTube. Yeah. Fascinating because he just, he's so gifted. Yeah. And within all of that too. So it's all, obviously the book is called The Encore, which is really fits a lot of the themes of like second chances and redemption and like coming back to the stage, kind of all of that. Were those themes in your head? Was that title in your head at all? Or is it like you kind of wrote it and then realized that the themes and like that. title would work really well. Okay, so that's a very interesting question because I submitted it to agents and then to publishing houses with a different title, which was arpeggio. And arpeggio in musical terminology is sort of any three notes of a chord that are played separately. Or sorry, there are four notes of a chord. And so I loved the poetry in there. But sort of, you know, once we got acquired and we were thinking about different titles, I think we wanted something that was a little bit more accessible.

Yeah. If you weren't familiar with musical terms. Right. That makes sense. Yeah. And the cover, oh my gosh. I know you don't typically have tons to do with the covers, but I just love the cover. If anyone is now watching on YouTube, it's like kind of like exploded guitar picks that like,

I have some of my stickers. Oh, there we go. Here we go too. I love it. I keep sending it to people. I'm like, I know this isn't your genre, but look at this cover. Maybe it is your genre. It can become your genre. Yes, I'm going to force this one on you. It is also like kind of international. So it takes place in the U.S. and in Ireland. Was there anything about Ireland that made you want to write a character there? I just love Ireland. Oh, nice. Ireland, like since I was a little kid, and I love both, you know, the musical tradition that comes out of Ireland and I'm a big fan of a lot of Irish writers.

And Doolin, where Anna goes for a handful of chapters is a real town. And it really is sort of the heartbeat of traditional Irish music or one of them. And so you go in any one of these pubs at night and there's always live music and they're always phenomenal. Yeah. I really loved the idea of putting her somewhere where she would have access to all. Yeah. Totally. It made me want to go to Ireland. I feel like I would do well in the like isolated-ish areas in the UK. So I definitely need to add that to my list. The other thing that I was thinking about, I kind of always think about this when I end up reading books about music is naming like the songs. and sometimes the albums was that like, what was that experience like for you? That was really fun.

I mean, I remember being a little kid and you'd have a project in school where you had to, like, make a fake island, right? And you'd have to, like, name all the rivers and mountain ranges or whatever. And it was always so fun to be like, everything is at my fingertips. Where do I hear? And so, yeah, all the character names and song names were really fun. And, you know, some of them I think I tried to, like, loosely peg to something. And then other things, I just like need a word. Like what was on my window

right now? Yeah. But yeah, it's very fun. It was funny because after I finished writing, I read a lot of other music novels because I was just kind of curious what else was out there for five to eight years or whatever. So I hadn't read Daisy Jones until after I finished the book. And so then I was reading that. I was like, oh, there's like full song lyrics. The back of the book literally has, I think, the lyrics for the entire album. So I was like, oh, it didn't even occur to me. Yeah.

Lyrics. And now that I've been reading a few books on musicians, like novels on musicians. And I'm like, oh, this is a pretty common thing to do. But I think for me, I just didn't know if I'd be able to achieve what I wanted without it feeling, you know, to stuff. I know. or hokey or whatever. So it's like, right. Rather just like allow the reader to decide what they think those lyrics might be or what that song might sound like as opposed to be super prescriptive about it.

Yeah. I feel like it would be really intimidating because even just like when I think about songs versus like I could technically write a poem if I needed to. But then songs have to be so tied to sound and all of that. So it would it would intimidate me to try to write something that would work as a song, even if I was like writing other stuff. A hundred percent. Did you have, are you a person who listens to music while you write? Did you have any like playlist going yourself? Great question. So I can't listen to music while I'm writing. Yeah. It's too much. I can't read and listen, but some people can. I can't. But I, I have. There's actually a playlist in the back of the book.

Oh, yeah. Which is fun, which has not every single song, but a lot of them that are mentioned. And then there's also a Spotify playlist, which is fun. I had a totally separate playlist for myself where if I was, you know, walking or maybe even on the treadmill or something, where those songs were my, essentially like my soundtrack or my score for those scenes. And so I would listen to them obsessively sometimes. times when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to say within a scene. Yeah.

I think now that I've written a whole book, I can see that I write fairly cinematically, like in my... Yeah. And so the scoring was really important to me to get myself in the right emotional frame of mind for then how I wanted to write it. Yeah, the characters also talk about some of the, some like classic composers. too. So I like don't listen to anything like symphonic or like any of that. But did you kind of already have an interest in that or did you just like learn about it kind of for this book? A little of both.

I like a lot of contemporary classical or like classical scoring work. So like Michael Nyman, who's mentioned in there, I love his work or Philip Glass or Steve Reich. Those are people that are like on my my Spotify all the time. Okay. Some of the other stuff, like there's mentions at the beginning when they're in conservatory of like what pieces Anna's working on. That's another Reddit question where I asked people like, okay, if you were first year, you know, piano major, like what are some of the pieces that you would need to be

tackling? Yeah. And, you know, people gave me a list. And then I listened to the ones and picked a few that I liked. Yeah. Was there a reason that you picked? piano for Lottie as like the instrument she was really like drawn to um i mean i think i picked piano for Lottie because anna was a pianist yeah i think i picked piano for Anna because um i mean

partially because i'm a huge Torayamas fan and so oh yeah i liked that connection um but it just felt like if she was going to sort of be a singer and also do an instrument like and she does also play guitar but piano's for main thing um i don't know i think piano is beautiful and i like the way it's yeah yeah was there anything that like surprised you that was more difficult to write than you expected or if it's a spoiler then obviously you don't have to i mean i think in general when you get to any pivotal scene um and you know in your head how you want people to feel when they're but then translating that sort of in co-it, feeling to actual words on the page.

Yeah. It's hard. Yeah. And you've been spending so much time. So you like know the characters differently. Exactly. Yeah. And I think a lot of the times it takes several drafts because you need to get it down on

the page and then you need to step away from it and come back and read it, you know, have a lot much longer later. could then see if with some distance it still resonating emotionally. And sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes I think things that you thought would be very clear for someone who hasn't been in their head with the characters. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. The other, another part of the story is they are on a tour bus together, which is like such a unique experience. to be touring on a bus. Did you get to go, like, be inside a tour bus at all? Or was this just kind of, like, the general idea that we all have when we see, like, BTS videos?

I tried. I asked my friends who are music publicists, like, can I get on someone's bus? And they're, no. Nice guy. And, like, my, I have some friends who are in an indie rock band, but they weren't touring at the time, and they all... Oh, yeah. ...a van. So that was like another YouTube thing where I just... Yeah. ...a bunch of videos of people who are on tour buses and learn some fun fact toys.

There's a scene in the book where right when they get on the bus and they're about to leave for tour that somebody's like, when you're in the bunk, make sure you always sleep feet first. Mm-hmm. The bus breaks, you know, you don't want to hit your head. And so, like, that was something I learned from one of the YouTube videos. Yeah. That's a good one. You mentioned her your indie rock friends, too. Did you ever consider any different genres for Anna's career?

Or was it always going to be that? I think it was always going to be that because that's the type of music I listen to. Yeah. And so it was easier for me to sort of place her in that world because I had more of a familiarity with it. Yeah. well my last question i heard someone ask an author this and i'm like now i need to incorporate this into my interviews but if you could get dinner with any of the characters could can you even pick just one that you would want to go to dinner with definitely Anna yeah she's she's very

complicated and i just would have so many questions for her oh yeah yeah that makes sense um and i guess I lied. That's not always my final question. My real final question is always, do you have any books that you've read and loved recently? Or do you have any books that you just recommend all the time to anyone? Something I just finished reading is another book in the music world. And it's called Wait for Me. Okay. Actually also comes out on March 3rd. Oh, wow. And it's by Amy Jo Burns. Okay. It's funny because if you read both of the synopsies of these two books. They sound kind of similar in a way. And then the stories are totally different. But she, oh, yeah. Um, an incredible writer. Just her, her pro is, is so stunning.

Um, so I've been recommending that to everybody. And if you like this book and you like music books, then I feel like you like that one too. Yeah. Yeah. And it, the cover, I love how it uses like, um, what is that, the music staff in, in the cover. And it does say it's happened. And it does say it's kind of in the 70s. So it's definitely going to be a different vibe than yours, but it might just be kind of similar. So now that's on my list for sure. Where can people follow you to stay up to date with everything? I'm most active on Instagram and my handle is just my name. So it's at Juliet Eazon. Nice. And do you have another book idea? Do you plan on writing more novels? I'd like to. I think the draft of a second book in the process of editing it now and then we will see if anybody wants to

take it. Yeah. Well, everybody go grab this book right now if this intrigued you because that will help the possibility that we'll get to have another book from Juliet. Otherwise, thank you so much for being on and talking with me. This was awesome. Thanks so much for having me.