Stephen King’s debut novel “Carrie” was published 50 years ago on Friday, a fact that the author himself can barely believe—though the fact that he’s still alive to enjoy the book five decades later is all the more incredible to him. As King tweeted on Thursday, “Tomorrow, CARRIE turns 50. Hard to believe I’m alive to see it.”
The fame that followed the release of both the novel and the Sissy Spacek film by the same name also ushered in an intense era for him. His battle with addiction was chronicled in the 2013 book “Doctor Sleep,” which King published decades after his family staged a life-saving intervention in the 1980s.
King was working as a teacher when he published “Carrie” in 1974. In his spare time he wrote short stories for men’s magazines, and the eventual novel was originally intended to be one such submission for Cavalier. He admitted to The Guardian that if he hadn’t published the book he might have never really become an author at all.
“I would teach, and I would come home tired, like I’d been on stage. And then I had to correct papers – more of the same. And there was very little time left for my own work. I can remember thinking, ‘Two or three more years of this and I won’t be able to write at all.’ Because they wanted to give me the debating club, and the play, and stuff like that. There was no discussion of me quitting.”
His wife told him to continue with the story. Doubleday picked it up and sent King an advance of $2,500. The paperback rights went up for auction a year later and King thought he would walk away with $30,000—instead, the advance was $500,000. King and his family were set, but that didn’t stop his alcohol and drug problems from ballooning.
King explained to Rolling Stone that though he had been drinking since he was 18, “I realized I had a problem around the time that Maine became the first state in the nation to pass a returnable-bottle-and-can law. You could no longer just toss the shit away, you saved it, and you turned it in to a recycling center. And nobody in the house drank but me. My wife would have a glass of wine and that was all. So I went in the garage one night, and the trash can that was set aside for beer cans was full to the top.”
“It had been empty the week before. I was drinking, like, a case of beer a night. And I thought, ‘I’m an alcoholic.’ That was probably about ’78, ’79. I thought, “I’ve gotta be really careful, because if somebody says, ‘You’re drinking too much, you have to quit,’ I won’t be able to.” In the same interview King said his problems with cocaine began around the same time.
He often used cocaine while working. As King put it, “I mean, coke was different from booze. Booze, I could wait, and I didn’t drink or anything. But I used coke all the time.” And though he managed to hide his addiction from his family for a while, “the books start to show it after a while. ‘Misery’ is a book about cocaine. Annie Wilkes is cocaine. She was my number-one fan.”
Things changed when King’s wife filled a trash bag with “beercans, cigarette butts, cocaine in gram bottles and cocaine in plastic Baggies, coke spoons caked with snot and blood, Valium, Xanax, bottles of Robitussin cough syrup and NyQuil cold medicine, even bottles of mouthwash” from his office and dumped it out in front of the author and his family. After that, she told him he could go to rehab or he could leave the home.
King has been sober ever since.