Stephen King: A Biographical Exploration

Warning: This article features adult content.

Anyone familiar with Stephen King knows he has a tendency to publish some truly harrowing tales. I’m by no means a King-connoisseur, having read only a few short stories from Skeleton Crew and Nightshift; in addition to his novel, The Stand. But these few stories contain plenty of disturbing scenes, in and of themselves. The Stand, for example, features a man being anally raped by another man…using a gun. And after traversing the rat-infested hell-scape depicted in Graveyard Shift (featured in Nightshift), let’s just say I was left not knowing what to do with myself for the rest of the evening.

The inevitable thought—that King is fully cognizant of—which crosses people’s minds once familiar with his work is, to paraphrase the man himself, “King’s, no doubt, pretty messed up.” If this is the case, then as a writer, King is in good company. Many famous authors have suffered immense hardship during their lives—much of it, self-inflicted. Here are just a few world-famous wordsmiths whose lives ended in tragedy:

• Ernest Hemingway: alcoholic; received electroshock, and shot himself aged 61.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald: heavy drinker; endured two heart attacks and died of a third, aged 44.
• Friedrich Nietzsche: reportedly suffered a ‘mental collapse’; suffered strokes that left him paralysed and unable to speak or walk; contracted pneumonia and died aged 55.
• Hunter S. Thompson: depressed, compulsive drug user; died from a gunshot to the head—allegedly self-inflicted.
• Sigmund Freud: cocaine user; lifelong smoker; died from cancer of the jaw.
• David Foster Wallace: was taking antidepressants for decades, later received electroshock, and hung himself at age 46.
• Virginia Woolf: drowned herself after writing a suicide note to her husband that began ‘Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again.’

‘Nothing’ Happened

King has addressed the speculation regarding his personal history several times:

Interviewer: You once said that the readers are interested in your secrets not in what you’ve read.

Stephen King: Mm

Interviewer: Meaning what?

Stephen King: Well it goes back to what I was saying earlier about how if you—if I give an interview about my, my career—what I do for a living—sooner or later somebody will kinda say, “By the way, what was your childhood like?” People wanna know where the bodies are buried. They wanna know what—what twisted me…to do what I’m doing and the truth is even more horrible: the answer is nothing.

– King speaking with Charlie Rose

Why do people ask me about my childhood? This is what I do for a living. But I don’t remember having a particularly unusual childhood. And it seems to me that the focus of that question is always: “Something terrible must have happened to you when you were a kid Steve or you wouldn’t be writing this awful stuff that you’re writing.”

– King speaking with Blank and Blank

During a Q&A held at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, King reiterated that ‘nothing’ traumatic happened to him. This time, however, he included an interesting caveat.

A lot of times, you know, when I do these interviews they’ll ask you questions and they’ll say: “What was your childhood like?” And I no longer brook that question, I just tell the interviewer, what you want to know is: What traumatised me so badly that I write this creepy shit? The answer is nothing. Nothing that I remember anyway but of course, I wouldn’t tell you anyway.

So, can we really believe King when he states that ‘nothing’ happened? There’s no need to speculate, because ironically, King’s admission that even if there was ‘something’, he wouldn’t tell, isn’t true. You need only read his memoir, On Writing, to find out why. After reading it, it becomes easier to understand why he became the man he is. In short, there was ‘something’—multiple ‘somethings’, in fact.

King’s Memoir

In the first section of On Writing, King takes readers on a brief trip through his childhood, although he describes it as a ‘curriculum vitae’ rather than an autobiography. Illustrating that era, he writes:

I lived an odd, herky-jerky childhood, raised by a single parent who moved around a lot in my earliest years and who – I am not completely sure of this – may have farmed my brother and me out to one of her sisters for awhile because she was economically or emotionally unable to cope with us for a time. Perhaps she was only chasing our father, who piled up all sorts of bills and then did a runout when I was two and my brother David was four. If so, she never succeeded in finding him. My mom, Nellie Ruth Pills-bury King, was one of America’s early liberated women, but not by choice.¹

[King’s mother] often worked two or three jobs at once just to pay their way and keep her small family afloat. There were times when Ruth couldn’t even afford babysitters and had to leave her small boys alone while she worked.

– Excerpt from a biography about King

By the way, what was your childhood like? You know, and you know that what they want—what they expect you to say on some level is “I was abused by my father. I was an orphan. I saw these terrible, horrible, sexual confrontations between all these people. And as a result, I’ve been writing these awful, nasty stories, all my life. But nothing could be further than the truth—from the truth—I grew up in a perfectly, er, sma… well not in a perfectly normal way, that isn’t true.

– King speaking in 1990

So, let’s review: King was born into a broken home, raised by an emotionally or economically unstable mother who may have abandoned her children—possibly to pursue King’s father—who also abandoned him. Does that sound like ‘nothing’?

According to the American Psychological Association,² father involvement has been consistently linked to positive child outcomes. Moreover, there is a large body of research documenting the detrimental effects of growing up without a father. In The Boy Crisis, Dr. Warren Farrell enumerates a number of concerning associations with what he calls ‘dad deprivation’. For example, roughly 90 percent of homeless and runaway youths, and 85 percent of youths in prisons, are from fatherless homes.³ Moreover, adolescents with minimal or no father involvement account for approximately 71 percent of high school drop-outs. Children from fatherless homes are also 5 times more likely to commit suicide, 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances, and 14 times more likely to commit rape, according to the Families Civil Liberties Union.⁴

The Shining is about a father who basically wants to eat up his child. And, any parent goes through those…those moments. And, to my mind, there’s a kind of optimistic side to a book like The Shining—even at its darkest—because…if a father is raging at a child, at least that father’s there. For me, it was just this vacuum. It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad, it was just nothing—it was this empty place.

– King speaking in a BBC documentary

King also had a ‘stream of babysitters’⁵ whilst living with his mother and brother in Wisconsin. The only babysitter he remembers clearly during this time was named Eula, a teenager who was ‘as big as a house, and…laughed a lot’,⁶ although he notes that it might have been ‘Beulah’. King sums-up his babysitter pretty well when he writes: ‘When I see those hidden-camera sequences where real-life babysitters and nannies just all of a sudden wind up and clout the kids, it’s my days with Eula-Beulah I always think of.’⁷

Eula-Beulah would be on the phone, laughing with someone, and beckon me over. She would hug me, tickle me, get me laughing, and then, still laughing, go upside my head hard enough to knock me down. Then she would tickle me with her bare feet until we were both laughing again.

Still sound like ‘nothing’? King shares other examples of her abuse, in detail, on subsequent pages of his memoir:

Eula-Beulah was prone to farts—the kind that are both loud and smelly. Sometimes when she was so afflicted, she would throw me on the couch, drop her wool-skirted butt on my face, and let loose. “Pow!” she’d cry in high glee. It was like being buried in marshgas fireworks. I remember the dark, the sense that I was suffocating, and I remember laughing. Because, while what was happening was sort of horrible it was also sort of funny. In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.

I don’t know what happened to the other sitters, but Eula-Beulah was fired. It was because of the eggs. One morning Eula-Beulah fried me an egg for breakfast. I ate it and asked for another one. Eula-Beulah fried me a second egg, then asked if I wanted another one. She had a look in her eye that said, “You don’t dare eat another one, Stevie.” So I asked for another one. And another one. And so on. I stopped after seven, I think—seven is the number that sticks in my mind, and quite clearly. Maybe we ran out of eggs. Maybe I cried off. Or maybe Eula-Beulah got scared. I don’t know, but probably it was good that the game ended at seven. Seven eggs is quite a few for a four-year-old.

I felt all right for awhile, and then I yarked all over the floor. Eula-Beulah laughed, then went upside my head, then shoved me into the closet and locked the door. Pow. If she’d locked me in the bathroom, she might have saved her job, but she didn’t. As for me, I didn’t really mind being in the closet. It was dark, but it smelled of my mother’s Coty perfume, and there was a comforting line of light under the door.

I crawled to the back of the closet, Mom’s coats and dresses brushing along my back. I began to belch—long loud belches that burned like fire. I don’t remember being sick to my stomach but I must have been, because when I opened my mouth to let out another burning belch, I yarked again instead. All over my mother’s shoes. That was the end for Eula-Beulah. When my mother came home from work that day, the babysitter was fast asleep on the couch and little Stevie was locked in the closet, fast asleep with half-digested fried eggs drying in his hair.⁸

There’s no need to explain how this kind of abuse can negatively impact a child’s development. Even that which is considered an ‘acceptable’ level of physical punishment by its proponents has been shown to have negative effects. A 2016 meta-analysis⁹ concluded that even after removing studies relying on abusive methods (e.g. hitting with fist or object), spanking was associated with detrimental child outcomes (e.g. more aggression, lower cognitive ability). Based on these and other data, the American Academy of Pediatrics recently issued an updated policy statement urging adults to ‘avoid physical punishment and verbal abuse of children’.¹⁰

King’s Drug Use

During King’s adult life, it’s no secret that he, like some of the writers mentioned above (and many others), has had a complex relationship with drugs. In On Writing, he goes into vivid detail with regards to his alcoholism and drug use—which escalated to the point that his wife, Tabby, staged an intervention.

Not long after that my wife, finally convinced that I wasn’t going to pull out of this ugly downward spiral on my own, stepped in. It couldn’t have been easy—by then I was no longer within shouting distance of my right mind—but she did it. She organized an intervention group formed of family and friends, and I was treated to a kind of This Is Your Life in hell. Tabby began by dumping a trashbag full of stuff from my office out on the rug: 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. A year or so before, observing the rapidity with which huge bottles of Listerine were disappearing from the bathroom, Tabby asked me if I drank the stuff. I responded with self-righteous hauteur that I most certainly did not. Nor did I. I drank the Scope instead. It was tastier, had that hint of mint.¹¹

Mentioned above, was the fact that children who grow up in fatherless homes are 10 times more likely to abuse drugs.¹² Thus, it’s not particularly surprising to learn of King’s excessive drug use. Also of note, is a study supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which found a strong graded relationship between people who experience adverse events as children and a number of health risks, including alcoholism and drug abuse.¹³

Why King Writes

There is one happy moment from King’s childhood worth sharing. But first, it’s worth noting a passage from part 2 of The Stand’s preface: ‘I write for only two reasons: to please myself and to please others. In returning to this long tale of dark Christianity, I hope I have done both.’¹⁴ In On Writing, the reader quickly learns whom the first person King pleased was.

“You didn’t copy this one?” she asked when she had finished. I said no, I hadn’t. She said it was good enough to be in a book. Nothing anyone has said to me since has made me feel any happier.¹⁵

From this passage, we see how King’s love of writing was galvanized by the approval of none other than his own mother.

Closing Remarks

Despite King’s denial of and refusal to acknowledge it during several interviews, there is good reason to believe he did suffer greatly during his childhood. He did a positive thing by sharing some of his personal experiences in On Writing, which makes it all the more mysterious why he answered in the way that he did, during that 2012 Q&A—which was recorded long after his memoir was published. Perhaps he doesn’t view the things he wrote about in On Writing as negative experiences. Or maybe he just enjoys disorienting his audience in person, as much as he does on paper. King’s relationship to the truth is probably best summed-up by the two quotes he includes at the beginning of On Writing.

Honesty’s the best policy

– Miguel de Cervantes

Liars prosper

– Anonymous

Everybody who does this—you, me, everybody else that does this—we’re fuckin’ liars…How do you know we’re lying? Our mouths are moving.

– King speaking at UMass Lowell

Whatever the motives behind King’s obfuscation, the man has achieved some incredible things—overcoming childhood adversity to become a bestselling author whose work has inspired some of the most famous films of all time. Perhaps, though, his greatest achievement lies not in his literary success but in his decision to salvage his family by putting an end to his drug use, rather than abandoning his wife and children, like his own father.

1. King, S. (2000). On writing: a memoir of the craft. New York: Scribner, p. 10.
2. American Psychological Society, Boys and Men Guidelines Group. (2018). APA guidelines for psychological practice with men and boys. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/about/policy/psychological-practice-boys-men-guidelines.pdf
3. Farrell, W., & Gray, J. (2018). The boy crisis: Why our boys are struggling and what we can do about it. Dallas: BenBella.
4. Families Civil Liberties Union. (2017). Parentless Statistics. Retrieved November 16, 2017, from Families Civil Liberties Union: http://www.fclu.org/parentless-statistics/
5. King, S., 2000, p. 19.
6. King, S., 2000, p. 20.
7. King, S., 2000, p. 20.
8. King, S., 2000, p. 20-21.
9. Gershoff, E. T., & Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2016). Spanking and child outcomes: old controversies and new meta-analyses. Journal of Family Psychology, 1-17. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/fam0000191
10. Sege R. D., Siegel B. S., AAP COUNCIL ON CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT, AAP COMMITTEE ON PSYCHOSOCIAL ASPECTS OF CHILD AND FAMILY HEALTH. (2018). Effective Discipline to Raise Healthy Children. Pediatrics, 142(6):e20183112, p. 1.
11. King, S., 2000, p. 97.
12. Families Civil Liberties Union, 2017.
13. Felitti, V., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., . . . Marks, J. S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245-258.
14. King, S. (2012). The stand. New York: Anchor.
15. King, S., 2000, p. 29.