“Only a lunatic — a masochistic lunatic — would make booze a regular part of his life.”
– Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
There’s blood on his typewriter. Dope-nose blood. Stephen King, the master of horror, is binge-writing and binge-snorting cocaine. But it didn’t always work. This is a scene from the author’s life as documented in the book Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King.
Stephen King is the bestselling author of 54 novels including The Shining, Carrie, and Misery, among others. His books have sold a combined total of more than 350 million copies. His short stories and novels have been made into 37 movies. But how could an alcoholic and a drug addict be so prolific?
The secret early on: his beloved cocaine.
“One snort and cocaine owned me body and soul,’” he said in the biography Haunted Heart. “It was my on-switch, and it seemed like a really good energizing drug.”
King used cocaine heavily from 1978-1986. It fueled his writing.
Stephen King barely remembers writing the 1981 bestseller Cujo because he was in such a drunken stupor and cocaine nightmare at the time.
“‘I was drinking, like, a case of beer a night. And I thought, ‘I’m an alcoholic,’” King told Rolling Stone. “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.’”
“I used to say that I didn’t want to go to bars because they were full of assholes like me,” King continued.
The biography goes on to say that King’s wife, Tabitha, would often find him in the morning passed out in a pool of vomit in his office. One day, she snapped. She rifled through his desk and collected all of King’s drug paraphernalia, including baggies of coke, a cocaine spoon, Xanax, Valium, Robitussin, mouthwash — yes, he drank mouthwash — and empty beer cans strewn about the office.
During a family intervention, she dumped all of these items on the floor in front of him and threatened to leave if he didn’t stop.
“Tabby said I had my choice: I could get help at a rehab or I could get the hell out of the house,” King says in his memoir On Writing. “She said that she and the kids loved me, and for that very reason none of them wanted to witness my suicide.”
Giving it two weeks to think on it, King decided to get sober.
In On Writing, he also drew references to Annie, the character in Misery who held the author protagonist hostage, demanding he write a sequel to her favorite novel.
“Annie was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie’s pet writer,” King writes. “I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to work anymore if I quit drinking and drugging, but I decided… that I would trade writing for staying married and watching the kids grow up.”
In fact, he did endure a period of writer’s block after he got sober. But that subsided. The nightmare was over.
And when Stephen King got sober in 1986, it was writing that became a cross-addiction. Thirty-six of his 54 novels to date were written sober. And that couldn’t be healthier.
