Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview
Did the quality of your writing start to go down?
Yeah, it did. I mean, The Tommyknockers is an awful book. That was the last one I wrote before I cleaned up my act. And I’ve thought about it a lot lately and said to myself, “There’s really a good book in here, underneath all the sort of spurious energy that cocaine provides, and I ought to go back.” The book is about 700 pages long, and I’m thinking, “There’s probably a good 350-page novel in there.”
Is The Tommyknockers the one book in your catalog you think you botched?
Well, I don’t like Dreamcatcher very much. Dreamcatcher was written after the accident. [In 1999, King was hit by a van while taking a walk and left severely injured.] I was using a lot of Oxycontin for pain. And I couldn’t work on a computer back then because it hurt too much to sit in that position. So I wrote the whole thing longhand. And I was pretty stoned when I wrote it, because of the Oxy, and that’s another book that shows the drugs at work.
If you had to pick your best book, what would it be?
Lisey’s Story. That one felt like an important book to me because it was about marriage, and I’d never written about that. I wanted to talk about two things: One is the secret world that people build inside a marriage, and the other was that even in that intimate world, there’s still things that we don’t know about each other.
Are you done writing Dark Tower books?
I’m never done with The Dark Tower. The thing about The Dark Tower is that those books were never edited, so I look at them as first drafts. And by the time I got to the fifth or sixth book, I’m thinking to myself, “This is really all one novel.” It drives me crazy. The thing is to try to find the time to rewrite them. There’s a missing element – a big battle at a place called Jericho Hill. And that whole thing should be written, and I’ve thought about it several times, and I don’t know how to get into it.
You’ve made a fortune over the years. A lot of people would be living it up, buying houses in Hawaii and the South of France and filling them with Picassos. That’s obviously not your thing, so what does your money do for you?
I like to have money to buy books and go to movies and buy music and stuff. To me, the greatest thing in the world is downloading TV shows on iTunes because there are no commercials, and yet if I were a working stiff, I could never afford to do this. But I don’t even think about money. I have two amazing things in my life: I’m pain-free and I’m debt-free. Money means I can support my family and still do what I love. Not very many people can say that in this world, and not many writers can say that. I’m not a clothes person. I’m not a boat person. We do have a house in Florida. But we live in Maine, for Christ’s sake. It’s not like a trendy community or anything. We have the houses and stuff. My wife likes all that. But I’m not very interested in stuff. I like cars, because I grew up in the country and a car was important. So we’ve got more cars than we need, but that’s our biggest extravagance.
When you look at these hedge-fund guys just living like kings . . .
Totally foreign to me. I saw The Wolf of Wall Street, and it looked to me like this guy was living this sort of exhausting lifestyle. Money for the sake of money doesn’t interest me. There’s a lot of it, and we give a lot of it away.
I’ve read that you make large charitable donations, but you almost never hear about where it goes.
We were raised firmly to believe that if you give away money and you make a big deal of it so that everybody sees it, that’s hubris. You do it for yourself, and you’re not supposed to make a big deal about it. We have publicly acknowledged certain contributions, but the idea behind that is to say to other people, “This is the example we’re trying to make, so we wish that you would do the same thing.”
So if you give away $1 million to Eastern Maine General Hospital here, you’re doing it because you’re hoping that somebody else will chip in. I’m not averse to using whatever celebrity that I have. I’m going to do a TV ad for the Democratic candidate Shenna Bellows this afternoon. She’s running against Susan Collins for Senate. And I don’t know how much goodwill I have in the state, but I think it’s a fair amount, so maybe the ad will make a difference.
Do you worry that being too political will turn off some of your readers?
It happens all the time. I wrote an e-book after the thing in Newtown, Connecticut, when that guy shot all those kids. I got a lot of letters, somebody saying, “Asshole! I’ll never read another one of your goddamn books.” So what? If you’re to a point where you can’t separate the entertainment from the politics, who needs you? Jesus Christ.
I never really cared for Tom Clancy’s books, but it wasn’t because he was a Republican guy. It was because I didn’t think he could write. There’s another guy that I sense is probably a fairly right-wing writer. His name is Stephen Hunter. And I love his books. I don’t think he likes mine.
Your father walked out when you were two. How much did his absence shape your life?
I don’t know. I don’t live an examined life, but I can remember when Tabby and I got married, back in ’71. I can remember laying in bed with her and turning over and saying, “We ought to get married.” And she said, “Let me think about it overnight.”
And in the morning, she said, “Yeah, we should get married.” We had nothing. I mean, I was working at a gas station. I was pumping gas. And then when I graduated from school, she was still in school. Then when I got a job working at a wet-wash laundry because I couldn’t get a teaching job, we had jack shit for money. She was working in a Dunkin’ Donuts when I finally got a teaching job. We didn’t have a phone in the house, and we had two babies. Don’t ask me why we did that. I can’t remember what the mindset was there.
Looking back, would you do it all over again?
We must have been fucking crazy, but I love those kids, and I’m glad we did it. She would go to work at Dunkin’ Donuts. She looked cute in the little pink uniform. God, she was so good-looking. She’s still good-looking to me, but oh, my God. And there was something sexy about all that pink nylon.
She would bring home the empty buckets of filling from the doughnuts, and we used them as diaper pails. So I would teach school, come home, she’d work at Dunkin’ Donuts. I would baby-sit the kids and give them the bottles and change them and everything until she came home at 11:00. And then we’d go to bed. And I’m thinking to myself, “I’m not going to leave this marriage no matter what happens.”
Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview, Page 4 of 6