As a group, we writers have a reputation as heavy drinkers. Names like Poe, Hemingway, Capote, Wilde, and Charles Bukowski were well known to tip the bottle more than a little. With good reason. Booze opens the mind to all kinds of possibilities, and removes the inhibitions that tend to constrain the imagination and stifle creativity. This truism is so strong that it has spawned sayings such as “Write when you’re drunk, edit when you’re sober.”
Stephen King certainly understands this stereotype. Almost every writer in his books is either a drinker or a recovering alcoholic. In one of my favorite short stories, 1408, the protagonist/victim, Mike Enslin is asked if he drinks. His response is essentially, “Of course, I said I’m a writer.”
In his book, On Writing, King notes that his penchant for writing about alcoholics started before he himself confronted his drinking problem, possibly foreshadowing his own self-denial. He admits to having consumed, in his drinking prime, a case of lite-beer tallboys per day. That’s 24, 16-ounce beers with an ABV of about 4%. Doing the math, this comes to more than 15 ounces of pure alcohol per day. Let’s put that in perspective.
Moderate alcohol consumption, the type that is said to be beneficial and even life prolonging, is usually described as 1-2 drinks per day for men. Said drinks are defined as either 12-ounce (4.5% ABV) beers, 5-ounce glasses of wine, or 1.5-ounce (40% ABV) glasses of liquor. Now, as an epidemiologist, I know that daily drinkers tend to underestimate their alcohol consumption, and that they rarely adjust their survey responses for subtleties such as a 3-ounce barroom pour or beers and liquors with higher alcohol content. That is to say, your average drinker probably counts his 20-ounce IPA draft as one beer, even though it’s nearly twice a 12-oz bottle and runs at an ABV of 7%. So, let’s be generous and ascribe healthy consumption as actually 3-4 drinks (roughly 2 oz pure alcohol) per day. This means that King used to imbibe at least 7-8x more alcohol than is healthy.
Most of us can barely imagine this level of intake, even if one assumes King had a hollow leg to store all that lite beer. But his body became accustomed to the load, just as his brain became addicted to the mind expansion of it. His biggest fear of stopping was not that he couldn’t do it, but that he might lose the creative spark, thereby losing his writing gift.
In the final analysis, King decided that love was more important than booze; love of life, love of family. This idea was brought home by his wife, who told him to kill himself if he wanted, but not to insist that the rest of them watch him do it. With that bit of angel-feathers intervention, she saved his life. Saved it to write more great books that we could all enjoy.
Thank you, Tabitha King.