The girl who helped inspire Stephen King‘s Carrie White wore the same black skirt to school every day, its hem halfway down her shins. When she returned from Christmas vacation in her sophomore year with a sweater and a knee-length cranberry skirt, the bullying grew worse.
The girls at school called her Dodo or Doodoo. King remembered that “you could just see her fade and shrivel.”
King remembered her as Dodie Franklin in On Writing, alongside another girl he called Sondra. Both died before he started Carrie, his 1974 debut novel, and neither reached 30.
Dodie later took her own life. Sondra had epilepsy and lived in a trailer with a huge crucifix.
King wrote that she “died during a seizure… alone.” Her death occurred in a Lisbon Falls apartment. Their real names have never been published.
Recalling the girl with the new Christmas clothes in 2024, King said: “Then, at Christmas, she got new clothes… and the meanness didn’t go away, it redoubled… I never took part, but I was never somebody who stood up heroically for her.”
Those memories became part of a fictional teenager who’s bullied at school and lives under her mother’s religious control. In On Writing, King described how the 2 girls helped him understand the character: “I never liked Carrie… but through Sondra and Dodie I came at last to understand her a little. I pitied her and I pitied her classmates as well.”
The novel almost ended after 3 pages. King threw them away, writing in On Writing: “After all, who wanted to read a book about a poor girl with menstrual problems?” His wife, Tabitha, retrieved the pages from the wastebasket and brushed off the cigarette ash.
King recalled her encouragement in 2024: “Tabby literally picked it out of the wastebasket and brushed off the cigarette ash. She read it in bed and said, ‘This is good, you should go on,’”
King later called Carrie clumsy and said he finished it because he’d run out of inspiration and had no better ideas.
