Tabitha King played a decisive role in the existence of Carrie, Stephen King’s debut novel.
While he was teaching high school and writing short stories for magazines, he drafted the opening pages of a story about a bullied teenage girl with telekinetic powers. Dissatisfied with the work—partly because he felt he knew little about high school girls—he crumpled the pages and threw them away. Tabitha found them while emptying the wastebasket, smoothed them out, and read them. She told him the story had promise and that she wanted to know what happened next.
When Stephen protested that he didn’t know enough about teenage girls to continue, Tabitha offered to help with that side of the material. She guided him on details of female adolescence and the social world of high school girls, including aspects of the locker-room scene that opens the novel.
With her encouragement, he expanded the discarded pages into a full novel rather than abandoning the idea. The book’s dedication—“This is for Tabby, who got me into it and then bailed me out of it”—directly credits her for both drawing him into the project and supporting him through its completion.
Beyond the practical help with the manuscript, Tabitha’s belief in the work came at a precarious time. The couple was living in a trailer with young children while Stephen taught and wrote; the success of Carrie (especially the large paperback sale) eventually allowed him to leave teaching and write full-time. King has repeatedly said that without her intervention, the novel—and likely his career as a novelist—would not have happened.
