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Susan Dominus from The New York Times has written a profile on Stephen King’s family business: writing. King’s wife Tabitha, his sons Joe and Owen and Owen’s wife, Kelly Braffet, are all authors and four out of the five of them, including King, have books out this year. Dominus, who spent some time with the family, writes about the important role that story-telling holds for them.
Not wanting to be associated with his father’s legacy, Joe “came up with the pen name Jay Stevenson (a pun on “J., Stephen’s son”)” when he was in high school, he now writes as Joe Hill, with his most recent book being Nos4a2. Owen writes under the King name but stepped away from the horror genre, with his first novel, Double Feature, feeling “more Nick Hornby than Stephen King”.
Braffet and Owen met at the Columbia MFA writing programme and “they swapped manuscripts to make sure they did not hate each other’s writing”. Her book, Save Yourself is coming out this year, Joe says it’s “like David Cronenberg adapted an S.E. Hinton novel for David Lynch”.
It’s an interesting look at what it’s like to be writing in the shadow of a best selling author:
Life in Maine, where Stephen King has spent most of his adult years, requires long drives down country roads, time that King, whose mind is restless, likes to fill by listening to books on tape. In the ’80s, however, he sometimes could not find the books he wanted on tape — or maybe he just did not bother. He had three children: Naomi, Joe and Owen. They could read, couldn’t they? All King had to do was press record. Which is how his school-age children came to furnish their father, over the years, with a small library’s worth of books on tape.
On a drizzly morning in July, King, his wife and their children gathered in Maine for a reunion the week of the Fourth and compared notes on what constituted chores in the King household. As they talked, they were crowded around a rather small kitchen table in a lakeside guesthouse, where King’s 41-year-old son, Joe Hill, was staying, a short drive from the family’s summer home.
Book details
- Under The Dome by Stephen King
EAN: 9781476735474
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- Nos4a2 by Joe Hill
EAN: 9780062222992
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- Double Feature by Owen King
EAN: 9781451676891
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- Save Yourself by Kelly Braffet
EAN: 9780385347341
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- Candles Burning by Tabitha King, Michael McDowell
EAN: 9780425210284
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