Jorie's Reviews > Lisey's Story

While he was hospitalized for pneumonia in 2003, Tabitha King started a reno project on her husband Stephen’s home office. Upon his discharge, seeing his workspace bare and his things in boxes, inspiration struck for a story:

The experience of a famous author’s wife during and after his death.

While Lisey’s Story isn’t necessarily Tabby’s Story — King says as much in his author’s note —, she clearly provided much more inspiration beyond boxing his things up. Tabitha King has lived a truly singular life, being married to arguably the world’s most famous writer. Throughout their partnership, her own accomplishments, literary and otherwise, have been eclipsed by his incomparable success.

Even the most famous anecdote about Tabitha is one in service of Stephen, retrieving the discarded pages of what would become Carrie from the trash, urging him to continue the story that would become his his debut and breakthrough.

Like the titular Lisey, Tabitha King has often been defined in the media by her relationship to her husband…including, probably, regrettably, in this very review. As recently as 2019, she and Stephen spoke out against an article on their donation to the New England Historic Genealogical Society that credited them as “Stephen King and his wife”.

“Wife is a relationship or status. It is not an identity,” she wrote.

And identity is what gets explored in Lisey’s Story.

In part.

In its strongest parts. Parts that hint that the story goes beyond inspiration, but subtle revelations of this famous couple’s private life.

Lisey met Scott Landon in college (just as Tabitha and Stephen met). Scott found unprecedented success as a writer, his books winning multiple awards, and providing the couple a very comfortable life (sound familiar?). Both before and after Scott’s death, Lisey must navigate how the disparity of her situation with Scott impacts her relationship with her two sisters, resentful Darla and troubled Amanda, who live in very different circumstances.

A quick Google search tells me Tabitha King has three sisters instead of two, but King admits in his author’s note that, while the fictional Debusher sisters aren’t 1:1 parallels of Tabby and hers, he was inspired all the same by observing their sororal dynamic through the years.

Another clue hinting at Lisey’s Story’s special importance to the King family was his listing it among his top five favorites of his own work in a 2021 Colbert interview promoting Billy Summers. There, he revealed he had held onto the story rights for years before finally selling it to Apple TV for adaptation.

All this in mind, I wish my regard for Lisey’s Story was so high.

Really, the best way I can describe this book is “Stephen King does Hannah and her Sisters”.

Like Hannah in the 1986 movie, the well-established Lisey must be a source of financial support and emotional labor for her sisters. Simultaneously, she receives minimal help when she needs it after Scott’s death, as if wealth and success are cocoon enough against life’s harsher realities. And, again like Hannah, resentment for her advantages precludes others from seeing her needs.

All of this is great. Being one of three sisters myself, I adore sister stories — it’s why my knowledge of this one movie is so thorough, despite my disdain for its director.

But here’s where Lisey’s Story loses my favor:

In Hannah and her Sisters, there’s a cheating subplot linking several of the characters. In Lisey’s Story, the through line is ~*~magical mental illness~*~, a trope I find inelegant.

Scott had it. His brother had it. His father had it, as had untold generations of Landon men before them. It took several of their lives, either by suicide or murder.

But it also gave them access to a fantastical other world, referred to by Scott as Boo’ya Moon, a beautiful, but dangerous place populated by…clinically depressed people? Like Lisey’s sister Amanda, comatose in real life after a suicide attempt? And “curing” Amanda is a simple as traveling into Boo’ya Moon to bring her back?

Anyone should be allowed to make whatever metaphor for mental illness they want; in that same vein, the reader can decide how they feel about that depiction. For me, it’s reductive (miracle cures) and problematic (Scott incorporates Boo’ya Moon into several of his bestselling books; that old trope of mental illness as a fount for creativity).

But I don’t feel like this book was meant for me or my critique. It was for the King family, for the Spruce family.

For Tabby, an incredible human in her own right 💗