One of Tabby’s favorite T-shirts reads, “If I’m speaking, you should be taking notes,” and frequently, her family members do. “When I wrote ‘NOS4A2,’ I wrote a really bleak ending, and I was artistically committed to it, come hell or high water — right up until Mum read it,” Joe said, sitting at the table with his family. “She said, ‘You know, Joe, that ending really won’t do.’ I was like, ‘Aww, all right.’ My artistic integrity lasted about 15 seconds on the phone with my mum.”

The feedback goes both ways. “And when you wrote ‘Survivor,’ Tabby, we all ganged up on you about the ending in that book,” Stephen recalled.

“Yeah, and the changes made it a best seller,” Tabby joked, then blew a loud raspberry. The book came and went, although Library Journal called it a “compelling psychological drama,” a book that “belongs in most fiction collections.” Tabby, who is slowly working on her ninth book, clearly feels ill served by the publishing industry, so much so that she encouraged Joe to use a pseudonym. “The perception that Steve’s success got me published cannot be erased for some people,” she said. The assumption, natural though it may be, is misguided: a trilogy of novels she wrote set in Maine — “Pearl,” “The Book of Reuben” and “One on One” — is pure narrative pleasure (the author Jennifer Weiner said “Pearl” was one of her all-time favorite reads). It may have been her husband’s shadow that held her back, or it may have been the same problems that hold back many midlist writers — work that falls between literary and comedy, novels with no gimmicks or glamorous locations. That her books aren’t better known pains her sons, both of whom consider her influence on their work as strong as that of their father’s. “At least, I hope that’s true,” Owen says. “Her sense of place, her sense of character — it’s just so strong.”

If Tabby does occupy something of a saintly status in the King household, it is not just because she stood by her husband when he was young and desperate, but because she threatened to walk away, years later, when he was famous and a full-blown alcoholic with a coke habit. In 1987, Tabby staged an intervention that all three children — Naomi, then 17, Joe, 15, and Owen, 10 — attended. All Owen knew until that point was that his father “consumed massive amounts of alcohol — but I might as well have assumed that everybody’s dad did that.” Tabby explained to all of them that if their father did not agree to get sober, she would ask him to leave. “I didn’t want to lie to my kids,” she said. “I’ve never really gotten lying anyway, because all you do is postpone the day at which you’re revealed to be a liar.” As the family discussed the intervention all these years later, the conversation grew almost hushed. “It was terrifying,” Naomi said. “Are you going to have a dad anymore?”

It took about two years, but King finally did get sober. Then there was a period of calm, until 1999, when King ran up against a series of near-tragic events. While walking down a country road near his home, he was hit by a van that tossed him 14 feet and reduced the bones in his lower left leg “to so many marbles in a sack,” in the words of one doctor. In chronic pain for months of recovery, he developed (and eventually kicked) an addiction to the painkillers. And finally, he came down with pneumonia, checking into the hospital within 24 hours of the speech he gave toasting his wife at the National Book Awards. “The pulmonologist wasn’t sure he’d get through the night, but that’s just what he did,” Tabby said. “I’ve told him, I’m not doing that again. It was just too hard.”

There was a moment during the interview when one of the King children was talking about a book, and Stephen turned toward his wife and took her hand. He grasped it, tightly, and they both closed their eyes and leaned in toward each other, as if in prayer. Later, when asked about that moment, Stephen could not remember what inspired that moment — maybe nothing at all. “Sometimes I just take her hand,” he said. “We’ve always been close, Tab and me. I love her.”

NAOMI

It is an odd twist of fate that Stephen King’s first child, Naomi, was born with a chronic deficit of the hormone adrenaline. She grew, over time, to be an avid reader, but the power of her father’s books was lost on her, as terror, she believes, is a hard emotion for her to access. So her father asked her, when she was a teenager, what it was that she did like. She told him she liked dragons, and her father wrote her a book, “The Eyes of the Dragon,” a fantasy tale complete with an evil, conniving magician in the king’s palace. He dedicated the book to her.