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The Haunting of Prince Harry

By Rebecca Mead

Balmoral Castle, in the Scottish Highlands, was Queen Elizabeth’s preferred resort among her several castles and palaces, and in the opening pages of “ Spare ” (Random House), the much anticipated, luridly leaked, and compellingly artful autobiography of Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, its environs are intimately described. We get the red-coated footman attending the heavy front door; the mackintoshes hanging on hooks; the cream-and-gold wallpaper; and the statue of Queen Victoria, to which Harry and his older brother, William, always bowed when passing. Beyond lay the castle’s fifty bedrooms—including the one known in the brothers’ childhood as the nursery, unequally divided into two. William occupied the larger half, with a double bed and a splendid view; Harry’s portion was more modest, with a bed frame too high for a child to scale, a mattress that sagged in the middle, and crisp bedding that was “pulled tight as a snare drum, so expertly smoothed that you could easily spot the century’s worth of patched holes and tears.”

It was in this bedroom, early in the morning of August 31, 1997, that Harry, aged twelve, was awakened by his father, Charles, then the Prince of Wales, with the terrible news that had already broken across the world: the princes’ mother, Princess Diana, from whom Charles had been divorced a year earlier and estranged long before that, had died in a car crash in Paris. “He was standing at the edge of the bed, looking down,” Harry writes of the moment in which he learned of the loss that would reshape his personality and determine the course of his life. He goes on to describe his father’s appearance with an unusual simile: “His white dressing gown made him seem like a ghost in a play.”

What ghost would that be, and what play? The big one, of course, bearing the name of that other brooding princely Aitch: Hamlet. Within the first few pages of “Spare,” Shakespeare’s play is alluded to more than once. There’s a jocular reference: “To beard or not to beard” is how Harry foreshadows a contentious family debate over whether he should be clean-shaven on his wedding day. And there’s an instance far graver: an account, in the prologue, of a fraught encounter between Harry, William, and Charles in April, 2021, a few hours after the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen’s husband and the Royal Family’s patriarch, at Windsor. The meeting had been called by Harry in the vain hope that he might get his obdurate parent and sibling, first and second in line to the throne, to see why he and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, had felt it necessary to flee Britain for North America, relinquishing their royal roles, if not their ducal titles. The three men met in Frogmore Gardens, on the Windsor estate, which includes the last resting place of many illustrious ancestors, and as they walked its gravel paths they talked with increasing tension about their apparently irreconcilable differences. They “were now smack in the middle of the Royal Burial Ground,” Harry writes, “more up to our ankles in bodies than Prince Hamlet.”

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King Charles, as he became upon the death of Queen Elizabeth , in September, will not find much to like in “Spare,” which may offer the most thoroughgoing scything of treacherous royals and their scheming courtiers since the Prince of Denmark’s bloody swath through the halls of Elsinore. Queen Camilla, formerly “the Other Woman” in Charles and Diana’s unhappy marriage, is, Harry judges, “dangerous,” having “sacrificed me on her personal PR altar.” William’s wife, Kate, now the Princess of Wales, is haughty and cool, brushing off Meghan’s homeopathic remedies. William himself is domineering and insecure, with a wealth of other deficits: “his familiar scowl, which had always been his default in dealings with me; his alarming baldness, more advanced than my own; his famous resemblance to Mummy, which was fading with time.” Charles is, for the most part, more tenderly drawn. In “Spare,” the King is a figure of tragic pathos, whose frequently repeated term of endearment for Harry, “darling boy,” most often precedes an admission that there is nothing to be done—or, at least, nothing he can do—about the burden of their shared lot as members of the nation’s most important, most privileged, most scrutinized, most publicly dysfunctional family. “Please, boys—don’t make my final years a misery,” he pleads, in Harry’s account of the burial-ground showdown.

As painful as Charles must find the book’s revealing content, he might grudgingly approve of Harry’s Shakespearean flourishes in delivering it. Thirty-odd years ago, in giving the annual Shakespeare Birthday Lecture at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon, the future monarch spoke of the eternal relevance of the playwright’s insights into human nature, citing, among other references, Hamlet’s monologue with the phrase “What a piece of work is a man!” Shakespeare, Charles told his audience, offers us “blunt reminders of the flaws in our own personalities, and of the mess which we so often make of our lives.” In “Spare,” Harry describes his father’s devotion to Shakespeare, paraphrasing Charles’s message about the Bard’s works in terms that seem to refer equally to that other pillar of British identity, the monarchy: “They’re our shared heritage, we should be cherishing them, safeguarding them, and instead we’re letting them die.”

Harry counts himself among “the Shakespeareless hordes,” bored and confused as a teen-ager when his father drags him to see performances of the Royal Shakespeare Company; disinclined to read much of anything, least of all the freighted works of Britain’s national author. (“Not really big on books,” he confesses to Meghan Markle when, on their second date, she tells him she’s having an “Eat, Pray, Love” summer, and he has no idea what she’s on about.) Harry at least gives a compelling excuse for his inability to discover what his father so valued, though it’s probably not one that he gave to his schoolmasters at Eton. “I tried to change,” he recalls. “I opened Hamlet . Hmm: Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper . . . ? I slammed it shut. No, thank you.”

That passage indicates another spectral figure haunting the text of “Spare”—that of Harry’s ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer. Harry, or his publishing house—which paid a reported twenty-million-dollar advance for the book—could not have chosen better. Moehringer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter turned memoirist and novelist, as well as the ghostwriter of, most notably, Andre Agassi’s thrillingly candid memoir, “ Open .” In that book, published in 2009, a tennis ace once reviled for his denim shorts and flowing mullet revealed himself to be a troubled, tennis-hating neurotic with father issues and an unreliable hairpiece. When the title and the cover art of “Spare” were made public, late last year, the kinship between the two books—single-word title; closeup, set-jaw portrait—indicated that they were to be understood as fraternal works in the Moehringer œuvre. Moehringer has what is usually called a novelist’s eye for detail, effectively deployed in “Spare.” That patched, starched bed linen at Balmoral, emblazoned with E.R., the formal initials of the Queen , is, of course, a metaphor for the constricting, and quite possibly threadbare, fabric of the institution of monarchy itself.

Moehringer has also bestowed upon Harry the legacy that his father was unable to force on him: a felicitous familiarity with the British literary canon. The language of Shakespeare rings in his sentences. Those wanton journalists who publish falsehoods or half-truths? They treat the royals as insects: “What fun, to pluck their wings,” Harry writes, in an echo of “King Lear,” a play about the fragility of kingly authority. During his military training as a forward air controller, a role in which he guided the flights and firepower of pilots from an earthbound station, Harry describes the release of bombs as “spirits melting into air”—a phrase drawn from “The Tempest,” a play about a duke in exile across the water. Elevating flourishes like these give readers—perhaps British ones in particular—a shiver of recognition, as if the chords of “Jerusalem” were being struck on a church organ. But they also remind those readers of the necessary literary artifice at work in the enterprise of “Spare,” as Moehringer shapes Harry’s memories and obsessions, traumas and bugbears, into a coherent narrative: the peerless ghostwriter giving voice to the Shakespeareless prince.

Moehringer has fashioned the Duke of Sussex’s life story into a tight three-act drama, consisting of his occasionally wayward youth; his decade of military service, which included two tours of duty in Afghanistan; and his relationship with Meghan. Throughout, there are numerous bombshells, which—thanks to the o’er hasty publication of the book’s Spanish edition—did not so much melt into air as materialize into clickbait. These included the allegation that, in 1998, Camilla leaked word to a tabloid of her first meeting with Prince William—according to Harry, the opening sally in a campaign to secure marriage to Charles and a throne by his side. (Harry does not mention that, at the time, Camilla’s personal assistant took responsibility for the leak—she’d told her husband, a media executive, who’d told a friend, who’d told someone at the Sun , who’d printed it. Bloody journalists.) They also include less consequential but more titillating arcana, such as Harry’s account of losing his virginity, in a field behind a pub, to an unnamed older woman, who treated him “not unlike a young stallion. Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me off to graze.” The Daily Mail , Harry’s longtime media nemesis, had a field day with that revelation, door-stepping a now forty-four-year-old businesswoman to come up with the deathless headline “Horse-loving ex-model six years older than Harry, who once breathlessly revealed the Prince left her mouth numb with passionate kissing in a muddy field, refuses to discuss whether she is the keen horsewoman who took his virginity in a field.”

The leaks have done the book’s sales no harm, and neither have Harry’s pre-publication interviews on “Good Morning America” and “60 Minutes”; in the U.K., Harry did an hour-and-a-half-long special with Tom Bradby, the journalist to whom Meghan tearfully bemoaned, in the fall of 2019, that “not many people have asked if I’m O.K.” But “Spare” is worth reading not just for its headline-generating details but also for its narrative force, its voice, and its sometimes surprising wit. Harry describes his trepidation in telling his brother that he intended to propose to Meghan: William “predicted a host of difficulties I could expect if I hooked up with an ‘American actress,’ a phrase he always managed to make sound like ‘convicted felon’ ”—an observation so splendid that a reader can only hope it was actually Harry’s.

There is much in the book that people conversant with the contours of the Prince’s life, insofar as they have hitherto been reported, will find familiar. At the same time, Harry bursts any number of inaccurate reports, including a rumored flirtation with another convicted fel— sorry, American actress, Cameron Diaz: “I was never within fifty meters of Ms. Diaz, further proof that if you like reading pure bollocks then royal biographies are just your thing.” Not a few of the incidents Harry chooses to describe in detail are centered on images or stories already in the public domain, such as being beset by paparazzi when leaving night clubs—he explains that he started being ferried away in the trunk of his driver’s car so as to avoid lashing out at his pursuers—and being required to perform uncomfortable media interviews while serving in Afghanistan in exchange for the newspapers’ keeping shtum about his deployment, for security reasons. (An Australian publication blew the embargo, and Harry was swiftly extracted from the battlefield.)

Given that what Harry dredges up from his past are so often things that have been publicly documented, one wonders whether Moehringer was obliged to indulge Harry’s extended dilation upon media-inflicted wounds , through Zoom sessions that even sympathetic readers will find exhausting to contemplate. There is a certain amount of score-settling and record-straightening, which, though obviously important to the author, can be wearying to a reader, who may feel that if she has to read another word about those accursed bridesmaids’ dresses—of who said what to whom, and who caused whom to cry—she just might burst into tears herself. More significantly, though, there are broadsides against unforgivable intrusions committed by the press, including phone hacking. (Harry is still engaged in lawsuits against a number of British newspapers that allegedly intercepted his voice mails more than a dozen years ago.)

And then there are pages and pages devoted to Harry’s personal trials, which even the most dogged reporter on Fleet Street would not dare dream of uncovering. Chief among these is Harry’s struggle to overcome penile frostnip after a charitable Arctic excursion with a group of veterans, which ends up in a clandestine visit to a Harley Street doctor; he writes, “North Pole, I told him. I went to the North Pole and now my South Pole is on the fritz.” “On the fritz” is an Americanism that we can hope Harry picked up while guiding American pilots—he calls them Yanks—back to base in Afghanistan, rather than the exchange being the ingenious invention of his ghostwriter. Moehringer, on the whole, does a good job of conveying the laddish argot of a millennial British prince, who addresses his friends as “mate” and—repeatedly—calls his penis his “todger.”

Above all, “Spare” is worth reading for its potential historical import, which is likely to resonate, if not to the crack of doom, then well into the reign of King Charles III, and even into that of his successor. As was the case in 1992 with the publication of “ Diana: Her True Story ,” by Andrew Morton—to whom, it was revealed after her death, the Princess of Wales gave her full coöperation, herself the ghost behind the writer—“Spare” is an unprecedented exposure of the Royal Family from the most deeply embedded of informants. The Prince in exile does not hesitate to detail the pettiness, the vanity, and the inglorious urge toward self-preservation of those who are now the monarchy’s highest-ranking representatives.

It’s not clear that even now, having authored a book, Harry entirely understands what a book is; when challenged by Tom Bradby about his decision to reveal private conversations after having railed so forcefully about the invasive tactics of the press, Harry replied, “The level of planting and leaking from other members of the family means that in my mind they have written countless books—certainly, millions of words have been dedicated to trying to trash my wife and myself to the point of where I had to leave my country.” Pity the poor ghostwriter who has to hear his craft compared to the spewing verbiage of the media churn—by its commissioning subject, no less. (Man, what a piece of work.) Remarkably, Prince Harry has suggested that he sees the book as an invitation to reconciliation, addressed to his father and brother—a way of speaking to them publicly when all his efforts to address them privately have failed to persuade. “Spare” is, you might say, Prince Harry’s “Mousetrap”—a literary device intended to catch the conscience of the King, and the King after him.

If so, the ruse seems about as likely to end well for Harry as Hamlet’s play-within-a-play efforts did for him. Moehringer, at least, knows this, even if Harry may hope that his own royal plot will swerve unexpectedly from implacable tragedy to restitutive melodrama. In a soaring coda, Moehringer has the Prince once again reflecting on the royal dead, describing the family he belongs to as nothing less than a death cult. “We christened and crowned, graduated and married, passed out and passed over our beloveds’ bones. Windsor Castle itself was a tomb, the walls filled with ancestors,” Harry writes. It’s a powerful motif: the Prince—shattered in childhood by his mother’s death, his every step determined by the inescapable legacy of the countless royal dead—as an unwilling Hamlet pushed, rather than leaping, into the grave.

Recalling the meeting with his father and brother in the Frogmore burial ground with which the book began, Harry invokes the most famous soliloquy from the play of Shakespeare’s that he says he once slammed shut: “Why were we here, lurking along the edge of that ‘undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns?’ ” Then comes a final, lovely, true, and utterly poetry-puncturing observation: “Though maybe that’s a more apt description of America.” In moving to the paradisaical climes of California, Harry has been spared a life he had no use for, which had no real use for him. The unlettered Prince has gained in life what Hamlet achieved only in death: his own story shaped on his own terms, thanks to the intervention of a skillful Horatio. You might almost call it Harry’s crowning achievement. ♦

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11 Takeaways From Prince Harry’s Memoir, ‘Spare’

The much-anticipated book offers few revelations, in the wake of leaks and high-profile interviews, but it tucks familiar incidents into a broader narrative.

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By The New York Times Books Staff

“ Spare ,” the hotly anticipated memoir by Prince Harry, has captivated people across the world, and is shaping up to be one of the year’s biggest books.

A series of high-profile interviews, along with leaked excerpts and premature sales of the book in Spain, heightened interest in a memoir that offers a frank, if one-sided, look at Harry’s life.

Harry says he decided to write “Spare” when he traveled to Britain for his grandfather’s funeral in April 2021. There he had the “staggering” realization that neither his father nor his brother truly understood why he and his wife, Meghan, had moved to California. “I have to tell them,” he thought. “And so: Pa? Willy? World? Here you go.”

Here are 11 takeaways from the book.

He talks candidly about Princess Diana’s death

The morning after Diana, Harry’s mother, died in a car crash in Paris, Charles, his father, woke him up to tell him what had happened.

“He sat down on the edge of the bed,” Harry writes. “He put a hand on my knee. Darling boy, Mummy’s been in a car crash .” He went on, “ They tried, darling boy. I’m afraid she didn’t make it.”

Harry writes that “none of what I said to him then remains in my memory. It’s possible that I didn’t say anything. What I do remember with startling clarity is that I didn’t cry. Not one tear. Pa didn’t hug me. He wasn’t great at showing emotions under normal circumstances, how could he be expected to show them in such a crisis? But his hand did fall once more on my knee and he said: It’s going to be OK . That was quite a lot for him. Fatherly, hopeful, kind. And so very untrue.”

Years after his mother’s death, Harry asked to see the secret police files related to the crash. Harry’s private secretary obtained the files, though he removed the most “challenging” ones, Harry wrote. Still, he saw many paparazzi photos of his dying mother.

The men who followed her “never stopped shooting her while she lay between the seats, unconscious, or semiconscious,” he writes. “Not one of them was checking on her, offering her help, not even comforting her. They were just shooting, shooting, shooting.”

Prince William and Harry begged Charles not to marry Camilla

“When asked, Willy and I promised Pa that we’d welcome Camilla into the family,” Harry writes. “The only thing we asked in return was that he not marry her. You don’t need to remarry, we pleaded. … We support you, we said. We endorse Camilla, we said. Just please don’t marry her.”

Press leaks from his family were common, he says

According to the book, Charles and sometimes Camilla approved damaging press leaks about Harry and William.

On one occasion, Harry writes, Charles — advised by a spin doctor — cooperated with the tabloids on a story about Harry and drugs to bolster his own faltering reputation. “No more the unfaithful husband, Pa would now be presented to the world as the harried single dad coping with a drug-addled child.” Much later, in 2019, Harry writes, William was “seething” because “Pa and Camilla’s people had planted a story or stories about him, and Kate, and the kids, and he wasn’t going to take it any more. Give Pa and Camilla an inch, he said, they take a mile.”

Separately, the news report that Harry and Meghan were leaving England included a tidbit that Harry believes was leaked by the palace.

The article, which appeared in The Sun, “included the telling detail that we’d offered to relinquish our Sussex titles,” Harry writes. “There was only one document on earth in which that detail was mentioned — my private and confidential letter to my father. To which a shockingly, damningly small number of people had access. We hadn’t even mentioned it to our closest friends.”

While in Afghanistan, he killed 25 Taliban fighters

“Most soldiers can’t tell you precisely how much death is on their ledger,” Harry writes of his tours during the war. “My number: 25.”

He added: “While in the heat of combat, I didn’t think of those 25 as people. You can’t kill people if you think of them as people. They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bads taken away before they could kill Goods. I’d been trained to ‘other-ize’ them, trained well. On some level I recognized this learned detachment as problematic. But I also saw it as an unavoidable part of soldiering.”

Harry describes suffering anxiety and panic attacks

Fear of public speaking morphed into a fear of crowds, and then full-blown anxiety attacks on the cusp of his 30th birthday. In the book, Harry sees the afflictions as a form of PTSD, attributing them to both his military service and the death of his mother. When he told his father what was happening, Charles said: “I suppose it’s my fault. I should’ve got you the help you needed years ago.” Harry writes: “I assured him that it wasn’t his fault. But I appreciated the apology.”

And a nasty case of frostbite

A trip to the North Pole left Harry with some discomfort. “Upon arriving home I’d been horrified to discover that my nether regions were frostnipped as well, and while the ears and cheeks were already healing, the todger wasn’t,” he reports. When home remedies — like applying Elizabeth Arden cream — did not work, he finally saw a doctor.

Meghan convinced him to return to therapy

One evening during their courtship, “Meg said something I took the wrong way,” so “I snapped at her, spoke to her harshly — cruelly.” Meghan left the room. “I went and found her upstairs. She was sitting in the bedroom. She was calm, but said in a quiet, level tone that she would never stand for being spoken to like that.” Harry writes:

She wanted to know where it came from. I don’t know. Where did you ever hear a man speak like that to a woman? Did you overhear adults speak that way when you were growing up? I cleared my throat, looked away. Yes.

Harry told Meghan he’d tried therapy, but it hadn’t helped. “No,” she told him. “Try again.”

Charles told Harry there wasn’t money to support him and Meghan

The exchange between father and son when Harry announced his intention to marry did not go as expected.

Does she want to carry on working? Say again? Does she want to keep on acting? Oh, I mean, I don’t know, I wouldn’t think so. I expect she’ll want to be with me, doing the job, you know, which would rule out “Suits” … since they film in … Toronto. Hmm, I see. Well, darling boy, you know there’s not enough money to go around. I stared. What was he banging on about? He explained. Or tried to. I can’t pay for anyone else. I’m already having to pay for your brother and Catherine.

Harry writes: “Pa didn’t financially support Willy and me, and our families, out of any largesse. That was his job. That was the whole deal. We agreed to serve the monarch, go wherever we were sent, do whatever we were told, surrender our autonomy, keep our hands and feet in the gilded cage at all times, and in exchange the keepers of the cage agreed to feed and clothe us.”

But it wasn’t about money, of course: “Pa might have dreaded the rising cost of maintaining us, but what he really couldn’t stomach was someone new dominating the monarchy, grabbing the limelight, someone shiny and new coming in and overshadowing him.”

William didn’t want Harry to be the best man at his wedding

“The public had been told that I was to be best man, but that was a bare-faced lie,” Harry writes. “Willy didn’t want me giving a best-man speech. He didn’t think it was safe to hand me a live mic and put me in a position to go off-script. He wasn’t wrong.” Still, he managed to present the newly married couple with an ermine thong at the wedding reception: “The room let out a collective gasp,” he writes, then “a warm, gratifying wave of laughter.”

Harry singles out Rupert Murdoch’s media empire for blame

“I couldn’t think of a single human being in the 300,000-year history of the species who’d done more damage to our collective sense of reality,” he writes. But those hired to shoot photographs for British tabloids are targets of his anger, too.

“The paps had always been grotesque people, but as I reached maturity they were worse,” he says. “They were more emboldened, more radicalized, just as young men in Iraq had been radicalized. Their mullahs were editors, the same ones who’d vowed to do better after Mummy died.”

Harry and Meghan felt blindsided during negotiations over their future

The couple chose to leave England, but hoped to keep up some of their royal duties and to retain the security that came with their titles. Instead, after a meeting dubbed “the Sandringham Summit” in January 2020, they learned that, in Harry’s words, “the fix was in” — they would no longer represent the queen and their security would continue for only a 12-month transition period. (In fact, they would lose that security several months later.)

“I love my Mother Country, and I love my family, and I always will,” Harry writes. “I just wish, at the second-darkest moment of my life, they’d both been there for me.”

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• <i>Spare</i> Is Surprisingly Well Written—Despite the Drama Around It

Spare Is Surprisingly Well Written—Despite the Drama Around It

G iven the many shocking, bizarre, and, in some cases, downright untoward leaks from Prince Harry’s memoir Spare before its Jan. 10 publication, readers might open the book expecting the kind of tell-all with no literary merit often churned out by celebrities. Headlines about Harry’s frostbitten penis and his physical altercation with Prince William primed us to expect something akin to a Real Housewives episode.

But Spare is filled with lyrical meditations on royal life. The book’s opening evokes none other than William Shakespeare; Harry awaits his father and brother at the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore, where many of his forebears are buried. The three men have agreed to a parley after Prince Philip’s funeral , a last-ditch effort to resolve some of the family conflicts that drove Harry from his ancestral home .

“I turned my back to the wind and saw, looming behind me, the Gothic ruin, which in reality was no more Gothic than the Millennium Wheel,” Harry writes. “Some clever architect, some bit of stagecraft. Like so much around here, I thought.” When his father and brother do arrive, they wander through the cemetery, and find themselves, Harry remembers, “more up to our ankles in bodies than Prince Hamlet.”

Perhaps Harry identifies with the morose, dithering prince. But in all likelihood Spare’ s ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer, fashioned the graveyard scene to evoke the Bard’s tragic tale of succession. Moehringer’s impressive writing propels the reader quickly through the 416-page book. It’s a shame that Spare will be remembered more for the leaks about Harry’s wife Meghan Markle and his sister-in-law Kate Middleton squabbling over bridesmaids dresses than for its lovely prose.

Moehringer, a former newspaper reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, has spent years helping celebrities like Andre Agassi share their life stories. (Agassi sought him out after reading Moehringer’s own critically acclaimed memoir, The Tender Bar. ) Across Moehringer’s works—or, at least the ones we know about—he manages to spill his subjects’ petty grievances while still entrancing readers with his writing style. Whatever you think of the content, there’s no denying Spare is unflinching, introspective, and well-written.

Read More: How Celebrity Memoirs Got So Good

A good ghostwriter is able to extract memories from the subject and paint a vivid picture of those moments. Moehringer has said he tries to capture his subject’s voice, too. “You try and inhabit their skin,” he said in an interview with NPR about the writing process for Agassi’s Open . “And even though you’re thinking third person, you’re writing first person, so the processes are mirror images of each other, but they seem very simpatico.”

The details in Spare are Harry’s. Some are delightfully mundane, like the one about his father doing headstands every day in his underwear as part of his prescribed physical therapy. Others are weighty: it was made explicitly clear to the boys from birth that if William got sick, Harry, as the spare, might need to provide a “spare part”—a kidney or bone marrow—to save the heir. Moehringer, bringing an outsider’s perspective, is able to ground Harry’s personal feelings in the history of the monarchy and cultural significance of his position. In a moving passage, the two try to reconcile Harry’s tangible memories of his late mother, Princess Diana, with her icon status.

“Although my mother was a princess, named after a goddess, both those terms always felt weak, inadequate. People routinely compared her to icons and saints, from Nelson Mandela to Mother Teresa to Joan of Arc, but every such comparison, while lofty and loving, also felt wide of the mark. The most recognizable woman on the planet, one of the most beloved, my mother was simply indescribable, that was the plain truth. And yet…how could someone so far beyond everyday language remain so real, so palpably present, so exquisitely vivid in my mind? How was it possible that I could see her, clear as the swan skimming towards me on that indigo lake? How could I hear her laughter, loud as the songbirds in the bare trees—still?”

Such passages have so far been missing from the rabid press coverage of Spare . There are too many titillating details to keep the tabloids occupied. Since the book accidentally hit bookshelves in Spain days before its intended publication, outlets like Page Six and the Daily Mail have dug through the memoir’s pages for the most sensational parts. The tidbits were stripped of context. But in the book they do serve a larger purpose than spilling the tea.

The anecdote about Harry’s frostbitten nether regions, for instance, segues into a moment of reflection about the invasiveness of the press. “I don’t know why I should’ve been so reluctant to discuss my penis with Pa,” writes Harry. “My penis was a matter of public record, and indeed some public curiosity. The press had written about it extensively. There were countless stories in books, and papers (even the New York Times ) about Willy and me not being circumcised. Mummy had forbidden it, they all said.” It’s a rich detail, to be sure, but all the richer juxtaposed next to the fact that a paper of record had written about the prince’s penis long before Harry considered writing about it himself.

The rebellious royal is often funny: He jokes about the frostbite incident in an aside when he writes “my South Pole was on the fritz.” He also proves a surprisingly good narrator of his life story in the Spare audiobook: Harry’s voice is calm yet transfixing. His self-awareness is apparent when he chuckles at a line about his grandmother’s corgis. His insecurities shine through when he admits trepidatiously that William told his brother he only made Harry best man at his wedding because it was what the public expected. It is in these moments that Moehringer’s writing and Harry’s disposition find harmony.

The book is far from perfect. It ends with Harry rehashing stories about who in his family leaked what to the press that he has now shared with Oprah Winfrey and Anderson Cooper and Michael Strahan and Netflix. The constant litigation proves exhausting. Still, celebrity memoirs are usually categorized as “well-written” or “revealing.” Rarely both. Spare, in that sense, is special.

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Prince Harry’s Spare is a sad and self-indicting portrait of royalty on the brink

The press is the villain but there are no heroes in Prince Harry’s new memoir.

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Spare , the explosive new memoir from Prince Harry, is a conflicted book. It feels like a diatribe from someone who has only recently learned that it is physically possible to talk openly about his life and his anger, and who now has no idea how to modulate himself. The result is occasionally insufferable, but also oddly fascinating. At times you wonder if it should ever have been made public.

By turns artless and lyrical, affectionate and bitter, Spare ’s 400 pages read in a chaotic swirl. It spirals from the death of Harry’s mother Princess Diana in 1997, across his stunted and laddish adolescence, through his manly army days and his marriage to Meghan Markle, and up to the point that he decided to step down as a senior member of the British royal family in 2020.

Throughout, Harry’s ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer channels Harry’s voice with disarming candor. Intimate details of royal life stream out unceasingly: the brown peat-sweetened water in the baths at Balmoral, the petty squabbles over parking spots at Kensington Palace, the miserly Windsor Christmas traditions. (Princess Margaret, upon gifting Harry a cheap ballpoint pen, points out that it has a tiny rubber fish wrapped around it. “Wow,” says Harry.)

Moehringer, who won a Pulitzer under his own name for his 2000 Los Angeles Times article “ Crossing Over ” and ghostwrote Andre Agassi’s celebrated memoir Open , presents Harry to the reader as a likably jockish sort, straightforward and uninterested in literary flourishes. His sentences are simple and sparse, often broken into single words. Harry (via Moehringer) introduces a Faulkner reference by noting that he found it on brainyquote.com, and he is charmingly overwhelmed by Meghan’s literary sophistication when she references Eat Pray Love , a book Harry informs us he has never heard of.

More Harry’s speed, it seems, are stories about how he lost his virginity (an older woman behind a pub) and how his penis was frostbitten during a trek to the North Pole (“Now my South Pole is on the fritz”). These he presents to the reader with a sort of dirty wink, an establishing of his credentials as a lad’s lad who would certainly never want to get in the way of anyone’s good time.

And yet even Harry, the subtext goes, can see that there is something badly wrong with the relationship between the British monarchy and the British press — especially when it comes to the way the British press treated Meghan, the British monarchy’s first member of color. So what’s everyone else’s excuse?

What, especially, is the excuse of Harry’s father and brother, King Charles and Prince William, that fraught, fragile family unit left behind after Diana’s death? They are the people to whom Harry was at one point closest in the world, and from whom he is now estranged. His relationships with them, and with his lost mother, are the beating heart of Spare .

Harry writes with palpable tenderness about Charles and William, whom he calls Pa and Willy. (In turn, Charles calls Harry “darling boy,” and William calls Harry “Harold.”) Charles appears during Harry’s childhood as an absentmindedly sweet man who leaves notes on Harry’s pillow about how proud he is of him. Every morning, Charles does headstands in his underwear for physical therapy, and he is attached to his childhood teddy bear, which he totes around everywhere. Meanwhile, William, the only person who truly understands the trauma of Diana’s death and of growing up in the glare of paparazzi flashbulbs, is in the first section of the book a partner in crime, a comrade, the first person Harry turns to with problems large and small: both when one of Diana’s old friends writes a tell-all, and when one of Harry’s school friends convinces him to shave off all his hair.

Yet Charles and William are both, in Harry’s telling, corrupted by the force of the crown, which pushes them to prioritize their own reputations and consider Harry’s expendable. Heirs, always, over spares.

“I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy,” he writes bluntly. “I was summoned to provide backup, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow.” In real life, William seems to be in little need of organ donations, but both he and Charles could always use something to take the pressure of the press’s attention off of them. Harry provides a handy distraction.

To that end, Charles allows his office to form an alliance with a journalist who falsely reports that a teenage Harry has gone to rehab for his cocaine use. Rather than denouncing the story, they use it to make Charles look sympathetic as the harried single father to a teen addict. (Harry darkly sees the hand of Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles’s longtime mistress and now queen consort, at work here, as the source for the piece is a known Camilla ally.)

The pattern continues for decades, with Charles and Camilla continually prioritizing their own rehabilitation narrative over the reputations of their children, and justifying the practice because they are the ones closest to the throne. They even, Harry reports, try to pressure Kate to change her name from Catherine to Katherine so as to avoid having too many royal “C”s. (Kate apparently declined.)

Meanwhile, William, Harry writes, is incensed with the way Harry gets to ignore the rules that regiment William’s own life: The heir must always be beyond reproach, but the spare gets to have fun. William has to shave his beard, but Harry gets to wear his even when in military uniform, in violation of protocol. William has to get married in his bright red Irish Guards uniform even though he prefers to wear the Household Cavalry frock coat uniform, but Harry gets to wear his uniform of choice to his own wedding.

To compensate for the loss of autonomy, Harry writes, William pulls rank constantly. As a teen, he tells Harry not to talk to him when they are both at Eton. As an adult, he seems put off that Meghan goes for a hug rather than a curtsy upon first meeting him. He squabbles over how he and Harry should split up their charitable concerns and tries to veto both Harry’s Invictus Games for wounded veterans and his environmental advocacy in Africa. “I let you have veterans,” he tells Harry, “why can’t you let me have African elephants and rhinos?”

When the tabloids falsely report that Meghan made Kate cry during the lead-up to her wedding with Harry (the truth, as Meghan told Oprah , is that Kate made Meghan cry), Harry traces the story to William, who fed it to Charles and Camilla, who fed it to the press. No correction, he writes, will ever be forthcoming from any of them, “because it would embarrass the future queen. The monarchy always, at all costs, had to be protected.”

Later, Harry writes that William has grown suspicious of the enlightened new attitudes Harry espouses post-Meghan, and post-therapy (suggested by Meghan). He seems to feel almost abandoned, as though Harry has left him behind in the suffocating structure of the monarchy. He refuses to join Harry in therapy, calling him “brainwashed.”

In the midst of one argument, William throws Harry to the floor so forcefully that a dog food dish shatters below him. The act is both violently aggressive and oddly plaintive, like the last resort of a spurned lover. “Come on, we always used to fight,” William says. “You’ll feel better if you hit me.” Harry refuses. As William leaves, he asks Harry not to tell Meghan about the incident and says, “I didn’t attack you, Harold.”

As in all families, deep betrayals and petty nonsense seem to hold equal emotional weight for the Windsors. Harry is justly furious with Camilla for the public relations rehab maneuver, but he’s also angry that she converted one of his many old bedrooms into her dressing room after he moved out, and that she once seemed bored talking to him at afternoon tea. He’s glad she makes his father happy, but he resents her for taking Charles away from him, in the same way that he resents Kate, whom he seems to genuinely like, for taking William away from him.

Harry is ambivalent not just about his family but also about the press, the central villain of this story and an object of fascination for him. He despises them, actively blames them for his mother’s death, compares the sound of a paparazzo’s clicking shutter to the sound of gunfire. He also reads their coverage obsessively, to the point that absorbing press coverage of the royal family seems to be his main hobby. He has nicknames for his least favorite journalists and follows the minutia of their careers with interest. When he bitterly mocks one reporter for starting two sentences in a row with the word “but” in a negative story written about him when he was 15 years old, he does so with the cadence of a man who’s been workshopping the bit in his head nonstop for multiple decades. A therapist suggests that he is addicted to the press, and he doesn’t dispute it.

The root trauma here is, of course, Diana: radiant, beloved, unreachable Diana. Harry was 12 years old when Diana died in a car crash in Paris. After her death, he had to march behind her coffin in a funeral procession while the world watched, and then shake hands and exchange pleasantries with the many mourners who had never met her, and whose hands were often, he writes in a striking detail, wet with their own tears. He himself only cried when Diana was interred, and then felt “ashamed of violating the family ethos.” Then he found himself unable to cry over her again until he was an adult.

In Spare , Harry writes about Diana with a child’s idealization. In his prose, she is beyond saints, beyond goddesses. When he meets a woman who remembers Diana cuddling her on a charity visit when she was a small child, he is overwhelmed with jealousy. Trauma has gnawed holes into all his own memories of his mother.

The army, in Harry’s narrative, both steadies and further traumatizes him. He feels that he grew up while on active duty, that he found his sense of purpose. (He believes wholeheartedly that the war in Afghanistan was just, although he notes that he doesn’t think the army was all that effective at swaying Afghan hearts and minds for the cause of Western democracy. He also makes a point of noting that he made sure each of the 25 people he killed were verified Taliban operatives and not civilians.) But after he returns from his tours, he begins to suffer from panic attacks every time he has to speak in public. Agoraphobia keeps him tethered to the tiny bachelor’s apartment his father has allotted him, watching Friends reruns and identifying with Chandler.

Things will be different, Harry thinks, when he is married. “You weren’t a fully vested member of the Royal Family, indeed a true human being, until you were wed,” he explains. After he’s married, he imagines, he won’t be afraid to go out in public, because his family will start to respect him. His grandmother will stop sticking him in the servant’s wing during holidays at Balmoral, because he’ll have more seniority. His father will up his allowance and give him a family home. He’ll get his beloved brother back, because he and William and Kate and whoever he marries will get to be couple friends together. And he’ll have, at long last, a partner, someone to replace the source of unconditional love he lost when his mother died.

Instead, when Harry marries, Charles tells him that he can’t afford to support both him and the Cambridges. (Supporting his children, Harry notes with outrage, was supposed to be part of Charles’s job as Prince of Wales, not something he did “out of any largesse.” After all, being the sons of the Prince of Wales rendered both William and Harry unemployable.) William darkly repeats tabloid stories about Meghan being pushy and abrasive, while Kate flinches away from Meghan’s American friendliness. And Meghan is so badly harassed by racist tabloids that she begins to struggle with suicidal ideation.

Harry does not explicitly blame the monarchy for any of these problems. In subtext, Spare is a searing indictment of the British crown, which Harry depicts as a force that warps family dynamics under the strength of its imperative: to protect the crown, and those in the direct line of succession, at the expense of everyone else. Yet textually, Harry declares his full-throated support for the monarchy and for his commander-in-chief. He writes lyrically of the “magic” of the crown itself, the beauty of its jewels, of how much he believes it means to the people of the British Commonwealth.

“The crown seemed to possess some inner energy source, something beyond the sum of its parts,” he writes, in an apparent attempt to square the difference. “But all I could think … was how tragic that it should remain locked up in this Tower.” The implication seems to be that the monarchy is strong and powerful and a force for good, but that it’s been hindered by forces that go too far to protect it. The idea appears nowhere else in Spare , and here it feels less than convincing.

Spare does not exist, though, for the monarchy. Spare exists, apparently, for William and Charles, the lost loves of Harry’s life, stolen from him by their wives, by the press, by the institution, by everything they chose before they chose him. He is writing and publishing Spare , he explains in the foreword, in order to explain to them why he felt he had to leave them and the rest of the family behind, to move to California and start over.

He can’t explain it to their faces, he writes. “It would take too long. Besides, they’re clearly not in the right frame of mind to listen. Not now, anyway. Not today. And so: Pa? Willy? World? Here you go.”

The tragedy of Spare is that everything Harry has told us makes it clear that Charles and William will take this memoir not as an explanation or a love letter but as a betrayal worse than anything they ever did to Harry, and that they may not be wrong. Even if they never read it, as seems highly possible, how can they avoid the endless stream of coverage, the interviews Harry has granted about the book, the Netflix documentary that came in December, the nonstop stream of information about Harry and Meghan that the two of them have flung out into the world? You close the book with the queasy sense that in reading it, you’ve been prying into something deathly private, that probably this book should not exist at all.

It’s as though Harry, who hates the press and its constant invasion of his privacy, has had to become press himself in order to finally bring the emotional force of his argument home. Because reading Spare , it’s hard to avoid the thought that we never had any right to these people’s lives at all.

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Spare by Prince Harry: A chaotic but stylish memoir that sets fire to the royal family

His wife might be the natural on camera, but the duke of sussex hits his stride on paper in this breathtakingly frank book, article bookmarked.

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You might feel as if you’ve already read Prince Harry ’s memoir Spare by now. The virginity lost to a stallion trainer behind a pub. The dog bowl-smashing, necklace-ripping tussle with William. The constant calling out of his family briefing the press. This book doesn’t so much lift the curtain on private royal life than rip it off and shake out its contents. But it’s also richly detailed and at times beautifully written; if Harry is going to set fire to his family, he has at least done it with some style.

Spare ’s ghostwriter JR Moehringer was behind tennis star Andre Agassi’s extraordinary memoir Open, and his choice as Harry’s collaborator was an early indication that the book would be no curling celebrity memoir. Even so, it is breathtakingly frank. His wife might be the natural on camera, but Harry seems to hit his stride on paper, his voice more authentic than the Californian inflections he slipped into while being interviewed with Meghan for their great soufflé of a Netflix docuseries (between the bombshells of Oprah and Spare , the streaming giant might be feeling justifiably short changed) even if at times his style is a little chaotic, written in a gallop of posh, staccato sentences that speak of “Ma”, “Pa”, “Willy”, and (yes) “todgers”.

Charles is less a father figure than a kind but emotionally distant uncle, who laughs in the wrong places when Harry performed in Much Ado About Nothing at Eton, and potters around Balmoral with his “wireless”. There is a disconnect between his words and deeds. He calls Harry “darling boy” but doesn’t ever hug him, even when delivering news of Diana’s death; he expresses joy at Harry’s birth to Diana but then goes straight off to see his “Other Woman” Camilla. “He’d always given the air of not being quite ready for parenthood – the responsibilities, the patience, the time,” Harry writes, but he is paradoxically an older Dad which “created problems, placed barriers between us”.

“Willy” is depicted as well-meaning but a little cold – and you get the distinct impression that they were never that close. Harry discovers his brother and Kate are engaged at the same time as everyone else. Their sibling rivalry is a “private olympiad” of petty grievances, from the size of their childhood bedrooms to ownership of causes: “I let you have veterans, why can’t you let me have African elephants and rhinos?” says William – who might also say that recollections vary. There is a whiff of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway in Harry’s assertion that “there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it than there is in so-called objective facts”.

As a boy, he deflects grief over Diana’s death by convincing himself that “Mummy” has simply faked her death and gone into hiding. The most affecting piece of writing in the book is when, as an adult, he asks to see photos of her body in the wreckage of the Paris tunnel, and observes a “supernatural” halo of light created by the camera flashes: “within some of [which] were ghostly visages, and half visages, paps and reflected paps and refracted paps on all the smooth metal surfaces and glass windscreens”.

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A white-hot hatred of the press rages through the book – the media kills his mother, hounds him as a teen, ruins his army career, scares away girlfriends and tortures his wife. He fixates on a pair of paps nicknamed “Tweedle Dumb” and “Tweedle Dumber” and obsessively sets the record straight on decades-old stories, even one as innocuous as the claim he and William hung “Just Married” signs on Charles and Camilla’s wedding car. (Harry says he doesn’t believe this happened.)

In a row with his father and brother which bookends the memoir, Harry writes that Charles “hated [the press’s] hate, but oh how he loved their love… compulsively drawn to the elixir they offered him”. But his own fixation is compulsive too. In an online world his effort to correct every falsehood written about him looks like shouting at the sea. But there is humour in the book too, even if it’s of the squaddie variety – that account of his frostbitten penis after a trip to the North Pole culminates in an odd admission that he covered it in Elizabeth Arden and thought of his mother, who once used the cream.

Passages about army exploits and travels to Africa are worthy but a little bloated. More interesting are the rich accounts of gatherings at Balmoral, the strangely loving process of being “blooded” after stalking deer, the baths with brown running water, the Queen whipping up a salad dressing. His great aunt, Princess Margaret, giving him a Biro pen for Christmas.

Then along comes Meghan – her beauty “like a punch in the throat”. She is not just the new love of his life but his emotional life raft, one he fears the press is intent on sinking, like they did to his mother. The panic of losing her inflates between every line like a balloon. His family tells him to tough it out. You know what comes next.

So what makes him do it? Money? Revenge? A desire to emulate the Obamas – humanitarian power couple with matching Netflix and Spotify deals. But his book hardly adopts the “when they go low, we go high” ethos, and even sympathetic commentators across the pond are starting to grow weary of the Sussex confessional tour. Most likely was his desire to tell his truth (before Meghan inevitably tells hers in her own autobiography).

In his acknowledgements, Harry thanks Moehringer for persuading him that “memoir is a sacred obligation”. But for a prince raised in a golden goldfish bowl, isn’t privacy far more sacred, more precious? He has given up so much of it with Spare . I hope it’s worth it.

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Prince Harry’s memoir Spare a portrait of an angry man struggling to make peace with his past

This article was published more than 1 year ago. Some information may no longer be current.

A poster advertising the launch of Prince Harry's memoir Spare, in London, on Jan. 6. LEON NEAL/Getty Images

• Title: Spare
• Author: Prince Harry
• Genre: Autobiography
• Publisher: Penguin Random House

The Duke of Sussex has often remarked in television interviews that he is very much his mother’s son. No doubt the late Diana, Princess of Wales, would have understood Prince Harry’s desire to tell his story after breaking out of the royal fold, much like she herself did upon her separation from then-Prince Charles when she collaborated with Andrew Morton for his 1992 book Diana: Her True Story, In Her Own Words .

Before I sat down to review Spare , I reached out to Morton to see what he thought of Harry’s memoir. Morton’s book about Diana altered the way people saw the monarchy and the “fairytale” marriage between her and Charles. The book also set the tone of royals coverage and debate for a generation. Were the Prince’s revelations about the Royal Family as revolutionary as his mother’s? Does this new book have the potential to challenge (or dare I say, change) people’s perceptions of the monarchy as the Diana book did in its own time?

Morton doesn’t think so, citing Spare ’s propensity for “petty point scoring,” which risks overshadowing “the genuinely sad story of a son unable to come to terms with the premature death of his mother.”

I’m inclined to agree with Morton – to a point. The book is spotted with a number of unnecessary slights, with Prince William bearing the brunt of them. But I believe that readers should look past Harry’s heated prose to the bigger, and I believe valid, claims he makes. If Harry’s claims are true, the monarchy is ripe for a reckoning.

In Spare , Harry navigates this struggle imperfectly. Some passages can certainly be seen as score-keeping – particularly when it comes to his “beloved brother” but also “arch nemesis,” Prince William. For instance, Harry highlights his brother’s “alarming baldness, more advanced than my own,” and his “fading resemblance” to their mother.

Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, is out. Here are the biggest bombshells so far

He also notes that the late Queen may have played favourites: “Willy always thought Granny had a soft spot for me, that she indulged me while holding him to an impossibly high standard,” Harry writes. Of the fact that the late Queen allowed him to keep his own beard for his 2018 wedding, he writes: “After he’d come back from an assignment with Special Forces, Willy was sporting a full beard and someone told him to be a good boy and run along and shave it. He hated the idea of me enjoying a perk he’d been denied.”

Like his mother, Harry makes some shocking claims about Camilla in his memoir, writing that the Queen Consort leaked private information to the press. Harry’s feelings for his stepmother are understandably complicated. When Charles and Camilla married, Harry says he and William were sympathetic to the couple’s years of “star-crossed longing” but also that Camilla “played a pivotal role in the unraveling” of his parents’ marriage. He says he had trepidations of gaining a step parent who had “sacrificed him on her personal PR altar” as a way to rehabilitate her image.

The book doesn’t spare the King, either. Harry talks about how in late 2001 his father made a deal with the editor of “Britain’s biggest tabloid” who had called Charles’s office to say that she had uncovered evidence of Harry doing drugs at a number of locations, including in the basement beneath Highgrove that he and William had nicknamed Club H (The “H” stood for Highgrove, not Harry). “She was hunting the spare and making no apologies for it,” he writes. Harry told his royal aide and mentor Mark Dyer – who he calls “Marko” – to tell her that she had it wrong. When that didn’t work, he thought his father’s office would put a stop to the story; instead, the editor ran a piece engineered to revamp Charles’s public image in a sympathetic light, as a “single dad coping with a drug-addled child.”

CATHAL KELLY: Prince Harry’s Spare is, ultimately, a story about brothers

PHOEBE MALTZ BOVY: Spare me: Prince Harry’s claim of victimhood doesn’t quite fly

Through all this, it is clear that Harry is a young man still reeling from the untimely death of his mother. As a teenager, Harry saw his mother’s death everywhere and in everything. He writes of how his father tried to get him to read more books – particularly Shakespeare – in his adolescent years. “I was part of the Shakespeare-less hordes. And I tried to change. I opened Hamlet. Hmm: lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper … I slammed the book shut. No thank you.” Until the age of 23, he believed that his mother was still alive and that he would one day be reunited with her. He travelled through the same Paris tunnel where she died, hoping it would give him some sort of closure. The only thing it did was bring on what he calls “Pain Part Deux.”

And, in his relationship with his wife, Meghan Markle, Harry is haunted by the press’s treatment of his mother, as it has been echoed in their treatment of the Duchess of Sussex: “I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces,” he writes.

With Megan, Harry has often said that he worries about history repeating itself. At the beginning of Spare , he quotes William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Throughout the book, Prince Harry’s past is very much alive. The book is, ultimately, a portrait of an angry young man struggling to make peace with his past, in the hopes that he may live a brighter future. Harry has the power to seek his own closure. Whether the monarchy itself, under a new King, takes any of Harry’s suggestions to heart, remains to be seen.

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by Prince Harry ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 10, 2023

A harrowing, sporadically self-serving account of life in and away from the British monarchy.

A royal tell-all with some substance.

Arriving at the end of the royal couple’s multimedia barrage that included a six-part Netflix documentary, Prince Harry’s eagerly anticipated memoir delivers further revelations about his struggles within the institution of the British monarchy and the unrelenting harassment he has endured from the British tabloids. The author also offers insights into his reported feuds with his brother, Prince William, and father, King Charles—most recently regarding his relationship with his wife, Meghan Markle. It may seem that Prince Harry has a particular ax to grind, and this notion intensifies as he recounts the events related to his courtship of Meghan. However, his story is more substantive than some readers might expect, depending on their loyalties to the monarchy. Beginning with memories of his mother’s tragic death in 1997, the author moves on to his lackluster schooling at Eton and his more remarkable career in the British Army (he served two combat tours in Afghanistan). The narrative frequently casts evocative light on the inner workings of the British monarchy and the various players involved. While his pen may be more harshly directed toward his father and brother than to others, such as Queen Elizabeth, the author also provides interesting glimpses into the likes of Prince Philip and Camilla, queen consort. If sometimes disparaging, his portraits are also surprisingly sympathetic. The prose is competent, and the author’s tales are consistently engaging—and far less smarmy than the self-aggrandizing tone set in the Netflix series. Readers may question Prince Harry’s motives, but his emotional struggles, though occasionally rendered in an overwrought fashion, feel palpable and heartfelt. “My problem has never been with the monarchy, nor the concept of monarchy,” he writes. “It’s been with the press and the sick relationship that’s evolved between it and the Palace. I love my Mother Country, and I love my family, and I always will.”

Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023

ISBN: 9780593593806

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023

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by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.

Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton

LOVE, PAMELA

by Pamela Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023

A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.

The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.

According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that ." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy , which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023

ISBN: 9780063226562

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

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Prince Harry’s  Spare  Is a Romp That Questions the Meaning of Privacy in the 21st Century

By Erin Vanderhoof

If  Prince Harry  manages to leave just one surprising impression of royal life in his memoir ,  Spare, it’s that he seemingly had tons of time to watch movies and TV. A recurring motif of the book’s second section is the solace he finds in rewatching  Friends  as he does his laundry. Elsewhere, he shows familiarity with an array of American cartoons, from  Family Guy  to  Johnny Bravo.  But as the memoir reaches its emotional height—Harry contemplates life on his own in California with  Meghan Markle —he draws a similarity between his life and another ’90s pop-culture favorite.

“I’d been forced into this surreal state,” Harry writes, “this unending  Truman Show  in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon,  almost  never traveled on the Underground. (Once, at Eton, on a theater trip.) Sponge, the papers called me. But there’s a big difference between being a sponge and being  prohibited  from learning independence.” 

I understand why Harry feels a kinship with the 1998  Peter Weir psycho-comedy’s protagonist, the  Jim Carrey  character whose belated discovery that his entire world has been faked, filmed, and broadcast to the public upends his life and tanks his sanity. Unlike Truman, however, Harry has been very aware of the cameras, the press interest, and the story line as it’s played out. In  Spare,  Harry juxtaposes his life with the sometimes inaccurate tabloid reports that result, and his world seems less a secret reality show than a full-fledged  panopticon .

Harry’s behavior is conditioned by his visions of the press right over his shoulder, and they approach in ways that startle him. In one chapter, he is visited by a palace employee at Eton and immediately worries that the press has learned that he recently lost his virginity. Instead, he learns that a tabloid editor, whom he describes as “an infected pustule on the arse of humanity, plus a shit excuse for a journalist,” has plans to print that Harry is a drug addict who did a stint in rehab. For Harry, it’s an early lesson in how a small truth—the prince has been drinking alcohol in his basement at Highgrove, he explains, and he did take a day trip to a rehab center for charity work—can become the beginning of an urban legend. It ultimately becomes self-fulfilling when Harry does dabble in drugs like cocaine and becomes a heavy drinker.

It’s worth remembering that in Jeremy Bentham’s 18th-century conception, the panopticon was supposed to be a peaceful, secure, and economical alternative to a death sentence. To that end, you can almost understand Britain’s modern constitutional monarchy, surveilled and held accountable by the rabid press, as the peaceful and economical alternative to expropriating the royals entirely, as countries like France did with the help of the guillotine. It was nearly two centuries later that Michel Foucault, inspired by Bentham’s image, pointed out that the panopticon trades direct force for psychological control, which can be every bit as powerful. And as much as  Spare fits snugly within its genres—royal biographies, books about father-son relationships, narratives of the war on terror—Harry’s contortions against the hold of the tabloid media give it the air of a psychological thriller unlike anything we’ve ever seen from the Windsors. 

Throughout his remembrances, another tabloid-constructed idea is raised: that Harry isn’t all that bright. Though he struggles with the implication from his family and the papers, he also jokes about it with genuine ease. The book opens with an epigraph from William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” Perhaps anticipating skepticism about his familiarity with literature of the American South, Harry admits pages later that he found it while browsing brainyquote.com. It wasn’t inevitable, but Harry is charming enough to live in the ambiguity his words occasionally prompt. He can joke about never having heard of  Eat, Pray, Love  until he started dating Meghan without undermining his real frustrations with his father and brother’s assumptions about his intelligence.

The weight of royal history does snake throughout the book’s narrative, but in marked contrast to  King Charles III,  Harry is nonplussed by the importance of his forebears. In one scene right after Prince Philip’s funeral in April 2021, the bookish father wanders a Windsor graveyard with his sons and launches “into a micro-lecture about this personage over here, that royal cousin over three, all the once-eminent dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, currently residing beneath the lawn.” Harry, on the other hand, was given a ruler in history class to use as a cheat sheet because he couldn’t remember the order of the past monarchs. 

At times, there’s an understandable urge for the reader to chide Harry for his lack of appreciation of his birthright. But his sumptuous descriptions of the family’s castles and grounds show that he has plenty of admiration for historic finery and its beauty. Still, as a person who is not overawed by art for its own sake or traditional aristocratic hobbies, unlike most other members of his family, Harry becomes an ideal vessel for the values that lie underneath the royal performance. “Being a Windsor meant working out which truths were timeless, and then banishing them from your mind,” he writes as a means of explaining why he was never too concerned with his place in the line of succession. “It meant  absorbing the basic parameters of one’s identity, knowing by instinct who you were, which was forever a byproduct of who you weren’t.”

By Kase Wickman

By Lawrence Grobel

By Eve Batey

In the acknowledgements for the book, Harry thanks his “collaborator,” the journalist and acclaimed ghostwriter  J.R. Moehringer,  who made his name with his own memoir, 2005’s  The Tender Bar.  Harry says Moehringer “spoke to me so often and with such deep conviction about the beauty (and sacred obligation) of Memoir.” Though the prince is maybe razzing his literary partner, it’s clear that the behind-the-scenes process included a deep education in the American school of life writing, and  Spare  has many of the qualities that make for a capital- m memoir. The prose is clean and streamlined, with a penchant for humorous specificity, and early sections bear the hallmarks of the rounds of revision and distillation that introduce lyricism into unadorned words. 

It must have been difficult to meld the diagrammatic sensibility of an acclaimed American stylist with Harry’s press-wary tendency to avoid declaratives in conversation. The resulting compromise is a choppy rhythm with hard stops and frequent smoothing sentence fragments. His thoughts upon first seeing an image of Meghan: “I’d never seen anyone so beautiful. Why should beauty feel like a punch in the throat?” The approach to internal monologue suits Harry, and at no point does the book feel like the product of ventriloquism. His smooth reading of the audiobook further testifies to the prose’s quality and his own skill at narration.

The stylistic approach will likely be surprising to anyone too steeped in the wide world of books about the British ruling class. There’s a floppy abandon that often suffuses writing about royalty with interminable sentences, a love of comma splices, four descriptors where one will suffice, and plenty of other flourishes that make me sure the strict rules of grammar I learned in school were invented by Americans. By comparison, Harry is practically Raymond Carver.

His retreat into new-school Memoir might be understood best as a sign that the prince’s life has been more shaped by the technological era he was raised in than the ancient tradition he was supposedly bred to follow. Born in 1984, the same year  William Gibson  popularized the term “cyberspace” in his novel  Neuromancer  and Britain established its first national academic intranet, Harry has seen several distinct media revolutions that have rendered the old ways of controlling information untenable. Though Harry’s circumstances have often been unusual,  Spare  proves that he really has been rendered relatable due to his experience with grief at a young age, his struggles with sibling rivalry, and even his casual wardrobe from the likes of Gap and J.Crew.

“Gilded cage,” a metaphor that Harry returns to throughout  Spare,  is an old phrase, but it hasn’t always been the case that being a royal meant submitting to constant, real-time surveillance. For generations, being a member of Britain’s aristocratic class meant living an isolated life and having exclusive access to the positions of world-historical importance. In those days, letter writing, journaling, and careful archiving were the means of legacy-building, and even when the press was occasionally hostile, it tended to leave personal assignations out of its reports.  

By cleaving their private and public selves, those past royals were able to shape their image for posterity, leaving the truth of their day-to-day to be discovered by their handpicked biographers and selectively revealed after death. Though Harry was raised with plenty of the same luxuries as his ancestors, the one he missed, privacy, might have been the thing keeping the system from crumbling. It’s ironic that  Spare,  a book containing multiple accounts of the time his penis was frostbitten , might be his best shot at winning some of it back.

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Erin Vanderhoof

Staff writer.

By Richard Lawson

By Julie Miller

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

The verdict on Prince Harry’s book: Juicy, humorous, resentful and sad

‘spare’ delivers behind-the-scenes vignettes of the royals — and a hefty dose of anger at the family and the media.

“Pandas and royal persons alike,” wrote Hilary Mantel in 2013 , “are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.”

Suppose now that one of those pandas attempts to leave his cage in search of fresh bamboo. So begins the odyssey of Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, who is technically still a prince and duke and still fifth in line to the British throne but who has turned his back on the monarchy for the sake of the woman he loves. An old-school gesture that puts him right up there with his great-great uncle Edward VIII, only the way he’s gone about it is so distinctly 21st century: a self-justifying, multiplatform pilgrimage — Non Mea Culpa , it might be called — which has pivoted from an Oprah sit-down to a Netflix documentary series and which now culminates — or, more likely, gathers steam — with a new memoir, “Spare.”

Tina Brown’s royal revelations spare no one, especially Meghan Markle

The title, in case you’re wondering, is the nickname bestowed on Harry in infancy. He was to be the second-born “Spare” to the “Heir,” his older brother William, future Prince of Wales. “I was the shadow,” he writes now, “the support, the Plan B. I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy.” And if you ever doubted that’s a recipe for resentment, here are 400-plus pages to set you right.

Prince Harry memoir attacks a family he seeks to change. They have no comment.

Like Harry, the book is good-natured, rancorous, humorous, self-righteous, self-deprecating, long-winded. And every so often, bewildering. More questions are answered about the Prince’s todger than you would ever have thought to ask. (It’s circumcised, and it nearly froze to death at the North Pole.) And if you’re wondering to whom Harry lost his virginity, it was an older woman who “liked horses, quite a lot, and treated me not unlike a young stallion. Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me off to graze.”

Written with and almost surely elevated by J.R. Moehringer, who helped make Andre Agassi’s memoir so memorable, the book delivers behind-the-scenes vignettes of the royals (the Queen whisking up salad dressing, Charles executing headstands in his boxers) and liberal helpings of woo-woo: Princess Diana’s spirit turning up variously in a Botswana leopard, an Eton fox and a Tyler Perry painting and even finding a way to mess up Charles and Camilla’s wedding plans. No question that his mother’s 1997 death is still the primal wound in Harry’s now 38-year-old psyche, and the book’s most affecting passages show his 12-year-old self struggling to grieve in public view. He cried just once, at her graveside, then never again, and spent years clinging to the theory that she had simply gone into hiding.

He grew into an indifferent student and a recreational drug user, known variously as “the naughty one” and “the stupid one.” (What was he thinking when he wore a Nazi uniform to a costume party? “I wasn’t.”) Two combat stints gave him a measure of confidence before he settled into the surreal life of a royal — “this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never traveled on the Underground.” Whatever relationships he forged couldn’t survive the full-court press of tabloid “paps” dogging his every step. “Royal fame,” he concluded, “was fancy captivity.”

Enter, as you know she must, Meghan.

By now, the stages of their affair are available to anyone who cares: the Instagram sighting, the dinner date, the week in a Botswana tent. So, too, is the mauling Markle received at the hands of British media, a toxic brew of racism and misogyny that too often, says Harry, went unchallenged by Buckingham Palace. No wonder, for Palace staff were either planting the stories or actively courting the reporters behind them. “Pa’s office, Willy’s office,” fumes Harry, “enabling these fiends, if not outright collaborating.”

“Darling boy,” his father counseled, “just don’t read it.” Not an option for Harry, who was, by his own admission, “undeniably addicted” to reading and raging at his own media coverage. But when he decided to step away from royal duties, the rage came back at him: William, according to one already well-publicized anecdote, grabbed him by the collar and knocked him to the ground. Stripped of their royal allowance and eventually their security detail, Harry and Meg fled first to Canada before settling in America, or, as Harry cheekily calls it, “the undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

Meghan and Harry made a fairy-tale escape. They still seem trapped.

So meet them in their current iteration: still gorgeous, parents to two gorgeous children — and also, the author tactfully concedes, drawing on “corporate partnerships” to “spotlight the causes we cared about, to tell the stories we felt were vital. And to pay for our security.” In a more rueful vein: “I love my Mother Country, and I love my family, and I always will. I just wish, at the second-darkest moment of my life, they’d both been there for me.”

Yet, in a perverse way, they were there for him, and he for them. The brand he and Meghan have so carefully nurtured is entirely dependent on the brand they so publicly cast off. With each morsel of palace scandal they lob into the news cycle, they feed the beast they deplore, and it will never end, and, for the Windsors’ sakes, can never end because that would mean our interest in them has run dry. One ends up almost longing for the days when royals just poisoned each other or waged civil war. If nothing else, they got it out of their systems.

Louis Bayard is the author of “The Pale Blue Eye” and “Jackie & Me.”

By Prince Harry the Duke of Sussex

Random House. 416 pp. $36

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Spare by Prince Harry review – a flawed attempt to reclaim the narrative

By turns sympathetic and absurd, this is a memoir that deals in the tropes of tabloid storytelling even as it lambasts them

T he monarchy relies on fiction. It is a constructed reality, in which grown-up people are asked to collude in the notion that a human is more than a human – that he or she contains something approaching the ineffable essence of Britishness. Once, this fiction rested on political and military power, supported by a direct line, it was supposed, to God. Nowadays it relies on the much frailer foundations of habit, the mysteries of Britain’s unwritten constitution, and spectacle: a kind of symbolism without the symbolised. Ceremonials such as the late queen’s funeral are not merely decorative; they are the institution’s means of securing its continuance. The monarchy is theatre, the monarchy is storytelling, the monarchy is illusion.

All this explains why royals are so irresistible to writers of fiction, from Alan Bennett to Peter Morgan: they are already halfway to myth. And, it seems, no one cleaves harder to the myths than the royals themselves. There’s a fascinating passage in Prince Harry’s autobiography, Spare, in which he describes his father’s delight in Shakespeare: how he would regularly take his son to Stratford, how he “adored Henry V. He compared himself to Prince Hal.” Harry himself tried Hamlet. “Hmm. Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with … parent’s usurper? I slammed it shut.” At Eton, he was cast as Conrade, one of Don John’s comic minions in Much Ado About Nothing. To his surprise, he was rather good. “Being royal, it turned out, wasn’t all that far from being on stage.”

Prince Harry portrays himself as no great reader. Studying invited reflection; reflection invited grief; emotions were best avoided. But he does himself an injustice. He is a voracious reader – of the press. For years, it seems, he devoured every syllable published about him, in outlets from the London Review of Books to the Sun to the faecal depths of below-the-line on social-media feeds. His father’s most oft-quoted refrain in the book is “Don’t read it, darling boy”; his therapist, he writes, suggested he was addicted to it. Spare is about the torment of a royal in the age of the smartphone and Instagram; a torment of a different order from even that suffered by his mother, and certainly by Princess Margaret, forbidden from marrying the man she loved by her own sister. (For Harry, Margaret is “Aunt Margo”, a cold-blooded old lady who could “kill a houseplant with one scowl” and once gave him a biro – “Oh. A biro. Wow” – for Christmas.)

The fiction of royalty can be maintained only if its characters are visible, hence its symbiotic but rarely straightforward relationship with the media. Spare contends that portrayals of the royals in sections of the press – aside from having at times involved shocking criminality, outright invention, intolerable harassment and overt racism – have also often depended on a kind of zero-sum game, in which one family member’s spokesperson will attempt to protect their client at the expense of another, trading gossip for favours. Harry, in his role as the expendable “spare”, has often been the victim of this process, he argues. Narrative tropes and archetypes as old as the hills have been invoked in the distortions: the wayward son; the warring brothers. In Meghan’s case, something even more corrosive: the witch-like woman.

It is the monarchist press for which Harry reserves special loathing. The Telegraph’s royal correspondent “always made me ill”, he writes; and he cannot bear even to name Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News UK, referring to her anagrammatically as Rehabber Kooks. As for her boss: “I didn’t care for Rupert Murdoch’s politics, which were just to the right of the Taliban’s”. Clueless as Harry may be about the sheer extent of his privilege – early in the book he writes, “It sounds posh and I suppose it was” of childhood meals of fishfingers served under silver domes by footmen – he isn’t remotely a snob, nor, I infer, temperamentally of the right.

A striking passage recounts the prince’s talking to his therapist about Hilary Mantel’s 2013 LRB essay about Kate Middleton. It became notorious, wilfully misread by the tabloids as being anti-Kate, even though it was the monstrosity of the representation of the now Princess of Wales that Mantel was skewering. Harry recalls his disgust at Mantel’s calling the royal family “pandas” – cosseted, fascinating animals kept in a zoo. “If even a celebrated intellectual could dismiss us as animals, what hope for the man or woman on the street?”

Still, he half gets what Mantel was driving at. The words “always struck me as both acutely perceptive and uniquely barbarous,” he writes. “We did live in a zoo.” Describing his unpreparedness for having his funding cut in 2020, he writes: “I recognised the absurdity, a man in his mid-30s being cut off by his father … But I’d never asked to be financially dependent on Pa. I’d been forced into this surreal state, this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never travelled on the Underground.”

In her essay, Mantel remarked that “Harry doesn’t know which he is, a person or a prince”. Spare is clearly the prince’s attempt to claw back personhood, to claim his own narrative. Of his tabloid persecutors, he writes: “I was royal and in their minds royal was synonymous with non-person. Centuries ago royal men and women were considered divine; now they were insects. What fun, to pluck their wings.” That, of course, is half-remembered Shakespeare: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport,” says the blinded Gloucester in Lear. The gods in Harry’s version are neither Olympians nor kings, but paparazzi and reporters – and so the circle has turned.

Spare is by turns compassion-inducing, frustrating, oddly compelling and absurd. Harry is myopic as he sits at the centre of his truth, simultaneously loathing and locked into the tropes of tabloid storytelling, the style of which his ghostwritten autobiography echoes. Had he seen more of the golden jubilee year of 2002, he would have observed that his impression that “Britain was intoxicated … Everyone wore some version of the union jack” was quite wrong; swaths of the UK were indifferent, some hostile. His observations about the darkness of the basement flat he once occupied in Kensington Palace, its windows blocked from the light by a neighbour’s 4x4, will seem insulting to those who can’t find a home, or afford to heat one. The logical corollary of the views he now holds would be a personal republicanism, but needless to say that is not the path he takes: “My problem,” he writes, “has never been with the concept of monarchy.” What he shows, though – whether intentionally or not – is that the monarchy makes fools of us all.

Spare by Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex (Transworld, £28). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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Spare Hardcover – January 10, 2023

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• Print length 416 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Random House
• Publication date January 10, 2023
• Dimensions 6.38 x 1.24 x 9.56 inches
• ISBN-10 0593593804
• ISBN-13 978-0593593806
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; First US Edition (January 10, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593593804
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593593806
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.63 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.38 x 1.24 x 9.56 inches
• #1 in Historical British Biographies
• #3 in Royalty Biographies
• #39 in Memoirs (Books)

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Prince Harry’s Open Book

With its relentless candor, spare reveals more than its author may have intended..

After watching two Oprah specials, reading various profiles, listening to assorted podcasts, and streaming a six-hour Netflix confessional, I did not expect Prince Harry’s tell-all memoir to tell me anything its author hadn’t many times before. It’s true that Harry’s familiar grievances — the myriad intrusions of the tabloid press, the royal family’s willful indifference to racist attacks on its first biracial member, and the unending beef over a child’s wedding attire — all get space in Spare , but there is so much more. Thanks to a leak , anyone with an internet connection now knows that Harry once suffered frostnip on his “todger” (which is circumcised) and that William, allegedly a Suits superfan, once threw him on a dog bowl during an argument. They may have learned how Harry lost his virginity and how many people he killed in Afghanistan. Still, none of these salacious details prepared me for the experience of reading the book. Or, in my case, listening to the audiobook: nearly 16 hours of Harry’s animated delivery, at once sympathetic, angry, exasperating, funny, and persistently self-justifying. Spare is a mess of contradictions, but as an insight into the royal reality, it is as singular as it is strange.

Opening with the memory of a meeting with his father and brother after Prince Philip’s funeral, Spare quickly spells out at least one of Harry’s motives for all this talking: He wants to explain, to his family and presumably the world, exactly why he stepped back from senior duties in early 2020. Over more than 400 pages, he describes how the British press drove him out while the palace did nothing to help. You’ve heard this before but not with the unvarnished fury he lets rip here. The editor who, he says, invented the 2002 report about his weed smoking? “An infected pustule on the arse of humanity, plus a shit excuse for a journalist.” Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the newspaper that ran it? “Just to the right of the Taliban” in terms of his politics. “The paps had always been grotesque people, but as I reached maturity they were worse,” he — or, more exactly, ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer, who has been called a “ skeleton exhumer ” and has rendered Harry’s incandescent rage with scalding clarity — writes. “They were more emboldened, more radicalized, just as young men in Iraq had been radicalized. Their mullahs were editors, the same ones who’d vowed to do better after Mummy died.”

The death of his mother, Princess Diana, is the tragedy that frames Harry’s life. His memory of his father, King Charles III, breaking the news was the first of a handful of Diana-related episodes that made me tear up. Even though he witnessed her burial, Harry says he remained unable to accept her death until he was 23 — nearly ten years in which he sustained the sincere conviction that she had gone into hiding to escape the press and would send for him any day now. When reality sets in, he’s already settled on his villain: the British tabloids. He recalls how the paparazzi followed him everywhere, stalking him and splashing his worst moments across front pages. They hacked his phone, tracked his loved ones, and apparently destroyed every romantic relationship he had before Meghan Markle. It takes a toll on his family life too: Harry repeatedly accuses certain family members of trading damaging stories about him, the disposable spare to his brother’s heir, to tabloid journalists in order to improve their own image. After serving in the army, he develops agoraphobia, panic attacks, and an acute sense of loneliness seemingly fueled by a distrust of those closest to him. As his brother and friends are getting married and having kids, he is still drying the TK Maxx (it’s “TK” in Britain) clothes his bodyguards helped him pick out on a radiator, eating takeout alone over his father’s sink.

So you feel for him even as you’re exasperated by him because, for all his claims to the moral high ground, Spare ’s Harry keeps score, and he is petty. Once again, he’s litigating an exhaustive list of tabloid headlines written about him or Meghan and wondering how things might have turned out differently if the palace had issued a statement saying it actually allowed Meghan to wear ripped jeans to some event. He gets granular in his grievances, offering up an anecdote about his sister-in-law’s reluctance to share lip gloss with his wife as if it were a character statement. Where Harry’s pettiness really shines is in the classic older-sibling-younger-sibling stuff. In Harry’s telling, the future king is envious of his little brother’s relative freedom and purpose. He is always yelling at Harry: to shave his wedding beard because he, Prince William, isn’t allowed to wear one; to let him “have” Africa because rhinos and elephants are his thing. According to Harry, it’s William who drove the heir-versus-spare competition, but the sense of rivalry seems to run both ways. Consider this extended aside about William’s waning hotness: “I looked at Willy, really looked at him, maybe for the first time since we were boys. I took it all in: his familiar scowl, which had always been his default in dealings with me; his alarming baldness, more advanced than my own; his famous resemblance to Mummy, which was fading with time. With age.”

In a recent interview with Anderson Cooper, Harry refuted the idea that this passage, with all its digs at William’s physical appearance, was “cutting at all,” which, come on. But when he is challenged, Harry often counters with Actually I never said that — another example of the press twisting my words . Over the weekend, when ITV’s Tom Bradby began to ask him about the allegations of racism Harry and Meghan made in their Oprah interview, Harry cut him off. “No, I didn’t,” he said, refusing to concede Bradby’s point that a member of the royal family raising concerns about baby Archie’s skin color might be understood as “essentially racist” and instead launching into a convoluted explanation of unconscious bias. (Interestingly, there is no mention of the incident in the book). After years of tabloid lies, of course Harry would be sensitive to inaccurate reporting. But he comes across as so defensive that it’s hard not to agree with Charles when he urges Harry, “My darling boy, just don’t read it.” (Unfortunately, if this week’s interview with Stephen Colbert is any indication, Harry still hasn’t entirely embraced that advice.)

Throughout Harry and Meghan’s post-royal productions, their lack of self-awareness can make even their legitimate complaints seem grating. Spare is no different. In an effort to (maybe?) underscore his relatability, Harry recalls footmen bringing him and William their dinner under silver domes — but even though it “sounds posh,” the food was just fish fingers. He complains of life in a cage even as he jets all over the world at his leisure: back and forth to Botswana, to the North Pole and the South Pole, to a luxury suite in Las Vegas with the lads and a multiday party at Courtney Cox’s house. He worries about his dad cutting him off in his mid-30s, and while he acknowledges the absurdity of that predicament, he also balks at dipping into the substantial inheritance left to him by his mother. As royal residences go, his bachelor pad in Kensington Palace may have been less than regal, but it is still a free apartment in one of London’s most expensive neighborhoods. And then there is the fundamental paradox of his choosing to sell and resell his story in the first place. Harry may welcome the opportunity to tell all, in his own words, rather than having to rely on unnamed sources as a cipher. At the same time, he is making a lucrative business of doing so. He is rumored to have received a $20 million advance for Spare , which is currently breaking sales records . Of that, he has given just under $2 million to charity.

And yet, in spite of his blind spots, he is so candid about so much, and that makes Spare an incomparably bonkers read. Here is a prince in my ear, telling me about the shopping bag full of weed he smoked and peeing his pants on a sailboat and applying Elizabeth Arden face cream to his penis. He is telling me about the effect of magnesium on his bowels and how, when he was tripping, the moon seemed to prophesize Meghan’s entrance into his life. He is doing it all without a discernible sense of ego, as if I had asked and as if these were normal biographical details to share. Countless movies, TV shows, and books have attempted to reconstruct the grinding interior of this family’s existence, but none of them has approached the sheer wackiness of this inside account. Royal life looks worse, but also so much weirder, than we could have known.

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Book Review: Spare by Prince Harry

Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare , is not only his opportunity to share his story, the book serves as a permanent vehicle to set the record straight for posterity. He has been mischaracterized and flat-out lied about in the press. This book is his chance to finally tell the truth–his truth.

About the Title It is a reasonable assumption that the concept of “Heir and Spare” is something that the British media created. While William is most certainly the Heir, the thought that an actual family would think of their second born child as a “spare” seems cruel. Upon reading Spare, it turns out that Harry’s birth order hangs over his head in his daily life. (While an impending crown hangs above Willy’s.)

This wasn’t merely how the press referred to us–though it was definitely that. This was shorthand often used by Pa and Mummy and Grandpa. And even Granny. The Heir and the Spare–there was no judgement about it, but also no ambiguity. I was the shadow, the support, the Plan B. I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy. I was summoned to provide backup, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow. This was all made explicitly clear to me from the start of life’s journey and regularly reinforced thereafter.

Harry’s Trauma Losing his mother, Princess Diana, at the tender age of twelve imparted a trauma onto Harry that he spends the rest of his life sorting out. Initially, he lives in denial that she is dead.

Her life’s been miserable, she’s been hounded, harassed, lied about, lied to. So she’s staged an accident as a diversion and run away. The realization took my breath away, made me gasp with relief…Mummy isn’t dead! She’s hiding!

Harry, whether he intended to or not, utilized magical thinking as a way to cope with his mother’s sudden, tragic death. He couldn’t believe that the beautiful and youthful Diana had died. He secretly created a narrative in his own mind that she was hiding because the press had made her life unbearable. Heartbreak, trauma and mental health all collide in this moment and continue in Harry’s life for years to come.

It wasn’t until Harry was twenty-three years old that he came to terms with the reality that his mother was not in hiding, as he had convinced himself for the past eleven years, but that she was actually dead. He traveled to Paris for the first time for the Rugby World Cup. He requested that his driver take him to the Pont de l’Alma tunnel where his mother died in that fateful crash. Harry also requested that the driver go precisely sixty-five miles per hour, the exact speed the police reported Diana’s car had been going at the time of the crash.

We zipped ahead, went over the lip at the tunnel’s entrance, the bump that supposedly sent Mummy’s Mercedes veering off course. But the lip was nothing. We barely felt it…Is that all of it? It’s…nothing. Just a straight tunnel…I’d told myself I wanted closure, but I really didn’t…Instead that was the night all doubt fell away. She’s dead, I thought. My God, she really gone for good.

There is a famous story about Mummy trying to hug Granny. It was actually more a lunge than a hug, if eyewitnesses can be believed. Granny swerved to avoid contact, and the whole thing ended very awkwardly, with averted eyes and murmured apologies…I wondered if Pa ever tried…When he was five or six, Granny left him, went off on a royal tour lasting several months, and when she returned, she offered him a firm handshake. Which may have been more than he ever got from Grandpa.

I turned my back to the wind and saw, looming behind me, the Gothic ruin, which in reality was no more Gothic than the Millennium Wheel. Some clever architect, some bit of stagecraft. Like so much around here, I thought.

When his father and brother do arrive, they wander through the cemetery, and find themselves, Harry remembers, “more up to our ankles in bodies than Prince Hamlet.”

Much like a Shakespearean play, Spare is segmented into three parts with a mixture of comedy and tragedy. Moehringer does a beautiful job of channeling Harry’s voice and organizing the prose into a well-written masterpiece. Harry’s father, King Charles III, is well-known for being an avid consumer of the works of Shakespeare. It is therefore both poetic and prophetic that Spare is given a Shakespearean treatment.

Closure (In Summation) If you think you know everything about Harry’s story and haven’t read Spare , think again. The Oprah interview and the news outlets who release clips from the memoir lack the nuance and totality of reading the entire 400+ page book. The Royal Family’s motto of “never complain, never explain” results in a lot of murky conjecture and lack of clarification for posterity. Harry, who stepped away from being an active working royal and moved to America, is both complaining and explaining, but also telling his story. Spare is Harry’s record of his life (thus far), his correction of the inaccuracies that have been reported about him, a love letter to Meghan and his children and a message to his father and brother. Charles requested letters rather than phone calls from Harry while he was in the Army. William, the Heir, was often disconnected from his brother and enjoyed pulling rank whenever he could. Well, Pa and Willy, Spare is Harry’s story, laid out in Shakespearean format, titled by his secondary ranking within the family, for you, and all, to read.

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What critics are saying about Prince Harry’s memoir ‘Spare’

Whether or not critics like the book has not impacted sales — it’s already a best seller.

By Margaret Darby

After months of anticipation, Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” has officially hit the shelves — not to be mistaken with the widespread leaks from the book which surfaced last week, as reported by the Deseret News .

So far, critics have not gone easy on the memoir. The Guardian called the book “a flawed attempt to reclaim the narrative.”

Regardless of how critics feel about “Spare,” the book is a hit. According to The Washington Post , the memoir is already at the top of bestseller lists.

“As far as we know, the only books to have sold more in their first day are those starring the other Harry (Potter),” said the memoir’s publisher, per Sky News .

Here are the initial reviews from critics and fans on “Spare.”

First reactions to ‘Spare’

• “At once emotional and embittered, the royal memoir is mired in a paradox: drawing endless attention in an effort to renounce fame,” Alexandra Jacobs wrote for The New York Times .
• Sean Coughlan, a royal correspondent said “Spare” is “part confession, part rant and part love letter. In places it feels like the longest angry drunk text ever sent,” per the BBC .
• According to Lucy Pavia with the Independent , the book “sets fire to the royal family.” Pavis claims the book is “beautifully” written and “doesn’t so much lift the curtain on private royal life than rip it off and shake out its contents.”
• “Harry comes across as honest and reflective, but also angry, thin-skinned, disoriented” Henry Mance wrote in the Financial Times .
• The London Times called the book a “400-page therapy session for mystic Harry,” wrote James Marriott. “Open the book and you discover quite a different Harry from the cool, square-jawed metrosexual Californian on the cover. This is a weirder, more complex Harry.”
• The Economist called the memoir an “ill-advised romp.”

Fan reactions to ‘Spare’

Fans have gone easier on the book than critics. Some fans are sympathetic to Harry and what he has gone through, while some think it’s time Harry practice a little gratitude and others simply shared lighthearted jokes about the memoir.

I'm fifty pages into "Spare" and it's so desperately sad: the tone is very different to how all the out-of-context quotes make it seem. Although he keeps making jokes - mainly self-deprecating - it just ACHES. — Caitlin Moran (@caitlinmoran) January 10, 2023

#PrinceHarry has the privilege and opportunities to have an amazing life. He has $100 Million in the bank, a wife and children and he wants us to go oh poor Harry he must speak his truth. He’s not 12, grow up and his invasion of his family’s privacy is creepy & sick. #Spare — The British Prince (@Freedom16356531) January 10, 2023

Pretty funny Harry is ridiculing Prince William’s “alarming baldness.” #Spare #BrotherBetrayal pic.twitter.com/ikzW1qr1J6 — DT Cahill (@DTCahill) January 10, 2023

#SpareUsHarry Anxiously awaiting Wills follow up Tell-Book in response to "Spare" pic.twitter.com/XXrGdf1pvh — Emily Harrison (@emharrison75) January 9, 2023

Prince Harry Considering Second Book After 'Spare'

Prince Harry may be on his way to becoming an author for the second time after Spare . A royal author says the Duke of Sussex has considered the possibility of writing another book. Although this time, however, it wouldn’t be chock full of bombshells like Spare . Instead, a potential second book from Harry would be “more conciliatory.” Meanwhile, another royal author isn’t so sure.  

Another Prince Harry book would be ‘conciliatory’ to help ‘thaw’ the tension with Prince William

According to Mirror , a second book from Harry “wouldn’t include explosive allegations like his first book did.” The reason, the outlet wrote, is because Harry and Meghan Markle “are reportedly keen to reunite with Harry’s estranged family.” 

“I’m told the couple have discussed Harry writing another book,” Tom Quinn, a royal author and commentator, said. “He can’t write another Spare . But he will be aware that writing a more conciliatory book might even help thaw relations with his brother [Prince William].”

As anyone who’s read Spare or simply saw the headlines when it hit shelves in January 2023 knows, William came under fire more than anyone else, save for perhaps the British press, in Harry’s book. 

Meanwhile, royal biographer and expert Ingrid Seward isn’t sure Harry’s headed for book no. 2 territory. “I can’t see that Harry’s up for writing another book,” the editor-in-chief of Majesty Magazine said. 

“I would think the other book, the real corker, would be Meghan,” she continued. “That’s got to be [ahead] because that’s really going to be the only way she’s going to make serious money [is by writing it].” 

Seward added she doesn’t see a Meghan memoir happening soon, what with the 42-year-old focusing on launching her lifestyle brand American Riviera Orchard . However, the former actor would make “serious money” from an eventual memoir. 

A potential ‘Spare’ sequel still worries the royal family 

Although it’s been more than a year since Spare ’s debut, the book remains a concern behind palace walls . 

As Robert Hardman wrote in The Making of a King: King Charles III and the Modern Monarchy , the royals are nervous about a second Spare as well as the possibility of a memoir from Meghan. 

“For the Palace, the most worrying aspect of the book [ Spare ] was the omission of large chunks of more recent events,” Hardman wrote in his 2024 book. 

“It did not go unnoticed that Harry and Meghan’s wedding, their married life, and their eventual departure from the royal world amounted to a small part — less than a fifth — of Prince Harry’s memoir,” he explained. “This suggested either a sequel or perhaps a memoir by Meghan in due course.”

Indeed, Meghan didn’t enter Spare until the third and final part of Harry’s book, more than 250 pages in. 

Harry previously said ‘Spare’ could’ve been ‘two books’

Harry himself admitted Spare very easly could’ve become “two books” instead of one. The 39-year-old revealed as much in an interview after his memoir’s release.

“There could have been two books, put it that way,” he told The Telegraph in January 2024. “The hard bit was taking things out. It was 800 pages, and now it’s down to 400 pages.” (The U.S. edition of Spare is 410 pages total.) 

Harry also noted he left certain things out of Spare between him and his brother, William, in addition to some stuff involving him and his father, King Charles III . 

“There are some things that have happened, especially between me and my brother, and to some extent between me and my father, that I just don’t want the world to know,” he said. “Because I don’t think they would ever forgive me.”

The omissions, it seems, did nothing to soften the blowback from Spare as Harry’s said to still be “picking up the pieces” of his “battered” relationships with William and his father as a result. 

Why Is Prince Harry Is Experiencing 'Sleepless Nights' Over Upcoming UK Trip?

Curated By : Yimkumla Longkumer

Last Updated: April 07, 2024, 18:52 IST

London, United Kingdom (UK)

The Duke is usually accompanied by his wife Meghan Markle at Invictus events. Though she has been listed as a guest at the event, it remains uncertain if she will join him in the UK. (Image: Reuters)

Royal expert and author Tom Quinn told UK publication The Mirror that the visit isn't easy for Prince Harry as he prepares to meet his estranged family during his visit

Prince Harry is reportedly experiencing “sleepless nights” before his upcoming visit to the UK next month. The Duke of Sussex is scheduled to attend a service at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Invictus Games on May 8.

Royal expert and author Tom Quinn told UK publication The Mirror that the visit isn’t easy for Prince Harry as he prepares to meet his estranged family during his visit.

The Duke is usually accompanied by his wife Meghan Markle at Invictus events. Though she has been listed as a guest at the event, it remains uncertain if she will join him in the UK.

“Harry and Megan are having sleepless nights about what they should do when Harry visits the UK later this year – he will have to do something to acknowledge the huge difficulties his family is going through, but he won’t want to do or say anything that seems to imply anything less than wholehearted support for his permanently aggrieved wife,” royal expert and author Tom Quinn told.

ALSO READ: Prince Harry Returns To The UK For Invictus Games, ‘Short Meeting’ Possible With William, Kate

The last time Prince Harry visited the country was to meet with his father King Charles after his cancer diagnosis, but Meghan stayed in California with their two children.

The publication stated that the visit lasted only 12 minutes, and Prince Harry did not visit his brother Prince William and his wife Princess Kate. Now, after Kate’s cancer diagnosis, the Duke finds himself in a dilemma.

Meghan and Harry have not returned to England together since the funeral of Queen Elizabeth in September 2022.

“Harry would love to patch things up with his sister-in-law and with his brother and father,” Quinn said. “He sees things far more calmly now he has had his say in Spare and in various interviews, but he just cannot think how to do it and keep Meghan on board.”

The royal expert stated that Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton, definitely doesn’t want an apology to resolve the feud, but Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, ‘definitely does’.

According to Quinn, the Duchess of Sussex’s perspective on the fallout is quite different. The relationship between the two women has been intensely scrutinised following revelations in Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare”. In the book, the Duke of Sussex recounted finding Meghan crying “on the floor” after an argument with Kate about bridesmaid dresses.

“William just thinks the whole thing is a storm in a teacup and can’t understand why his brother can’t get over the sort of spat that many brothers have to go through. Meghan and Harry feel hurt by the way they were treated when they were working members of the royal family and William and Kate feel they were treated poorly once Harry and Meghan left and Harry published Spare,” Quinn stated.

What is the Invictus Games?

The Invictus Games is an international multi-sport event for wounded, injured, and sick servicemen and women, both serving and veterans. Prince Harry launched the sporting event in 2014 after being inspired by his visit to the Warrior Games in USA in 2013.

The first Invictus Games took place in London in 2014 and were followed by subsequent games in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2022, and 2023.

The word “Invictus” is Latin for “unconquered.” It represents the fighting spirit of wounded, injured, and sick service personnel, and illustrates what these resilient men and women can achieve after injury.

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SNYDE | Elizabeth Hurley addresses rumors she took…

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SNYDE | Elizabeth Hurley addresses rumors she took Prince Harry’s virginity

Elizabeth Hurley is clearing up the “ridiculous” speculation that she was the older woman to whom Prince Harry lost his virginity.

The 58-year-old “Austin Powers” star told “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen” on Wednesday that she’s “never met” the 39-year-old Duke of Sussex.

The Duke wrote about that first “inglorious” tryst in his controversial 2023 memoir, “Spare.”

“That was ludicrous!” the actress and model said of the rumors. “He said, ‘She was English. She was older than me. It was in Gloucestershire.’ And they were like, ‘Ah, it’s Elizabeth.’ It was absurd. It was ridiculous.”‘

Hurley, who said, “I’ve never met him in my life,” equated the speculation to “saying, ‘He’s great-looking. He’s American.’ Oh, it’s Andy Cohen.”

The royal wrote that the “older woman” in question “liked horses, quite a lot, and treated me not unlike a young stallion.

“Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me off to graze,” he added.

Though Harry never named the woman he has sex with at age 17 “in a grassy field behind a busy pub,” the book pulled back the curtain on a slew of otherwise private (and oft-salacious) details about the prince. These ranged from his experimentation with drugs , bowel issues at his friend’s wedding, frostbitten genitals, and a physical altercation with big brother William over Meghan Markle.

Hurley’s dismissal of the Harry rumors comes amid widespread instability in the monarchy as both Kate Middleton and King Charles III undergo treatment for cancer.

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