Photo: ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
After watching two Oprah specials, reading different profiles, listening to different podcasts, and streaming a six-hour Netflix confessional, I didn’t expect Prince Harry’s comprehensive memoir to tell me something its author hadn’t often had. It’s true that Harry’s familiar grievances — the myriad tabloid encroachments, the royal family’s willful indifference to racial attacks on their first multiracial member, and the never-ending bickering over a child’s wedding attire — find a place in Spare, but there’s so much more . Thanks to a leak, anyone with an internet connection now knows that Harry once suffered frostbite on his “todd” (who is circumcised) and that William, allegedly a Suits superfan, once threw him on a dog bowl during an argument. You 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, listen to the audio book: almost 16 hours of Harry’s animated performance, simultaneously likeable, angry, annoying, funny and persistently self-justifying. Spare is a jumble of contradictions, but as a glimpse into royal reality, it’s as unique as it is odd.
Beginning with the memory of meeting his father and brother after Prince Philip’s funeral, Spare is quick to explain at least one of Harry’s motives for all this talk: He wants to explain to his family, and presumably to the whole world, exactly why he resigned in the beginning Released from managerial positions in 2020. In more than 400 pages, he describes how the British press drove him away while the palace did nothing to help. You’ve heard this before, but not with the unvarnished anger he unleashes here. The editor who he says made up the 2002 report on his weed smoking? “An infected pustule on humanity’s ass, plus a shitty excuse for a journalist.” Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the newspaper that published it? “Right to the right of the Taliban” in reference to his policies. “The paps have always been grotesque people, but as I grew up they got worse,” he writes — or more specifically, ghostwriter JR Moehringer, who has been dubbed the “skeletal exhumer” and has rendered Harry’s searing anger with scalding clarity. “They were more encouraged, more radicalized, just as young men in Iraq had been radicalized. Your mullahs were editors, the same ones who swore 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 cry. Despite witnessing her funeral, Harry said he couldn’t accept her death until he was 23 – almost ten years during which he maintained the sincere belief that she had been in hiding to escape the press, and him would fetch any day now. By the time reality sets in, he’s already committed to his villain: the British tabloid. He remembers how the paparazzi followed him everywhere, hounding him and splashing his worst moments across the front pages. They hacked his phone, stalked his loved ones, and seemingly destroyed every romantic relationship he had before Meghan Markle. It’s also taking its toll on his family life: Harry consistently accuses certain family members of leaking damaging stories about him, his brother’s heir’s throwaway spare, to tabloids in order to boost their own image. After serving in the army, he develops agoraphobia, panic attacks, and an acute sense of loneliness, apparently fueled by distrust of those closest to him. While his brother and friends are getting married and having children, he still dries the TK Maxx (“TK” in UK) clothes his bodyguards handed out for him and eats snacks alone over his father’s sink.
So you feel for him, even if you’re annoyed with him, because for all his claims to moral superiority, Harry von Spare keeps points and he’s petty. Once again processing an exhaustive list of tabloid headlines written about him or Meghan, he wonders how things would have been different if the Palace had issued a statement actually allowing Meghan to wear ripped jeans to wear to an event. He gets granular in his complaints and offers 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 tale, the future king is jealous of his little brother’s relative freedom and determination. He’s always yelling at Harry: to shave his wedding beard because he, Prince William, can’t wear one; letting him “have” Africa because rhinos and elephants are his thing. According to Harry, it’s William who pushed the heir-versus-surrogate competition, but the sense of rivalry seems to go both ways. Consider this at length about Williams’ fading edge: “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 that had always been his default way of dealing with me; his frightening baldness, more advanced than mine; his famous resemblance to Mummy, which faded over time. With age.”
In a recent interview with Anderson Cooper, Harry refuted the idea that this passage, with all its jibes about William’s physical appearance, was “sharp at all,” which, come on. But when challenged, Harry often counters with I never actually said that — another example of the press twisting my words. When ITV’s Tom Bradby started asking him about the racism allegations Harry and Meghan made in their Oprah interview over the weekend, Harry cut him off. “No, I haven’t,” he said, refusing to acknowledge Bradby’s argument that a member of the royal family raising concerns about baby Archie’s skin color could be taken as “essentially racist,” and instead started with one convoluted explanation for unconscious bias. (Interestingly, the incident is not mentioned in the book). Of course, after years of tabloid lying, Harry would be sensitive to inaccurate reporting. But he seems so defensive that it’s hard not to agree with Charles when he tells Harry, “My love, just don’t read it.” (If this week’s interview with Stephen Colbert is any indication, unfortunately, Harry always has that advice not yet fully accepted.)
In Harry and Meghan’s post-royal productions, their lack of confidence can make even their legitimate grievances seem annoying. Replacement is no different. To (perhaps?) mark his allegiance, Harry recalls footmen bringing him and William their dinners under silver domes – but while it “sounds fancy,” the meal was all fish fingers. He complains about life in a cage while he jets leisurely around the world: round-trip to Botswana, the North Pole and the South Pole, a luxury suite in Las Vegas with the boys, and a multi-day party at Courtney Cox’s house. He worries his father might cut him off in his mid-30s, and while he acknowledges the absurdity of this predicament, he’s also shying away from delving into the considerable legacy his mother left him. As far as royal residences go, his bachelor pad at Kensington Palace may have been less than royal, but it’s still a vacant flat in one of London’s most expensive areas. And then there’s the fundamental paradox of his decision to sell and resell his story in the first place. Harry will welcome the opportunity to tell everything in his own words, rather than having to rely on unnamed sources for cipher. At the same time he makes a lucrative business with it. He is rumored to have received a $20 million advance on Spare, which is currently breaking sales records. Of that, he has donated nearly $2 million to charity.
And yet, despite his blind spots, he’s so candid about so much, and that makes Spare an incomparably wacky read. Here’s a prince in my ear telling me about the grocery bag full of weed he smoked and how he peed his pants on a sailboat and put Elizabeth Arden face cream on his penis. He tells me about the effects of magnesium on his gut and how the moon, as he stumbled, seemed to herald Meghan’s entry into his life. He does all of this with no apparent ego, as if I asked for it and as if these were normal biographical details to share. Countless movies, TV shows, and books have attempted to reconstruct the crunchy heart of this family’s existence, but none have come close to the sheer weirdness of this insider’s account. Royal life is looking worse, but also so much stranger than we could have known.
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