Less than a week after its release Spare, the first biography of Prince Harry written by the world’s best ghostwriter, JR Moehringer, has already entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest-selling essay (we’re currently at around a million and a half copies). Harry has hit the mark: his version of the story has reached every corner of the world. But that unfortunately it will not be enough to make him find peace.
Spare is actually a book full of pain There is victim and there are many villains. There’s dad Carlo, there’s older brother heir William, there’s Camilla, who’s just called “the other woman,” there’s Kate Middleton, who’s guilty of not getting it anymore. There’s the whole company, and even more so the press, which Harry has developed a real obsession with over the years.
After all, the prince’s resentment can already be read from the title. William the heir, he the reinforcement. “I was the shadow”, lets out Harry, “the support, the plan B. I was put into the world in case anything happened to Willy”. Like Harry, the book is bitter, moralistic, self-deprecating, long-winded, irreverent. And occasionally amazing. In fact, we’re discovering a lot more things about Elizabeth II’s nephew than we ever imagined. He was circumcised, came back from the North Pole with a frozen penis, lost his virginity to an elderly woman in a guest garden: “She was very fond of horses and didn’t treat me much differently than a young stallion. A fast rideat the end of which he beat me up and sent me out to graze».
We also discover that the Queen loved making salad dressing and that Carlo does handstands in boxer shorts that Kate doesn’t like to swap lip glosses. That competition between siblings is strong, including in terms of physical appearance. “I looked at Willy, really looked at him, maybe for the first time since we were children,” says one passage, “I became aware of everything: his familiar frown he was used to having around me; it is alarming baldness, more advanced than mine; her famous resemblance to her mother, which faded over time. With age.”
But there’s no doubt that the whole book revolves around them death of mother, which took place in 1997 when he was twelve years old. A deep wound in Harry’s psyche, who is 38 years old today. In public, he says, he only cried once, at Diana’s grave, and never again. He spent, he reveals, more than a decade clinging to the theory that she wasn’t dead, that she was simply hiding. To escape from the company and the press, in short, from the enemies.
Meanwhile, Harry becomes a mediocre student who hates unlike his father Shakespeare. He tried to open his works, he explains, “to discover that Hamlet was telling of a lonely prince who became obsessed with his dead parent and watched his living parent fall in love with a usurper. I shut it down straight away.” At Eton, he reveals, he was then cast in Much Ado About Nothing, which made him realize, to his surprise, that he was doing pretty well: “Being real wasn’t that far off to be on a stage.”
Proceed with Drug addict Harry. There’s cocaine, alcohol, and hallucinogenic mushrooms tasted during a Hollywood party. To give him an idea of the real world, he continues, it was there Operations in Afghanistan, one of the most controversial passages in the book before entering the palace’s heyday. “An endless Truman show,” he continues, “where I almost never had any money in my pocket, never owned a car, never took my house keys with me, never ordered anything online, never got a single box from Amazon, I am hardly ever rode the subway».
And if he was never a literature geek, Harry always was an attentive tabloid reader. Every syllable written about him over the years, despite Papa Carlo’s recurring advice: “Don’t read, my dear boy”. It was his therapist, he explains, who told him he was addicted. The press, Harry says, ruined his life and the palace did nothing to defend it. Because he was always the substitute, the expendable. After returning from assignments with the army, Harry suffers from panic attacks, loneliness, he no longer trusts anyone. While his brother and friends get married, “he continues to dry the clothes that my bodyguards helped me sort on a heater and eat takeout food, alone, over the sink in my father’s cabin.”
This until, as we know Meghan does not enter the scene. Harry tells everything about her story, every detail, even the most insignificant. However, this is the least interesting part. And not just because we had already seen the Netflix series. When Harry talks about Meghan, the woman who saved him, the woman to whom he owes everything, he changes tone. The wound appears smaller, the protective instinct for the family he finally has grows and which could not be more different from his origins.
A family that loves Harry despite everything. In the last interview, the Prince revealed that he has material for another book and that he wrote this to save the Windsors from themselves. Even if that were the case, unfortunately it will not be enough to save himself. Tina Brown, Lady D’s biographer, puts it well: «It is incredibly touching and very moving to hear how Harry dealt with the loss of his mother as a child. But when he talks about what has happened over the last few years, he gaslights himselfhonestly, because the thing is … he’s essentially selling his family for money when he’s talked about the agony of being betrayed so many times.’