by Irene Soave
There’s Möhringer. the king of autobiographies (others), behind the book. His method, the role of fathers. The prince received an advance of $20 million
The daring economic bet: $ 20 million advance, for which the publisher Penguin Random House must sell at least 1.7 million copies. Binding price, in English-speaking countries, from a university volume: 35 euros (25 in Italy). And the story seems strange: Prince Harry already talked about his life last March in a long interview with Oprah Winfrey and at the end of 2022 in a Netflix docuseries that fans judged to be at least revealing little.
Nonetheless, Spare, the Duke of Sussex’s autobiography, due out worldwide on Tuesday (in Italy for Mondadori, quickly translated into Italian by a tandem of four translators and titled The Minor), is eagerly awaited. Of the many advances that have broken the publishers’ embargo in recent days (and perhaps worried, in addition to royalty, Netflix producers who didn’t have them), Spare the elusive venture seems to be succeeding even the great Oprah so far: to give the public a more complete, and perhaps even more sympathetic, portrait of Prince Harry than the Prince himself has ever managed to do when speaking of himself. The secret ingredient is called JR Moehringer.
The cover of the book Spare, the minor. It will be released simultaneously worldwide on January 10th: in Italy the printed and digital versions of Mondadori
The biggest ghostwriter on the square, 58, a Pulitzer Prize winner at 36, didn’t want his signature on the cover. He didn’t want to when Open came out in 2009, a masterful portrayal of tennis player Andre Agassi, who had chosen him while looking for an author for his autobiography. Not just for the Pulitzer. Agassi had read Moehringer’s autobiography, which had appeared five years earlier (in Italian, Il bar delle grandioses, which later became a George Clooney film starring Ben Affleck), and it was the only autobiography I had read up to that point that did so . Doesn’t feel like total self-promotion to me.
Moehringer tells you about his childhood, abandoned by his father, DJ Johnny Michaels, and raised by his uncle Charlie, a bar owner. A world of men, old-fashioned, boastful, with a great sense of humor, who practically babysit me, he said in one of his rare interviews. A world that perhaps prepared him for the portraits – almost exclusively male – that made him famous. When I interviewed Agassi, it was immediately clear that he was also looking for me because of the difficult relationship with my father.
The cover of Open and the cover of Spare look the same – close-ups of young men with tawny beards and helpless eyes – and so are the stories: athlete Andre is coached by his tyrannical father Emmanuel, non-heir Harry is coached by his brother overshadowed William and neglected by his father now king; the golden yoke of competitive sport and that of Buckingham Palace; notoriety. And the rescuers: Steffi Graf for Agassi, Meghan Markle for the Duke. In the opening section, a sentence by Van Gogh writing to his brother, only deep affections, like those between brothers, save us; Before the release of Spare, the bitter revelations just about breaking up with his brother William, who still seems to be Harry’s biggest disappointment in the invisible box.
Spare is known to be the third biography Moehringer co-wrote (he prefers that phrasing to the term ghostwriter), the second being that of Nike founder Phil Knight in 2016 (Art of Victory).
But his only novel Full Day (2012), dedicated to the robber Willie Sutton, also focuses on a great life. And the two articles that almost won and then won the Pulitzer in 1998 and then in 2000. In 1998 he reached the finals with a portrait of a homeless man from San Francisco who claimed to be former boxing legend Bob Satterfield. Two years later he won by narrating – through the life of a resident – the community of descendants of slaves of Gee’s Bend in Alabama (the article published in Italian by Piemme entitled Oltre il Fiume, ed.).
To write Open, Moehringer had moved from California, where he lives, to Las Vegas, where Agassi lives, in a house the champion bought ad hoc. He had been there for two years, interviewed him for a few hours almost every morning at breakfast and slept no more than a few hours a night, as he always does when he is writing a book. We unpacked 12,000 pages of interviews, he said, and together we began to see some themes resurface. In addition I had eaten a feast from Freud, from Jung, from the basics of psychotherapy. The method I used was this. Little is known about how he and Harry worked at Spare, but the Moehringer method on the former Reserve may have worked.
January 7, 2023 (change January 7, 2023 | 07:48)
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