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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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• <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.

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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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Write to Eliana Dockterman at [email protected]

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.

by Constance Grady

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”.

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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Spare by prince harry, the duke of sussex — review.

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Honest, insightful and often vulnerable, Spare shares Prince Harry’s personal journey from childhood to adulthood and fatherhood

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“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

— William Faulkner

I finished reading this book a couple weeks ago, when the public furor and panty-twisting about it were at their zenith. But despite all the wildly inaccurate claims about what this book supposedly says, I think it reads like a deeply personal coming-of-age memoir.

(Credit: Ramona Rosales, Penguin Random House.)

I found Spare by Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex (and his ghost writer, J.R. Moehringer) ( Random House , 2022: Amazon US / Amazon UK ), to be sensible, carefully structured (for the most part) and extremely readable. Unlike all the abuse spouted by its detractors, this book wasn’t scandalous, and it wasn’t self-aggrandizing. Instead, it was a very down-to-earth, very absorbing memoir by and about a person who, through no fault of his own, is living an extraordinary life. In short: I enjoyed it and read it in one long sitting.

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The book is divided into three roughly equal-sized parts: Harry’s childhood, the premature loss of his mother, Diana, and his educational years, particularly at Eton; his young adulthood, career in the military along with his ongoing search for love and his growing hostility towards the paparazzi (‘paps’ as he refers to them), and in the third part, meeting Meghan, his deepening relationship with her, their changing relationship with his family, and his fatherhood.

Prevailing themes throughout the book are trauma, betrayal and loss, which many people can relate to. Harry presents a powerful and courageous look at the dynamics of an astonishingly dysfunctional family trapped in an emotional poverty they can’t understand, a socially crippled family that uses the press as a weapon against its enemies and against the world — and each other — by publicly or politically discrediting their rivals with falsehoods. In some ways, I viewed this book as a modernized retelling of, say, I Claudius , which was about another highly dysfunctional royal family where individual family members secretly plot and ruthlessly maneuver to increase their own personal power, usually by murdering-by-poisoning their relatives.

Poisoning by paparazzi?

But it’s not all murdering drama. As he tells his story, Prince Harry also considers the central issues in his own personal life, core issues that all thinking people recognize and reflect upon at some point in their own lives. The book is, by turns, emotional and raw and funny and perceptive. For example, I found it to be particularly poignant that Harry was only too well aware of his primary purpose and duties as The Spare even when he was still a very young child. He writes:

“The Heir and the Spare — there was no judgment 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.”

How much might this peculiar status have damaged Harry’s self-esteem? I cannot even imagine. Although many of Harry’s life experiences are unique, his writing about their effects upon him and his world views are refreshingly relatable and insightful: his recollections about feeling misunderstood, invalidated, unheard and devalued as an individual by his family certainly ring true for me, as I am sure they will for many people.

Most of this book shares Harry’s public and charitable work, and his military career. Both are deeply important to him and both are where the paparazzi hounded him mercilessly. Those closest to him often ended up fearing for their lives because the hoards of insatiable paparazzi that routinely stalked them, and — again and again — this cost Harry dearly. For example, his former girlfriend, Chelsea, whom Harry might have married, broke up with him after discovering a tracking device had been installed on her car. Even more outrageous, the paparazzi endangered the lives of Harry’s military unit in Afghanistan.

Then Harry met Meghan. But even then they were subjected to frequent abuse, lies and overt racism by the press. These attacks were so bad that Meghan, who was pregnant at the time, contemplated suicide. What could Harry do to avoid yet another tragedy like what claimed his mother’s life, other than to flee?

“My problem has never been with the monarchy, nor the concept of monarchy” writes Prince Harry. “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. I just wish, at the second-darkest moment of my life, they’d both been there for me. And I believe they’ll look back one day and wish they had too.”

This engrossing book shares details of Harry’s childhood, young adulthood and eventually finding love. But it also details a decisive journey away from loneliness and isolation into a fuller life by relying on the support of others and by discovering strength in vulnerability. It’s a coming-of-age story that reflects on the importance of finding one’s own identity and being open to new experiences. Highly recommended.

NOTE: This piece was edited to correct an error on 4 March 2023. Prince Harry served two tours in Afghanistan, not Iran, as erroneously stated.

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NOTE: I purchased a hardback copy of this book from a local bookseller in a small town in Norway — rather an accomplishment, I’d say. As an Amazon Associate, I may earn micropayments from qualifying Amazon purchases made through links in this piece.

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• What Is Cinema?

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 Bess Levin

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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Spare by Prince Harry review: a lifelong quest for meaning often shows royal in an unflattering light

Spare is available to download on Amazon’s Audible here , with a free trial as well as paid membership

Prince Harry is a man in search of a purpose - a fact made abundantly clear from the outset (I mean, even before you’ve read a page, the title of the book is about as subtle as an Apache helicopter), and hammered home across 400-odd pages, where he seems to use the word “spare” again and again, like a cudgel to beat himself with.

Basically, as the third in line to the throne, Harry started life as a “spare” - only “necessary” should his brother William meet an untimely end. It’s a raw deal, psychologically speaking. He is now seventh in line (“very spare”?), so what’s next?

A search for meaning dominates the book. Harry is rarely happier than when at the controls of a £42 million Apache helicopter. “I can tell from the way you fly,” an instructor tells him, “this is what you were meant to do”. Bliss: a purpose and one that serves his country to boot (Harry loves Britain - the Union Jack flag pops up throughout the book). But deployment with the army in Afghanistan eventually proves too dangerous. Ruined, like much in Harry’s life, by the pesky press, whose leaking (or reporting, depending on which way you see it) of the details puts him and those around him in danger. His frustration is immeasurable and somewhat understandable. Yet while he blames the press he doesn’t touch on the brute fact that it’s his status which makes him a target. Harry never seriously considers that it simply might not be possible to be both a royal son and a soldier on active duty in the 21st century.

Some years later, he finds a place where he is even happier than when flying Apaches - and it’s with Meghan. After their early meetings he wonders: “What is this? What’s the word? Is it… The One? Have I found her? At long, long last?” Again, the desire for purpose and meaning is telling and Meghan gives it to him in spades. By his telling, she profoundly changes – and makes sense of – his life, which he describes (not inaccurately) as one which has been lived in a “gilded cage”.

He means royalty itself - though, this relentless search for a life’s purpose, a higher meaning (premised, as it seems to be for him, on the idea that everyone has their little box, it is just a matter of finding it - and climbing in) is surely constricting too?

And then there is also the cage of his past. The book opens – where else? – with the death of Diana. An awful event for any boy of twelve is, as we all know, intensified almost beyond belief by the grief of the nation and blanket coverage in the media. Harry is trapped by the memory of his mother, who he describes in effusive, angelic terms as being “light, pure and radiant light”. She is the divine being who hovers throughout the narrative and often floats, almost literally, before Harry’s eyes.

Then there is his obsession with the press which also seems to bind him. By his own admission he is addicted to reading stories about himself and his loved ones. His father, King Charles, his brother William and the late Queen Elizabeth all repeatedly plead with him not to read them. But he simply can’t or won’t stop.

This results in a number of scarcely believable scenes. When a blizzard of negative stories about Meghan begins to rage, for instance, she makes a (fairly sensible) decision to not to look at the internet. “She wanted to protect herself,” he writes, “keep that poison out of her brain. Smart”.

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Harry, though, refuses to do anything quite so practical. To win the “battle for her reputation and physical safety”, he “needed to know exactly what was fact, what was false, and that meant asking her every few hours about something else that had appeared online”. It reduces Meghan to tears. Harry blames the press, and seems to take no responsibility for reading this stuff out to his girlfriend, in the process overriding her clearly stated wishes to just ignore it

The tales Harry relates of press intrusion do leave you agog. Was there no peace on earth for this man, or his family? Photographers pop up everywhere, all the time. He cannot escape. He doesn’t always help himself, it has to be said. Once, on a lads trip to Vegas in 2012, he unwisely strips off as part of a jolly late night game (alcohol, as ever, was involved) and lo, the photos soon appear in the press. Other photos too - like those of him in a Nazi costume at a fancy dress party in 2005 (a catastrophic error he ungallantly tries to blame on William and Kate), and the 2003 photos of him kissing a girl in a club. Horrible and intrusive, but you do wonder: in nearly a decade, why didn’t you learn?

Part of the answer appears to be because he didn’t want to. Because he wanted to be free. Freedom is important to Harry (and important, too, to his new audience in America, where the Sussexes’ story is one of breaking free, telling their own truths, escaping the system). But what does freedom really mean to him? As we have  seen in the last few days, an important aspect of that is the liberty to talk about his family and the institution. But there are other things too.

He writes lovingly, and rather endlessly, about Africa, a continent which appears in this book as a refuge. It is where Harry finds solace and happiness in the brutal years after his mother’s death and freedom from intrusion. It is where he longs to take Meghan, having fallen head over heels with her instantly (in fact almost just from a clip of her on Instagram – “for thirty-two years I’d watched a conveyor belt of faces pass by and only a handful ever made me look twice. This woman stopped the conveyor-belt. This woman smashed the conveyor-belt to bits” – which I thought a touch dehumanising).

Harry suggests for their early courtship a trip to Botswana. His pitch to her is this: “Birthplace of all humankind. Most sparsely populated nation on earth. True garden of Eden, with 40 per cent of the land given over to Nature”. No mention of the people, except that there aren’t many. He’s not the only royal with a questionable attitude to the continent. At one point Prince William gets furiously angry with Harry and demands that Africa be his thing (the rhinos and elephants, that is) as Harry already has the Invictus Games. It’s not a good look.

The Harry that finds freedom in Africa is a different man to the one obsessed with the press – even his friends and girlfriends tell him he’s a different “Spike” (one of his endless nicknames) when there.

That’s not to say that he’s not fun when he’s back in Blighty. Harry had a deserved reputation as a party boy. In this book he drinks and takes drugs with great abandon. Indeed after his magical week in Botswana with Meghan, he heads off on a multi-phase lads trip complete with jetskiing in crocodile infested waters, bush cocktails and African beer, and “certain controlled substances”. Then there’s the marijuana, a habit which starts in his teens at Eton and appears to go on until possibly the present – he talks about smoking a joint at Tyler Perry’s house in Los Angeles, where he and Meghan briefly lived in 2020.

The partying is a piece of his silly side. Harry declares that he likes nothing more than making people laugh – a sweet, winning trait. He loves a bawdy joke too. Which perhaps explains why there is so much information – more than I expected – about his penis.

On a trip to the North Pole, Harry discovers frostnip (the forbear to frostbite) on his member. He goes to the doctor where, in another unintentionally revealing moment, he notes repeatedly that the doctor - who is preoccupied with something else - fails to look at him and so recognise exactly who he is. The doctor makes Harry wait and the prince feels slighted. The penis stuff goes on and on – you sense then, that Harry is still something of an unreformed ‘lad’. And it’s all wrapped up - as one of the book’s most startling passages shows - with his childhood.

A friend recommends Harry apply Elizabeth Arden cream to his frostnipped penis. “My mum used that on her lips. You want me to put that on my todger? It works, Harry. Trust me. I found a tube, and the minute I opened it the smell transported me through time. I felt as if my mother was right there in the room. Then I took a smidge and applied it… down there. ‘Weird’ doesn’t really do the feeling justice”.

That’s another unavoidable conclusion drawn from this book: Harry’s was a childhood arrested. Diana is a constant presence – Harry even visits a medium in LA to speak to her. Her son’s great quest is to avenge her, to fight the fight she was unable to do at the time, projecting, one feels, onto his own family many of his feelings about his mother and his relationship to her.

This arrested childhood also shows in the way that Harry speaks. William is Willy, Charles is Pa (not Dad, or Father) and Diana is Mummy. Always. There are references to “legends,” “lads,” and endless nicknames – Boose, Henners, Brent, Bidders, Jakie, Skippy and so on. He often sounds, when the ghostwriter allows him, like a teenager.

But his language is not always cuddly. On the subject of the press his vitriol is astounding (of course I may be somewhat biased myself on this subject). Rebekah Brooks, who he names bizarrely as “Rehabber Kooks” for a story she published about him – apparently not wanting to dignify her with a proper name, is described as a “loathsome toad… an infected pustule on the arse of humanity”. Another journalist, whom Harry agrees to be interviewed by, is portrayed as an addict: “I blurted something about not being normal, which caused the reporter’s mouth to fall open. Here we go . He was getting his headline, his news fix. Were his eyes rolling up into his head?” We weren’t there, Harry, so tell us: were they?

His extreme vitriol towards, and hatred for, the press is a family trait, but one which in Harry appears to reach extremes beyond what his father and brother experience. Clearly and obviously Harry feels it is not fair that he does entirely control the narrative of his life. That would be nice if it were possible, but that’s not how life works, royal or commoner.

A telling exchange takes place near the end, when King Charles tells Harry “the Institution can’t just tell the media what to do”. Harry writes: “Again, I yelped with laughter. It was like Pa saying he couldn’t just tell his valet what to do”. Once more – how revealing.

As a way to tell his own story, Spare is a triumph. But it shows its author often in an unflattering light: vain, status-obsessed, bitter and confused. It’s by turns elegantly written (the ghost writer J. R. Moehringer has done a very good job) and has sections that really ring true with Harry’s voice.

Why, though, did Harry write it? To tell his side of the story, to blow the whistle on the behaviour of the press and the way his family works, to avenge (perhaps) his mother. In these, it succeeds. He is a man, though, ever in search of a purpose. By the end, one senses he has found a new one: to tell the truth and change the world. Those are noble goals. But they may not be easy to achieve. It is hard not to fear, somehow, that the likeable, sweet, rather simple prince may soon find himself in search of meaning once more.

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World » Europe » Britain » The Royal Family

By prince harry the duke of sussex.

Spare by Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, has sent the British media into a frenzy. It’s a revealing book, including everything from how Harry lost his virginity to how he killed 25 people in Afghanistan. As one of the BBC correspondents commented, to say this is a tell-all book would seem to be an understatement. Above all, what is revealed is a very angry man—perhaps not surprising for someone who lost his mother at age 12 as she was being chased by photographers and has had to grow up in the public eye as part of an extremely privileged but also very formal family . The title of Harry’s memoir is from the phrase ‘an heir and a spare.’ For British aristocratic families, with the inheritance of vast tracts of land and property at stake, the idea was that you needed two sons, an heir and a spare, just in case the eldest one died. According to Harry’s book, it’s also what Prince Charles, now King Charles III , said to his wife Diana when Harry was born.

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NEWS... BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT

Prince Harry’s book has totally changed my mind about him… and the Royal Family

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As the slow drips of detail started to seep out last week, Spare looked set to be one of the biggest book releases of the decade.

I’d like to consider myself a fairly level-headed observer of the royal family ; having grown up just outside Windsor and being able to see the castle from my bedroom (well, if you really squint on a clear day) I have often cast a curious eye across the headlines to see what the royals/my neighbours were up to.

My opinions on the Windsors are conflicting – while I know there’s deep-rooted issues with the colonialism the monarchy represents and the privilege they all enjoy, I have avidly devoured The Crown and would occasionally go gooey-eyed about the late Queen .

But the excerpts leaked from Spare in the run up to its release – from ‘Harold’ and ‘Willy’ having physical fights to Hazza snorting lines at shooting parties and shagging in fields made even me, the most casual observer of the crown, want to neck Harry’s book neat like a shot of tequila.

So that’s exactly what I did, after trekking to a colleague’s house to pick up the weighty tome, the preview arriving four hours later than planned.

Spare does not so much spill the tea on life in the royal household – it rather smashes the entire gold gilded teapot, with the carefully PR-curated representations of King Charles and Prince William shattered amongst the shards.

Harry is unflinchingly raw and honest in his writing, describing his father’s glacial manner being at odds with Harry’s ‘sillier’ self.

The pair consistently fail to connect, with the King choosing not to pull his son in for a hug when he announced his mother, Princess Diana, had died, to laughing at all the wrong points and causing blushes when Harry starred in an Eton production of Much Ado About Nothing.

His love for William, ‘Willy’, is evident, but often superseded by their ‘private olympiad’ of a sibling rivalry – constantly putting each other on the backfoot, tensions between them build to a crescendo which culminates in the much-publicised physical fight at Nott Cott.

Harry offered a less measured portrayal of his step-mother, Queen consort Camilla, whom he describes as ‘bored’ upon their first meeting, and ‘dangerous’ ahead of her wedding to his Pa.

While he rather begrudgingly writes that he hopes she makes his father happy, he is less gracious towards the memoir’s primary antagonist, the press, who Harry squarely lays the blame for most of his woes.

Journalists are given a short shrift, with one infamous editor described as a ‘loathsome toad’ and a ‘pustule on the arse of humanity.’

But the book’s bitterness is counterbalanced with Harry’s heartbreakingly beautiful descriptions of his late mother.

You can feel the palpable pain of his loss as he recalls how his younger self coped with Diana’s death by pretending she was merely in hiding, spiriting herself away from the ghastly flashbulb of photographers.

He sees Diana everywhere, sending him messages through nature, and explains his desperate need for proximity by following her charity work.

Spare has its funny moments too, although it can border on schoolboy/squaddie at times. The first half of the book is a misty-eyed look back at his days as a boarder in Ludgrove and Eton, with Harry fondly remembering smoking spliffs in the loos before watching Family Guy. The infamous frostbitten penis debacle also features, although the lengthy and bloated descriptions of Harry’s ‘todger’ begin to tire quite quickly. 

Of course, the final section of the book is dedicated to his life with Meghan, someone so breath-takingly beautiful that Harry describes looking at her like ‘a punch in the throat’. As their relationship goes public, Harry’s fear of losing Meghan, like he lost his mother, is evident – bringing a fresh, raw perspective of a story that has been rehashed for over three years.

Ahead of the release of Spare, I was beginning to tire of Harry and Meghan’s round the clock PR drive. Their recent Netflix documentary bordered on being a little self-indulgent and worthy, and failed to significantly tread any new ground following the famous Oprah interview early last year. As much as I can sympathise with their claims of poor treatment and Meghan’s struggle with her mental health, I couldn’t help but wish they’d move on from their confessional tour, and start to look forward instead of backwards.

However, it is clear that TV isn’t necessarily Harry’s forte. In print, the prince seems to have found his stride with this somewhat sad tale of a tortured man, grappling with a grief that still hangs heavy in his heart. He has J. R. Moehringer’s skilful penmanship to thank for his eloquence, keeping the lengthy read tight as he threads Harry’s anecdotes together in a vignette-style narrative . 

What I am still struggling with is Harry’s motive for writing Spare, besides the obvious financial benefit. He claims to want to reconcile with his father and brother, I can’t help but feel a book this unflinchingly frank will push him further from the fold.

For someone who speaks so furiously about press intrusion and the desire for privacy, Spare is a far more telling story than any newspaper nib. Whether it’s worth losing his family over remains to be seen.

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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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Prince Harry’s Book Is Just Good Literature

I don’t give a fig about the royals, but much of spare reads like a good novel..

In Spare , his blockbuster memoir, Prince Harry recounts that during a 2015 interview shortly after his brother’s second child was born, a journalist told him that his gadabout single life had caused some to liken him to Bridget Jones. Harry was perplexed by the comparison, but in the context of Spare , it’s an apt one. At its best, the prince’s memoir reads like one of those popular late-1990s novels about British singletons blundering their way out of solipsistic immaturity into self-awareness and true love: if not quite Bridget Jones’s Diary , certainly High Fidelity or About a Boy .

To be clear, my idea of the best parts of Spare is unlikely to coincide with the notions of most of the book’s readers. I don’t care about the British royal family and have never paid much attention to their doings—a position that goes all the way back to Princess Diana, Harry’s mother. I cracked open Spare with only a dim sense of its narrative outline: Harry married the American actress Meghan Markle, but racist coverage of the couple in Britain’s tabloid press caused them to attempt to escape the public eye by quitting whatever it was they did as members of the royal family and moving to America. Feuding of the immensely tedious type that gossip columnists adore was involved. What could Spare possibly have to offer the kind of reader who’d rather chew broken glass than have to hear about bridesmaids’ dresses?

To my surprise, the first half of Spare turns out to be a fascinating literary venture. This is surely all down to Harry’s collaborator, J.R. Moehringer, one of the most sought-after ghostwriters in the business, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, and the author of his own bestselling memoir, The Tender Bar . When ghostwriting Andre Agassi’s memoir Open , Moehringer moved to Las Vegas, where Agassi lives, for two years , interviewing the tennis star for many, many hours to produce what’s widely considered the gold standard in sports autobiography.

By his own admission, Harry is “not really big on books,” and while he was blown away by the Faulkner quote he uses as Spare ’s epigraph—“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”—his first thought upon encountering the lines on BrainyQuote.com was “Who the fook is Faulkner?” The Harry of Spare is a blokey bloke, a man more of action than of thought or words. He prefers outdoor adventure, video games, drinking with his mates. He loved being in the army, the physical challenges of basic training, flying Apache helicopters, and his two operational tours of duty in Afghanistan. He joined expeditions to both the South and North Poles, confessing in the book (to the unending delight of journalists, whatever their pretensions to the contrary) that during the latter he contracted a case of frostnip in his “todger.”

Books—whether novels or memoirs—aren’t written or read by people like this, and the people who do write books aren’t inclined to devote much attention to them. How to put into words the inner life of someone who doesn’t really reflect on, let alone cultivate, his inner life? Phil Knight, whose memoir was also ghostwritten by Moehringer, described his collaborator to the New York Times as “ half psychiatrist. … He gets you to say things you really didn’t think you would .” It’s impossible to read Spare without thinking, multiple times per page, of the intensive interviews that produced it, of how Moehringer must have pressed Harry to recall the sensual minutiae that make Spare feel so intimate. Take this description of the linens at Balmoral Castle:

The bedding was clean, crisp, various shades of white. Alabaster sheets. Cream blankets. Eggshell quilts. (Much of it stamped with ER, Elizabeth Regina .) Everything was pulled tight as a snare drum, so expertly smoothed that you could easily spot the century’s worth of patched holes and tears.

This shows a literary writer’s knack for detail that summons not only the smooth texture of the sheets beneath the hand but also what they convey about the rigor of the housekeeping and the genteel economy of the mending. (Nothing says old money like the careful preservation of excellent old sheets.) I would also take bets that Prince Harry has never in his life used the term “eggshell quilts” uncoached. The first half of Spare is studded with such details, from the “clinking bridles and clopping hooves” of the horses that pull the carriage carrying his mother’s coffin in her funeral cortege, to the likening of the smooth surface of the Okavango River in Botswana to a “poreless cheek.”

Men like Harry, who have the opposite of a writer’s temperament and tastes, and who perhaps bullied writerly kids at school, usually show up as antagonists in literary fiction and memoir. Moehringer, on the other hand, needs to make this alien creature endearing. Some choices are obvious, such as organizing Harry’s personality around his grief at the death of his mother in 1997 and his hurt at being relegated to an ancillary role as the “spare” to his older brother’s heir. Other, smaller touches are more artful. For every stupid, bro-ish stunt for which Harry must dutifully apologize (such as dressing up as a Nazi for a costume party in 2005—he says his brother and sister-in-law put him up to it ), there’s a mischievous exploit like sneaking into a farm with a friend as schoolboys and stuffing their faces with filched strawberries. Shades of those lovable hobbit scamps Merry Brandybuck and Pippin Took in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings !

And Moehringer largely succeeds at his mission. His Prince Harry is a likable, not-too-complicated dude who occasionally, and rather improbably, gives himself over to wondering if Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII are “floating in some airy realm, still mulling their choices, or were they Nowhere, thinking Nothing? Could there really be Nothing after this? Does consciousness, like time, have a stop?” (On the other hand, it seems more plausible that Harry believes his late mother has visited him in the form of various animals.) Every prince needs a dragon, and Harry’s is the media, specifically the “paps” (paparazzi) and the tabloids who hire them, for hounding his mother to her death and scuttling most of his relationships before he met Markle. “If I had a choice, I wouldn’t want this life either,” he tells himself when he breaks up with a girlfriend daunted by the reporters pestering her and her family.

It’s possible to feel sympathy for Harry, who never learned how to live another kind of life, without endorsing the absurdities of hereditary monarchy in the 21 st century. With his physical courage and old-fashioned manliness, he would have made an excellent medieval prince. Today, however, royalty has something in common with Bridget Jones regardless of their relationship status: Like Bridget, they work in public relations. Their job (as Harry admits) is to use their entirely unearned fame to “raise awareness” of various worthy causes, which further burnishes their own fame. This is what Harry and his family describe as their work, and it can’t be done without the very press that also torments them.

By Prince Harry

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After Markle comes into Spare , a little past the halfway point, the memoir surrenders its lovely, episodic, ruminative moments to prosecute the many mind-numbing disputes and grudges the couple has with his parents and brother. The British tabloid press behaves shockingly, but even outrage at its flagrant racism could not sustain my interest through long passages about wedding arrangements and housing options. Spare becomes more Harry’s book than Moehringer’s and in the process loses the sweetness and generosity that suffuse its first half. The writing also becomes notably more pedestrian. It left me wishing Moehringer would write a novel about a man much like Harry, a simple man in an impossible situation, seeking a meaningful place for himself in the world. A light novel, a sweet novel, a comically romantic novel. And above all, a novel that ends before the wedding.

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Could Anyone Spare a ‘Spare’? No.

A New York Times book critic had one day to read and review Prince Harry’s hotly anticipated memoir, which was kept under lock and key.

By Alexandra Jacobs

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

The wait for an advance copy of “Spare,” the memoir for which Prince Harry reportedly received an advance of at least $20 million , felt longer than that of his father’s for the British throne.

OK, that’s an exaggeration. But the experience did remind me of a “Seinfeld” episode wherein the character Elaine Benes, stuck with her pants down in a public restroom without toilet paper, is outraged that the stranger in the adjacent stall “ can’t spare a square .”

“What’s the matter?” I more than once wanted to yell at Random House, the book’s publisher. “You can’t spare a ‘Spare’?”

The editor of The New York Times Book Review, Gilbert Cruz, and his deputy editor, Tina Jordan, had been negotiating for weeks to secure a copy for me before the memoir’s official “pub date,” as it’s known in the trade, of Jan. 10. How soon they couldn’t tell me.

News outlets are often given early looks at books, movies, studies and official reports before their release, on the condition that we will not publish articles about them until a certain time. The Times respects these rules, known as embargoes, unless another news organization breaks them. But it doesn’t sign nondisclosure agreements, and Random House knew that, so it would have to rely on our word that we wouldn’t leak details or lodge criticisms before the book arrived on store shelves. This is a familiar dance, usually a polite minuet, but with a book as high-stakes as this one, it becomes more of a jitterbug.

British news organizations were going nuts in the days leading to the release of “Spare,” as it had accidentally gone on sale early in Spain. I tried to avoid all the coverage, worried it would cloud my judgment and make me sick of the book before I’d even read it.

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• Intellectual Affairs

The Philosophy of Rapture

Scott McLemee reviews Christopher Hamilton’s Rapture .

By  Scott McLemee

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Columbia University Press

It may spare potential readers of Christopher Hamilton’s book Rapture ( Columbia University Press ) some confusion to take note of the subject headings for it in the Library of Congress catalog . The first, “Rapture (Christian eschatology),” refers to one of the better-known apocalyptic scenarios, in which the faithful are suddenly transported to heaven before the world succumbs to mayhem on a scale much larger than usual.

The author (a professor of philosophy at King’s College London) mentions belief in “the rapture” just once in the book, in passing—and that is to make clear it is not what he has in mind and will not be discussing the matter at all. Another subject heading given for Hamilton’s book is “Religious awakening—Christianity.” This seems broader, perhaps, but is no less perfectly irrelevant.

At times it proves necessary to read more than the title of a book to have any idea what it is about, and I am afraid this is one of those occasions.

Hamilton is forthright enough about the nature of his topic. “To be enraptured,” he writes early on, “is to be taken out of oneself, lost in an experience, a sight, or whatever, and yet to be returned to oneself unburdened, with a sense of freedom.” No theology is implied. Someone who has passed through a rapturous state might find mystical or devotional language appropriate when trying to talk about it. But most of the figures Hamilton writes about—for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, Werner Herzog, Virginia Woolf and Philippe Petit, who walked across a tightrope stretched between the World Trade Center buildings in 1974—got along without such language.

The author himself identifies with the “broadly humanist” stance that George Orwell stakes out in his essay on Tolstoy and Shakespeare .

“On balance,” Orwell says, “life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise … The [religious] aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life.”

And yet rapture is not precluded. We may be wired for it. Hamilton mentions the sexual embrace as rapture at its most fully absorbing, though not its precondition. The experience of recovering from a period of illness—of finding oneself able and eager to do familiar things once again—can also be rapturous: “I suddenly become attentive to the small things in life,” he writes, “to their irreplaceable value, and then I grasp that these are things that are a source of value in life generally.”

This can feel like a revelation, for as long as it lasts, which is never long enough. (The miraculousness of ordinary existence tends to disappear once it resumes at regular pace.) Rapture is exhilarating, but it reaches deeper into the individual’s experience of the world than a mood can. It is a bolt of lightning that flashes in the murk of everyday life, revealing what is otherwise lost to overfamiliarity.

An artist of great gifts (and the acrobat on a terrifyingly high wire qualifies) seems better suited to grasping and communicating the experience of rapture than most of us—philosophers included, in Hamilton’s judgment. A note of disappointment and exasperation with his discipline runs throughout his essays.

“Philosophy,” he writes, “is in many ways very bad at nourishing the imagination, accepting flights of fancy, of fantasy.” This leaves the profession devitalized, he complains, incapable of conceiving either the philosopher or the layperson as “a whole human being with all that this entails by way of hope, fear, longing, fantasy, blood, sweat, and tears, with a largely obscure and confusing inner life, recalcitrant to improvement and stubborn in its obsessions and desires.”

For Hamilton, the obvious exceptions are Nietzsche and Simone Weil: Their openness to rapture—as a personal experience, but also as a challenge in comprehending the world—makes them artists almost as much as philosophers. Weil in particular is a challenging figure for Hamilton’s project, given the secular and humanist sensibility emphasized above. Weil’s tortuous spiritual path—from Jewish socialist to Catholic not-quite convert, with extremes of self-denial in solidarity with the oppressed—was marked by mystical experiences of compassion, suffering and the love of beauty. (I’ve written more on her here .)

Weil understood her own raptures in theological terms that Hamilton takes seriously without embracing them as his own. (He also avoids psychologizing her beliefs and behavior, which is difficult temptation for the nonbeliever to resist.) The author models his approach on the inventor of the essay as a literary form, Michel de Montaigne, who combined wide-ranging sympathy for the variousness of human life with skeptical irony about our powers of rationalizing our assumptions.

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It makes sense, then, that Hamilton challenges his own predominantly secular outlook with the example of someone whose understanding of the world pushed in a radically opposed direction. Rapture, whatever its metaphysical provenance, “can be a disruptive force,” he writes, “because it is expressive of a certain energy for life. The experience of rapture is that of a hunger for experience, a hunger that can be, even if it need not always be, imperious and demanding.”

The author’s expressed purpose is to open the reader to the possibility of rapture, not as an escape from the world, but to live more fully while here. The book will find readers—by word of mouth, perhaps, since the library catalog won’t be of much help.

Scott McLemee is Inside Higher Ed ’s “Intellectual Affairs” columnist. He was a contributing editor at Lingua Franca magazine and a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education before joining Inside Higher Ed in 2005.

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