new york times book review of spare

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The Haunting of Prince Harry

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.

Read More: How Celebrity Memoirs Got So Good

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Write to Eliana Dockterman at [email protected]

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Word of Mouth

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» Click here to read Jesse Kornbluth's review.

Review #1 by Roberta O’Hara

There are two sides to every story. Those sides are perception --- or, perhaps better put, perception of truth.

With all the hoopla that has been in the ether the past few months surrounding SPARE, along with the Netflix series and the countless interviews, I made a conscious decision to approach Prince Harry’s memoir with the above in mind. There are two sides to every story. The tabloid gossip and so-called news has been brutal, even heartbreaking at times, for a world that has watched (perhaps too closely) the shattered childhoods of Princess Diana’s boys. I wanted to give Harry an honest read.

What I didn’t expect was to walk away from the book not only maintaining that perception is in the eye of the one doing the experiencing, but also feeling a new-found respect and sympathy for Harry.

"What I didn’t expect was to walk away from the book not only maintaining that perception is in the eye of the one doing the experiencing, but also feeling a new-found respect and sympathy for Harry."

The idea of a “spare to the heir” takes the notion of a favorite child to new and deplorable heights. Smaller rooms, a lesser cottage, even fewer sausages at breakfast --- Harry’s role as the “other,” the almost dispensable one, was always on the surface, a constant reminder. He was, in his own words, “the shadow, the support, the Plan B” to his brother, Will. And for a child who had lost his mother, the negation and isolation compounded. Loss was a constant throughout his life. Even on Will’s wedding day, Harry sensed the “feeling that this was yet another farewell under this horrid roof. Another sundering. The brother I’d escorted into Westminster Abbey that morning was gone --- forever.”

Charles’ marriage to Camilla resulted in less time with his father. It’s no wonder that it was years before Harry could come to terms with the fact that Diana was actually dead, not just in safe hiding, away from the royal games and expectations. Harry spent the rest of his childhood and much of his young adult life looking for signs of her.

And yet, Harry couldn’t cry. He recalled tears briefly --- once --- at his mother’s funeral. But then not again for 17 years (“of suppressed grief”) when asked about Diana by his then-girlfriend, Cressida. This moment was perhaps the beginning of a catharsis long overdue. And SPARE is definitely a culmination of catharsis.

Since all the juicy bits are “out there” in the news, there aren’t surprises of shocking value. Everyone has heard about the frostbite, the physical fight with Will, and the line about Camilla doing spin control.

SPARE reinforces the brutality of the British press, the downright trickery to which they will stoop in order to get a photograph, a tidbit that they can twist into something salacious, a story of half-truths. The memoir is rife with tales of the press inserting themselves in situations to get the “news” (in quotes because calling it journalism in the purest sense of what respectable reporters do doesn’t seem justified). From Diana’s death through the rest of Harry’s life, the press has been a constant presence --- mosquitos looking for their next meal.

“For much of my adult life there had been paps [paparazzi] waiting for me outside public places. Sometimes a mob of them, sometimes a handful…. But it wasn’t just public places. I’d be walking down a side street…and they’d leap from a phone box or from under a parked car.” And Harry feared that “[s]ome person, or persons, extremely close to me and Willy, was sneaking stuff to the newspapers….” His father’s only advice: “Don’t read it, darling boy.”

Harry longed for something that made sense to him because the loss he experienced didn’t, nor did the treatment he and his family received at the hands of reporters. “Please,” he begged, “put me on a battlefield where there are clear rules of engagement.” And so he deployed to the Iraqi border, to escape. The long passages about Harry’s service stood out for me; they showed a courage not often attributed to royals whose service was more for show than actual combat. Harry’s duty was real. Much has been made about his “kills,” the press touting that he bragged about this, but in words he didn’t. He states the facts of his service plainly. Pride in his military service, yes; pride in numbers, no.

And, finally, the romance. And the racism. Meghan Markle. Harry fell quickly, and so did Meghan. Harry’s writing about their early courtship is, well, beautiful. (It’s equaled only by his stories of Botswana, where he so clearly feels a comfort level he had seldom experienced in his life to date.) But once the relationship was made public, the vicious cycle began again, and Meghan was villainized quickly. “Tormenting Meghan Markle has become a national sport that shames us,” read a headline in The Guardian .

Everyone knows the end of the story --- the wedding, the adorable children, the move to America. And now this book. Where Harry bares his soul. Where he is allowed to be vulnerable and tells his story, from his point of view. Critics and wannabe critics will argue forever about the veracity of what Harry shares, but I see it this way: a boy who lost his mother in a horribly visible way and lived in the proverbial glass castle was tortuously scarred yet managed to build a new life for himself on his terms. And finally learned how to cry --- tears of pain and joy.  

Review #2 by Jesse Kornbluth

SPARE is the fastest-selling nonfiction book  ever , with 1.43 million copies sold on its launch day. I wasn’t among those avid first-day buyers. I wasn’t one of the 17 million viewers of Oprah’s interview with Harry and Meghan, and I do not live in one of the 28 million households that watched their Netflix documentary. I hadn’t savored the press reports of the book’s revelations and inaccuracies, or read beyond the headlines of the damage the book may deliver to the Crown, or cheer their $135 million deals that look a lot like a raised finger to the family that refused to pay even their much-needed security team. Truly, my interest in the Harry and Meghan story extended no further than Tina Brown’s book, THE PALACE PAPERS , and her unforgettable quip at her publication party: “This is a book Meghan Markle wishes she’d read four years ago.”

And yet a copy of SPARE was on my desk the other day when my daughter walked in. Her face was a rictus of young disgust. As was her tone: “Ooooo…why?” I explained that the ghostwriter was J.R. Moehringer, author of one of my favorite memoirs, THE TENDER BAR . Harry is, by his own admission, not a reader. He is surely no writer. As I occasionally ghostwrite, I explained to my daughter that I was reading the book to see what I could learn from Moehringer, who reportedly earned $1 million for his services on SPARE.

"The high-level gossip regularly detonates, keeping us reading...and we feel for the kid who believes his mother is alive, just elsewhere, because then she’s not really gone. But there’s no getting around it: until Harry meets Meghan Markle, this is one sad book."

So let me pass over the book’s greatest hits --- there’s a laundry list of them here and here --- and deal with Moehringer’s considerable achievement. He structured the book as a case history of a great trauma: the death of Harry’s mother and the inability of his stiff-upper-lip father and equally traumatized brother to help him.

Not long ago, I read this: “Trauma is stored in the body and released in relationships.” I asked a therapist if she believed that was true. “100%” she said.

“Released” in relationships is not a good thing. It means that, when triggered, the trauma is expressed as anger or tears or even violence on an innocent, baffled lover, friend or relative. In the classic TRAUMA AND RECOVERY: The Aftermath of Violence — from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror , Judith Herman writes, “When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often, secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.”

Most of SPARE is a chronicle of Harry’s symptoms: drugs, endless confrontations with paparazzi, stalled relationships with women, and, of course, the ongoing war with his family. There are exciting chapters --- Harry’s experiences in the Army are vivid and detailed --- and his high-speed drive through the Paris tunnel where his mother died is a heartbreaker. But the real plot engine is dish. The high-level gossip regularly detonates, keeping us reading --- kudos to Moehringer --- and we feel for the kid who believes his mother is alive, just elsewhere, because then she’s not really gone. But there’s no getting around it: until Harry meets Meghan Markle, this is one sad book.

From the second Meghan appears, the clouds clear and the sun shines, and we are reading a thrilling love story: a wounded warrior is healed by a fantastic woman, who creates a family with him that he is dedicated to protect. Could there possibly be a happier ending?

Stories that end this well --- stories that are too good to be true --- generally omit disquieting realities. The main one: Harry and Meghan have created a family unit almost as insular as the royals. The New York Times review nibbles at this:

One kind of wants to snatch the remote control from his hands and press into them a copy of Joseph Heller’s CATCH 22…because of the seemingly inescapable paradox of his situation…

In the prince’s full-throated renunciation of fame and royalty with all its punishing invasions of privacy, he has only become more famous, if not more regal, trading his proximity to the throne for the No. 1 spot on a cushioned chair.

Finally, a personal note. When Diana died on August 31, 1997, I was the Editorial Director of America Online. I was spending the Labor Day weekend at an off-the-grid inn a hundred miles from AOL headquarters in Dulles, Virginia. I rushed back to the office the next morning. Right… Labor Day --- the building was locked. (Unreal, but the internet wasn’t 24/7 then.) On Tuesday, my team belatedly started to build a memorial special. When it launched, it was like no special ever seen on AOL. Instead of links to news accounts, all the links went to message boards that asked for emotional responses: Grieve. Share. For her family. AOL then had three million members. In a few days, we had 4.5 million messages.

When I recall those numbers, I cut almost everyone in SPARE a little slack. Not the media --- there are killers with better ethics than the British press and its ghoulish photographers. And it’s hard to forgive Charles and Camilla, and Kate and William, for tolerating and even encouraging a racist campaign against Meghan.

But context matters. And in context, I see a traumatized family in a traumatized world. The death of Diana was like 9/11 for the royals. No one who was alive that day will ever forget it. Or not feel it. That ongoing trauma --- Diana’s long shadow --- sadly will be a silent, ghostly presence in what Harry and Meghan want to believe is their beautifully tended garden of a marriage.

Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara, and Jesse Kornbluth for HeadButler.com on January 27, 2023

Spare by Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex

• Publication Date: January 10, 2023
• Genres: Memoir , Nonfiction
• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Random House
• ISBN-10: 0593593804
• ISBN-13: 9780593593806

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

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.”

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

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

A royal tell-all with some substance.

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

Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023

ISBN: 9780593593806

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | POLITICAL & ROYALTY

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New York Times Bestseller

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

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

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

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

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

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

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by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton

LOVE, PAMELA

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

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

The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.

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

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023

ISBN: 9780063226562

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

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Prince Harry’s 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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Bonkers Revelations From Prince Harry’s Book, Ranked

Like Prince Harry , I have been struggling recently with the question of whether I should reject my birthright. But while Harry’s new memoir, Spare , seems likely to sever his relationship with his family for good, it’s bringing me back to my inherited affinity for royals-watching.

This habit was thrust upon me at a young age. I was born the same year as Harry, and as a small child, I recall hearing my mother’s detailed thoughts on Princess Diana’s wedding dress (“Too poofy”), Prince Charles ’s affair with Camilla (“Creepy and sad”), and the royals’ mandatory pantyhose rule (“A fine example for us all”). As I grew older, my mom and I watched Sarah Ferguson tell Oprah that royal life is “ not a fairy tale ,” closely followed the aftermath of Princess Diana’s tragic death, and went to a theater to watch Peter Morgan’s dramatization of the aftermath in The Queen . I woke up early to watch Kate Middleton’s wedding and stayed up late searching for clips online of Oprah’s interview with Harry and Meghan Markle (I’m still upset that CBS didn’t stream it immediately).

This past fall, however, Netflix pushed me past my limit when The Crown slowly examined Prince Philip’s love of carriage-driving and the Harry & Meghan docuseries revealed that their courtship involved a doggy-ears Snapchat filter. I get it — the royals are largely a bunch of monsters. “Harry and Meghan are at least partly correct, but they’re also so annoying,” as Gawker aptly put it . Isn’t this all too much, even for devoted Anglophiles?

Apparently not! I had no intention of reading Spare , which was released on January 10, but the leaked details are simply too explosive to ignore. Please join me in the coming days as I rank Harry’s big revelations from most to least bonkers and accept that fully escaping the royal family — even when you’re just an American watching from your couch — is nearly impossible.

1. Prince William physically attacked Harry.

Spare ’s biggest allegation (so far) would strain credulity if it appeared in one of the trashy tabloids that have been inventing stories about the princes since before they were born. Harry claims that in 2019, William “grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and … knocked me to the floor” during an argument about Harry’s wife. According to the Guardian , which obtained an early copy of the book, Harry says William came to his home at Nottingham Cottage to talk about “the whole rolling catastrophe” of their relationship and issues with the press. He showed up “piping hot” and called Meghan “difficult,” “rude,” and “abrasive.” Harry told William that William was just repeating the press narrative about Harry’s wife, and they began shouting insults at each other.

Harry became scared and gave his brother a glass of water in an attempt to calm him down. Then William suddenly attacked him. Per the Guardian :

He writes: “He set down the water, called me another name, then came at me. It all happened so fast. So very fast. He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out.” Harry writes that William urged him to hit back, citing fights they had as children. Harry says he refused to do so.

2. Harry killed 25 Taliban fighters.

Here’s something no one saw coming: Spare leading to calls for Harry to be dragged before the International Criminal Court. The prince, who served two tours in Afghanistan during his time in the British army, managed to anger people on both sides of the conflict with his claim that he killed 25 Taliban fighters. The Guardian reported :

The prince recounts in his memoir his time as a gunner in an Apache attack helicopter while on his second tour in Afghanistan in 2012. It was possible to establish a kill count, the prince said, because he was able to watch gun-cam footage of every mission he flew on. Harry writes that “in the era of Apaches and laptops” it was possible to establish “with exactness how many enemy combatants I had killed. And it seemed to me essential not to be afraid of that number. So my number is 25. It’s not a number that fills me with satisfaction, but nor does it embarrass me.”

Later in the book, Harry admits he dehumanized the people he killed. “When I found myself plunged in the heat and confusion of combat I didn’t think of those 25 as people,” he wrote. “They were chess pieces removed from the board. Bad people eliminated before they could kill good people.”

Former members of the British military told the press that revealing this wasn’t smart, as it could increase security threats against Harry and his family. They also questioned how he could be sure of the number, and said the claim paints an inaccurate picture of how soldiers approach missions. Tim Collins, a retired British Army colonel, told Forces News, “That’s not how you behave in the Army; it’s not how we think. He has badly let the side down. We don’t do notches on the rifle butt. We never did.”

Anas Haqqani, a senior aide to the Afghan interior minister, accused Harry of confessing to “war crimes,” according to the New York Post , adding, “The ones you killed were not chess pieces, they were humans; they had families who were waiting for their return.” And Khalid Zadran, the Taliban’s police spokesman in Kabul, told The Telegraph , “The perpetrators of such crimes will one day be brought to the international court and criminals like Harry who proudly confess their crimes will be brought to the court table in front of the international community.”

3. Harry had frostbite on his penis at William’s wedding.

In case there is any remaining doubt about Harry’s commitment to oversharing in this book, here is a snippet from a Post report about the sad state of his willy during his brother’s nuptials. The younger prince had just completed a 200-mile Arctic charity walk and was still suffering from the effects during the big event:

“While the ears and cheeks were already healing, the todger wasn’t. It was becoming more of an issue by the day,” he says. Following the wedding, Harry says that he went to the doctor after using Elizabeth Arden cream. Harry also  confirms he’s circumcised  in the explosive tome, despite longstanding reports that he’s not.

On a friend’s advice, Harry treated his frostbitten “todger” with Elizabeth Arden cream, which made him think of his mom. Yes, really.

4. Harry lost his virginity behind a pub.

Alternate title for Harry’s memoir: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Harry’s Penis* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) . The royal reveals that he lost his virginity to an unnamed older woman in a field behind a “very busy pub” when he was 17. Then, Harry says, a royal family bodyguard came to the school to investigate. The Independent reports:

The book outlines how one of the Royal Family’s bodyguards Marko paid him a visit when he was still a pupil at Eton College in Windsor and told the Prince he had been sent to “find out the truth”. Harry writes: “I suspected he was referring to my recent loss of virginity, a humiliating episode with an older woman who liked macho horses and who treated me like a young stallion. “I mounted her quickly, after which she spanked my ass and sent me away. “One of my many mistakes was letting it happen in a field, just behind a very busy pub. No doubt someone had seen us.”

The bodyguard was actually investigating reports that a newspaper had evidence of Harry taking drugs. He said this was “all lies,” but discloses that he had started using marijuana and cocaine by that time.

5. William and Kate told Harry to dress like a Nazi.

What if the real culprits behind Harry’s most appalling scandal were actually … the future king and queen of England? That’s what the prince alleges in Spare , according to the New York Post . He says he was deciding between dressing as a pilot or a Nazi for a 2005 “Native and Colonial” party and called up his elder brother and William’s then-girlfriend to ask for their advice.

“I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought. Nazi uniform, they said,” Harry writes. He also modeled the outfit for them and “they both howled. Worse than Willy’s leotard outfit! Way more ridiculous! Which, again, was the point.”

But, of course, the public didn’t appreciate the 20-year-old prince’s look when it appeared on the cover of the Sun soon after.

6. William and Harry ‘begged’ Charles not to marry Camilla.

Harry and William, understandably, have some issues with the woman their mother publicly blamed for her divorce, saying there were “three of us in this marriage.”

Harry wrote, according to the New York Post , that Camilla looked “bored” at their first meeting, which he assumed was because he wasn’t the heir – not that she had a great relationship with his brother. “Willy had been suspicious of the Other Woman for a long time,” Harry added.

Eventually they accepted Camilla, and the fact that their father was going to marry her, though the boys had “begged” him not to. “I remember wondering … if she would be cruel to me; if she would be like all the wicked stepmothers in the stories,” Harry wrote.

In an interview with Good Morning America broadcast Monday, Harry said he and Camilla are on “perfectly pleasant” terms and he doesn’t see her as an “evil stepmother” – but he’s had some pretty unflattering things to say about her.

Harry wrote in the book that he “wanted Camilla to be happy” because “maybe she’d be less dangerous if she was happy.” He elaborated in 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday that she was dangerous because she had been cast as the “villain” and need to “rehabilitate her image.”

“That made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press,” he told Anderson Cooper. “And there was open willingness on both sides to trade of information. And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her, on the way to being Queen consort, there was gonna be people or bodies left in the street because of that.”

He says he was one of those bodies at times, writing in the book that his stepmother “sacrificed me on her personal P.R. altar.”

7. The brothers call each other ‘Willy’ and ‘Harold.’

The Netflix docuseries made it clear that Meghan and Harry remain committed to their insufferable habit of calling each other M and H (though “Harry” is already a nickname). It appears William keeps things more formal, as evidenced by the line “I didn’t attack you, Harold.” (His full name is actually Henry Charles Albert David of Wales.)

Harry, meanwhile, refers to his brother by a nickname — and not the well-known moniker Wills. He writes in Spare that when he tried to calm his brother during their 2019 altercation, he said, “Willy, I can’t speak to you when you’re like this.”

8. William tried to gaslight Harry about the attack.

Harry says William returned shortly after the 2019 attack looking “regretful” and he apologized. Then when William departed a second time, he acted like nothing had happened. Per the Guardian :

When William left again, his brother writes, he “turned and called back: ‘You don’t need to tell Meg about this.’” “‘You mean that you attacked me?’” “‘I didn’t attack you, Harold.’”

Harry said he didn’t immediately tell Meghan, but he did call his therapist. And he eventually told his wife what had happened when she noticed “scrapes and bruises” on his back. He writes that she “wasn’t that surprised and wasn’t all that angry,” but “she was terribly sad.”

9. William and Kate were massive Suits fans.

Many Americans did not know who Meghan Markle was before the announcement that she was dating Prince Harry, but he says the royals were well acquainted with her from the USA Network drama Suits (which aired on Dave and then Netflix in the U.K.). Here’s how Harry describes William and Kate’s reaction to him revealing that he was dating Markle, per the New York Post :

“Their mouths fell open. They turned to each other. Then Willy turned to me and said: ‘F–k off?’” “I was baffled until Willy and Kate explained that they were regular — nay, religious — viewers of ‘Suits,’” Harry writes. “‘Great,’ I thought, laughing. I’ve been worrying about the wrong thing. All this time I’d thought Willy and Kate might not welcome Meg into the family, but now I had to worry about them hounding her for an autograph.”

10. The royals are not huggers.

Could we have guessed this? Sure. But it’s still pretty horrifying to learn that Charles (allegedly) didn’t even hug Harry after telling him his mother was in a car crash and “didn’t make it.” Harry wrote, according to the New York Post , “Pa didn’t hug me. He wasn’t great at showing emotions under normal circumstances, how could he be expected to show them in such a crisis?” He added, “His hand did fall once more on my knee and he said, ‘It’s going to be OK.’ That was quite a lot for him. Fatherly, hopeful, kind. And so very untrue.”

Elsewhere in the book Harry says that William “recoiled” and “completely freaked” that Meghan hugged him when they first met. Strangers are supposed to curtsy when meeting William, but Meghan didn’t know and Harry didn’t think she needed to follow protocol. “Willy didn’t hug many strangers,” Harry says. “Whereas Meg hugged most strangers.”

11. Meghan was too familiar with Kate.

Would you happily share your lip gloss with your sister-in-law? Is it appropriate to tease a pregnant woman about having “baby brain”? Spare forces readers to ask these tough social conundrums.

Harry recalls that before a joint appearance at the Sussexes’ and the Waleses’ Royal Foundation Forum in 2018, his wife asked to borrow Kate’s lip gloss because she forgot hers. “Kate, taken aback, went into her handbag and reluctantly pulled out a small tube,” Harry wrote, according to the New York Post . “Meg squeezed some onto her finger and applied it to her lips. Kate grimaced.”

A few months later, Kate, who was pregnant, forgot something minor in conversation and Meghan joked that she had “baby brain.” Later when the couple sat down for tea to hash out their differences, Kate and William said the remark wasn’t appreciated. Per the Today Show :

“You talked about my hormones,” Kate allegedly said of the comment. “We are not close enough for you to talk about my hormones!” The offense was evidently so great that Kate was allegedly gripping the upholstered side of her chair so intensely that her fingers went white, according to the book. Harry described his wife as looking perplexed about the reaction, as Meghan said the words simply reflected the way she would speak to her own friends.  But Kate wasn’t the only one offended. Harry recalled the Prince of Wales also lashing out about the perceived slight, pointing a finger at Meghan and calling the remark “rude.” Harry noted the Duchess of Sussex responded by asking William to “take your finger out of my face.”

Harry describes borrowing lip gloss as an “American thing,” but I don’t know. Maybe his wife should have reeled it back a bit around her reserved, pregnant sister-in-law?

12. Harry felt he existed to be William’s organ donor.

In Harry’s interpretation, his “spare” role went beyond being a back up king. 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 explicit clear to me from the start of life’s journey and regularly reinforced therafter.

13. William ordered Harry to shave his beard for his wedding.

Harry writes that he had to ask Queen Elizabeth for permission to keep his beard for his wedding, as he was getting married in his Army uniform and beards are forbidden in the British Army. He pointed out that he was no longer in the service, Meghan had never seen him without the beard, and it had become something of a “security blanket” for him. “Granny” gave him the okay.

But his brother hit the roof. They argued for “more than a week,” with William accusing Harry of putting their grandmother in an uncomfortable position. Then, Harry writes, he discovered the real issue:

At one point he actually ordered me, as the Heir speaking to the Spare, to shave. Are you serious? I’m telling you, shave it off. For the love of God, Willy, why does this matter so much to you? Because I wasn’t allowed to keep my beard.

Harry, unlike William, kept his beard for his wedding. And he eventually got back at his brother with a hair-related jab; in the book’s introduction, Harry references William’s “alarming baldness, more advanced than my own.”

This post has been updated throughout.

14. Family members referred to Harry as ‘the Spare.’

Harry writes that when he was 20 he heard a family story about what his father said to his then-wife, Princess Diana, on the day of his birth: “Wonderful! Now you’ve given me an heir and a spare — my work is done.” Harry says this was presented as a joke, but minutes later Charles ran off to be with Camilla.

Charles certainly isn’t Prince Charming, but he was far from the only family member to call him “the Spare.” He says the nickname was also used by Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, and Diana.

15. Prince Charles was jealous of his son’s press coverage.

If decades-old gossip is to be believed, Charles hated that Princess Diana stole the limelight wherever they went. Harry says that by 2015, Charles’s pettiness was causing problems between him and William, too. The BBC reports :

“Willy did everything he [King Charles] wanted, and sometimes he didn’t want him to do much, because dad and Camilla didn’t like Willy and Kate getting too much publicity,” he writes. He goes on to detail a time where Kate allegedly had a visit planned to a tennis club on the same day King Charles, then Prince of Wales, had a public engagement. According to Harry, one of the monarch’s press officers called William to ensure there were no photos of Kate holding a tennis racquet. “Undoubtedly that kind of photo would have pushed dad and Camilla off every front page,” he writes. “And that couldn’t be tolerated under any circumstances.”

16. King Charles is never without his teddy bear.

While describing how his father was bullied at the boarding school Gordonstoun (see The Crown : Season 2, Episode 9 ) Harry mentions, for no apparent reason, that his father still has his teddy bear:

I remember him murmuring ominously: I nearly didn’t survive. How had he? Head down, clutching his teddy bear, which he still owned years later. Teddy went everywhere with Pa. It was a pitiful object, with broken arms and dangly threads, holes patched up here and there. It looked, I imagined, like Pa might have after the bullies had finished with him. Teddy expressed eloquently, better than Pa ever could, the essential loneliness of his childhood.

17. King Charles exercises in his boxers.

In yet another detail that’s seemingly only in the book to embarrass King Charles, Harry revealed his father’s workout routine while describing the layout of Balmoral:

Open the wrong door and you might burst in on Pa while his valet was helping him dress. Worse, you might blunder in as he was doing his headstands. Prescribed by his physio, these exercises were the only effective remedy for the constant pain in Pa’s neck and back. Old polo injuries, mostly. He performed them daily, in just a pair of boxers, propped against a door or hanging from a bar like a skilled acrobat. If you set one little finger on the knob you’d hear him begging from the other side: No! No! Don’t open! Please God, don’t open!

Was Pa the world’s best dad? Clearly not. But at least this neglected and severely bullied single dad, who suffering from constant neck and back pain, was trying.

More on the royals

• How Are King Charles & Kate Middleton Doing? Latest Health Updates.
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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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Watch CBS News

Prince Harry's "Spare" jumps to No. 1 on bestseller lists

By Aimee Picchi

Edited By Anne Marie Lee , Alain Sherter

January 10, 2023 / 11:12 AM EST / MoneyWatch

Prince Harry's memoir's title, "Spare," is a nod to his position as the backup son in the line of royal succession. The book, however, is hardly an afterthought in bookstores, with the title jumping to the top of several bestseller lists as it hit store shelves on Tuesday.  

As "Spare" made its debut it ranked No. 1 on Amazon's nonfiction bestseller list, while it was also atop Barnes & Noble's top 100 sellers the same day. However, it may take a week or more to show up on the gold standard of bestseller lists, the New York Times, as its current nonfiction bestseller list is based on data from sales before December 31, which is prior to the publication date of the book.

• As Prince Harry's book "Spare" hits shelves, what do the Brits make of it?
• Here are some of the major revelations from Prince Harry's leaked memoir, "Spare"
• Prince Harry: The 60 Minutes Interview Transcript

In the memoir, the 38-year-old Harry details his life as part of the royal family, warts and all — and it may be the warts that are boosting book sales. The memoir covers his decades-long struggle with grief after his mother Princess Diana died in a car crash and discusses conflicts he has had with his father, King Charles; his stepmother, the Queen Consort Camilla; and his brother, Prince William, who is heir to the throne. 

In the book, Harry writes about his father waking up him and his brother, then 12 and 15, respectively, to tell them of their mother's death. 

"Pa didn't hug me. He wasn't great at showing emotions under normal circumstances. But his hand did fall once more on my knee and he said, 'It's going to be okay,'" Harry wrote in his recounting of hearing the painful news. 

In an interview with Anderson Cooper of "60 Minutes," Harry said, "Nothing was okay."

Book bombshells

The book details Harry's experiments with psychedelics in search of relief from his trauma, as well as his military career and his revelation that he killed 25 people in Afghanistan while serving in the British armed forces.

Other bombshells include his claim that William physically assaulted him over tension related to Meghan Markle, whom Harry married in 2018. William reportedly called Meghan "abrasive," "difficult" and "rude," the book says. 

"It all happened so fast. So very fast. [William] grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and  he knocked me to the floor .   I landed on the dog's bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out," Harry wrote in "Spare."

Reviews: The good, the bad and the ugly

So far, reviews of the book have been mixed, with some critics praising the memoir while others not. The Economist called it an "ill-advised romp." 

"'Spare' is by turns compassion-inducing, frustrating, oddly compelling and absurd," The Guardian wrote in its Monday review of the book. 

Other reviewers praised the book, but with caveats. The Financial Times noted, "You may question whether you should be reading anything more about Harry, let alone a 416-page book." 

But, its reviewer added, "Of all Harry and Meghan's output since they stepped down from royal duties in 2020 — the interview with Oprah Winfrey, the Spotify podcasts, the six-hour Netflix documentary — 'Spare' is the most bearable and revelatory."

Not exactly high praise, but it may be enough to convince readers to open their pocketbooks and order a copy. 

• Prince Harry Duke of Sussex

Aimee Picchi is the associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and personal finance. She previously worked at Bloomberg News and has written for national news outlets including USA Today and Consumer Reports.

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Prince Harry’s Spare Is Taking The Internet By Storm, But What Do The Critics Think?

What do the reviews say about Spare?

Between people watching Harry & Meghan, reading the leaks from Prince Harry ’s memoir Spare and now being able to read the entire book, his stories about the Royal Family have taken the internet by storm. However, what do the book critics think about this book from the Duke of Sussex? The reviews are mixed and complex, and many noted, even those who liked the book, how for a prince who desires privacy he sure does reveal a lot. 

Prince Harry’s Book Spare Has Taken The Internet By Storm

Before this book even came out there were lots of stories leaked from Prince Harry’s memoir Spare , and the revelations, allegations , and stories have been wild. 

For context, about a week before the book came out, an excerpt from it about the time Prince Harry wore a controversial Nazi uniform to a party went viral. The internet was ablaze with the updated version of this story as Prince Harry explained that William and Kate were involved. Other stories about the two brothers fighting also came up, as well as one story about how Camilla reportedly wanted Catherine to change her name after she married William. In the book, and in interviews Prince Harry has also spoken about his relationship with Camilla, and claimed she “sacrificed” him to the press . Those are only scratching the surface of the stories Prince Harry tells and the claims he makes in Spare . 

However, while the internet is all over these stories and revelations, the critics have now voiced their opinions on the book as a whole. 

What The Critics Think Of Prince Harry’s Spare

The New York Times critic Alexandra Jacobs explained that she wanted to like the memoir, especially since J.R. Moehringer helped write it, and he is a writer she adores. She then wrote that she did end up enjoying parts of it, but did not like others.

Like its author, “Spare” is all over the map — emotionally as well as physically. He does not, in other words, keep it tight.

Over at the BBC , the review has a headline that calls Spare , “the weirdest book ever written by a royal." Sean Coughlan, a royal correspondent, went on to call the book “the longest angry drunk text ever sent.” He also described the “ghost-written” book as a “fast-paced, quickfire account” of Prince Harry’s story, he also noted what he thinks is missing from the memoir:  

What's missing from the book is any sense of awareness of any wider context of the rest of the world outside. It's as if he has been blinded by the paparazzi flashlights.

After this, Coughlan noted that he thinks readers will be irritated by the book’s “self-absorption.” He wrote that while so many stories came out in this book that we’ve never heard before it all might be too much, making the last words of the review “TMI. Too much information…” 

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Your Daily Blend of Entertainment News

Joanne Kaufman at WSJ also talked about the immense detail Prince Harry goes into, noting that his “over-sharing” is a problem in the book. She referenced the frostbitten penis story that both aforementioned journalists also brought up, using the title of the book to make her point, the critic wrote: 

In his score-settling, setting-the-record-straight, ghost-written memoir, “Spare”—perhaps you’ve heard about it, then heard about it some more—Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, spills his tea about his frostbitten penis (spare us), the loss of his virginity (please, spare us) and his copious youthful drug use and alcohol consumption (who would have guessed?).

She also explained an opinion that many on the internet, especially those who criticized the docuseries Harry & Meghan , think, which is: 

What may gall the reader most is the hypocrisy. Harry claims to want privacy, but there he is putting it all out there for Oprah, Anderson and others.

Meanwhile, The Independent gave the book four out of five stars. Lucy Pavia wrote about the uncovering of many new stories, and thought it was well done and “breathtakingly frank.” She explained:

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.

However, at the end of the review, Pavia noted something many critics also pointed out, including Victoria Murphy at Town and Country who wrote:

There is no doubt that Harry’s story is heartbreaking at times and it would be hard to come away from reading Spare without feeling some compassion for him. If you do end up caring about him when you finish this book, you may find yourself turning the last page and hoping that he does not wake up one day and wish he could take it all back.

I’ll leave you with a snippet from Charlotte Higgins review in The Guardian , which explains the mixed opinion many critics have, which includes seriously questioning how much information Prince Harry revealed. She wrote:

Spare is by turns compassion-inducing, frustrating, oddly compelling and absurd. Harry is myopic as he sits at the centre of his truth, simultaneously loathing and locked into the tropes of tabloid storytelling, the style of which his ghostwritten autobiography echoes.

It seems clear that many who reviewed this book are aware of the juxtaposition of Prince Harry wanting to not be the center of attention, but then doing all these interviews and releasing a book. While the reviews all talked about how Spare reveals many interesting unheard stories about the Royal Family, the ones mentioned here also seemed to question how much is too much. 

Spare is now available to read, and you can watch Harry & Meghan with a Netflix subscription . 

Riley Utley is the Weekend Editor at CinemaBlend. She has written for national publications as well as daily and alt-weekly newspapers in Spokane, Washington, Syracuse, New York and Charleston, South Carolina. She graduated with her master’s degree in arts journalism and communications from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. Since joining the CB team she has covered numerous TV shows and movies -- including her personal favorite shows  Ted Lasso  and  The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel . She also has followed and consistently written about everything from Taylor Swift to  Fire Country , and she's enjoyed every second of it.

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SPARE Book Sales: Prince Harry & The NY Times Best-Seller List

SPARE Book Sales: Prince Harry & The NY Times Best-Seller List (By Connie May, MHST) © 2023 All rights reserved.

The big question this month for Authors and Publishers alike, is “how many copies of Prince Harry’s Memoir, SPARE, have sold so far? Across all book formats, e.g. print, audiobooks, and eBooks?” We’ll answer the SPARE book sales question in this article (below) and other FAQs about his book, from a publishing market & book sales perspective.

This article is written for all aspiring and published writers. To help them understand the market. And learn that ‘being exiled’ from a royal post is not necessarily the worst thing that can happen to a person who writes to self-express. .. and who will earn a decent living as a writer.

I’m really amazed at how much Prince Harry (The Duke of Sussex) and his mother are alike. Ignore the crazy media stuff (she tried to do so also). He has a heart, he has past and current pain, he’s human, and he’s letting it all spill out onto the pages of his Memoir. I’ll have much more to say in my upcoming SPARE book review, but for now, here’s another insight into the publishing sector.

But this article is not a book review of SPARE by Prince Harry, it’s a review of book sales figures

I’ll write a book review of SPARE in my next article/blog (so contact us for an update), as I’ll be listening to his Audiobook version on Audible. And bravo that he narrated it himself. A wise move in my opinion.

This article is, instead, a commentary on book sales. Because I’m passionate about helping Authors understand the publishing market in today’s digitally-focused climate, so I write courses, blogs and books on the publishing industry including branding & digital marketing for Authors. I also present on similar topics to Board Members & University Master Degree Students.

Knowledge Authors generally need includes how to sell books. And how an Author’s pre-publishing reputation, along with sustained doses of media attention, can help a book (take SPARE, for example) sell enough copies in a few days to reach the #1 spot in the prestigious New York Times (NY Times) Best Sellers list .

A perfect example of how the publishing industry really works, from my viewpoint, is Prince Harry’s SPARE book sales statistics (Day 1 book sales). Consider that Prince Harry’s Memoir, SPARE, landed in the top #1 place on the NY Times Best Sellers Books list in record time. Hint: it was just released and it isn’t there, yet. Emphasis on ‘yet’ — it’s only the 11th of January 2023. But stay tuned…it won’t be long at all.

As I explain in detail in my 2-part Publishing Course for new & pre-published Authors, he has a really good combination of factors that will sell his books. But for most Authors, it’s not generally that easy to sell books. Nor to reach the New York Times Best Sellers list.

Nor is it easy to garner the kind of sustained media attention that SPARE received prior to, and immediately after, its release.

Or to gain the huge sum of money Penguin Random House reportedly paid Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (Duchess of Sussex), his beloved wife, in their publishing deal.

(Likely enough money to compensate for whatever funding they “lost” (and gained) when they relocated their family to America a few years ago). Refer to the FAQs for the estimated figures of Prince Harry’s publishing deal with Penguin Random House.

Britains & Americans: 1773 Tea vs 2023 Coffees – Resentment lingers

When it comes to the controversies behind their book deal, and SPARE book sales figures, it goes without saying that:

• Relocating to America was much to the distaste of the British population and the rest of the Royal Family.
• The United Kingdom of Great Britain (UK) is a culture where — let’s face it — neither their Royals nor the broader population ever got over things like the 1773 Boston Tea Party rebellion.

Brits have held widespread distaste for Americans, or so it seems, ever since.

• Especially vocal ones, who prefer coffee over tea.
• Or Americans who reject irrelevant suitors from the UK, who later go on to bitch about them despite so few will listen.

Not sparing Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, in the least, and directing much of their distaste for Americans in her direction after the marriage. Extremely poor taste, I agree, but that’s kind of how I think the Brits really feel about Americans in general.

the truth about selling books for most Authors/writers

• For most authors, it’s hard to sell books, let alone reach the NY Times bestsellers list by selling 10,000 books to over a million books (in short order).
• Unless, of course, you have some significant wind gusts behind your sale, like the Author of SPARE
• And like the books written before SPARE, relating to the life of his mother (Diana, Princess of Wales, loved by nearly all, gone too soon, and greatly missed).

Current NY Times Best Sellers List

This snapshot of the ny times best sellers list is about to change with the release of spare..

As everyone who reads books is well aware, Colleen Hoover is a mega-star in the publishing world. But a good-looking Prince is likely about to knock her #1 title off the pole position on the New York Best Sellers list (or at least come second).

There’s only one thing (er…maybe a few things) that will stop that from happening, but we’ll save those for the course. Let’s just say that dishing the media in a book doesn’t always bode well for an Author, and Journalists and other Media people write book reviews…and we’ll leave it at that.

There are actually 3 key factors that help a book like Prince Harry’s book (SPARE) sell over A million Copies.

So what are the 3 things necessary to help a book sell lots of copies, fast , or to reach prestigious best-sellers lists, in my opinion?

• Pre-existing recognition of the Author, the topic, or the book-series
• Well-timed and sustained media attention
• Ongoing public interest in either the Author and/or the book topic or series (an existing fan base, for example, much like what Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, Colleen Hoover, and Lee Childs enjoy)

The latter – ongoing public interest – is generally ‘helped along’ tremendously by global controversy. And by controversy, I mean significant differences in vocalised (or printed) opinions.

Not to mention that the differences of opinion, in this case, exist between a number of very famous personalities. A large majority of the public also seems happy to weigh in (when asked or when drunk at night on Twitter), happily espousing varying opinions on the Royal Family dynamics, and Prince Harry’s publishing approach.

So in this case, the controversy surrounds the opinions (stated or hidden) of the current King of England (King Charles III), and the Queen Consort of the United Kingdom (Camilla Parker Bowles), married to King Charles for over 17 years now. The Author’s own estranged brother (William, Prince of Wales) and wife, Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales. And many others.

Combined, these controversies, and the media attention they generally garner, are the key ingredients helping to ensure Harry’s SPARE book sales reach phenomenal numbers.

Prince Harry Surely Has All Three Essential Ingredients When It Comes To SPARE Book Sales & Reaching The #1 Place On The NY Times Best-Sellers List.

Surely Prince Harry’s book, SPARE, will reach the #1 spot on the NY Times best-sellers list in short succession. By week 2, in my estimate, knocking off Colleen Hoover for a while. Although that’s NO easy feat, even for a good-looking Prince embroiled in controversy with a beautiful wife too ‘American’ to make the British population happy (but then again, very few things generally do).

SPARE will also reach the top book rankings on other best-selling book lists, in my opinion. Because, in addition to the New York Times Best-Sellers list, there are many others: Amazon’s best sellers books lists , the Washington Post’s book tracking listings, Neilsen’s Book tracking, and more (as I noted…stay tuned)!

When it comes to selling millions of copies of a book such as Prince Harry’s SPARE:

• It is more than just the right dose of sustained media attention.
• Being a famous person (not to mention extremely handsome and caring about the world, and so much like his Mum), along with a real-life drama & painful grief behind them, are key features of being able to write a book that reaches the New York Times Best Sellers List.

Certainly being recognised or famous, and getting media attention, have helped many a writer sell a book or 3 million along the way (think Michelle Obama and Barack Obama).

Prince Harry’s book, SPARE, published by Penguin Random House , is no exception.

Note also that the reporting window for the NY Times Best Seller list closes each week at noon on Tuesdays . This strikes me as an intentional marketing & publicity strategy, to maximise a full week of book sales reporting.

FAQs about SPARE by Prince Harry

Who published prince harry’s memoir, spare.

Answer: The memoir, SPARE, was published by Penguin Random House.

Which other Author helped Prince Harry write his book?

Answer: Pulitzer Prize winner J. R. Moehringer (John Joseph Moehringer, born in 1964), an American novelist, journalist, & ghostwriter. 

When was Prince Harry’s book SPARE released for sale?

Answer: SPARE was released to the book sales market in the UK on the 10th of January 2023 (January 10, 2023). That noted, a mishap occurred in Spain, and books were released several days early.

How much is the hardcover Copy of SPARE (price)?

Answer: The retail price for SPARE, as shown on Penguin Random House’s website, is $36 (USD). Other formats will vary (e.g., Audible is typically 1 Credit per book or $19.47 AUD).

How much did Penguin Random House pay to publish SPARE?

Answer: It is estimated that SPARE is part of a 4-book deal Prince Harry made with Penguin Random House, worth somewhere around $20 million to $35 million (likely per book). I’ll update this figure as more information becomes known.

It is debatable at this stage if the Penguin Random House will actually recoup that amount in book sales, but it’s somewhat likely.

According to its publisher, Prince Harry’s Book “SPARE” sold over 400,000 copies on its first day of release (across all formats).

Some critics — of which there are many in the world — claim it was underwhelming, and compared to people like Michelle Obama and J.K. Rowling, perhaps that’s true. But it’s early yet, and I believe his book will sell relatively well and reach the #1 place on the NY Times Best Seller list.

Certainly, the 20,000 or so books of SPARE, targeted for the Australian reading audience (Dymocks order) didn’t jump off the shelves (just yet). Then again, it is January, and everyone is probably watching the Tennis matches preceding the Australian Open .

How many SPARE book copies have been sold so far?

Answer: 400,000 on its first day of release*

SPARE book sales figures in this article will be updated on January 17, 2023.

• As I discuss in detail in my publishing/book marketing for Authors course , it’s the first week of a book’s launch (and the subsequent few months) that determines the book’s success in terms of book sales figures over its lifetime.
• Prince Harry’s book SPARE (a Memoir) reportedly sold over 400,000 copies upon its release.
• This book sales figure was provided by Random House, Prince Harry’s Publishing Group.
• *Official numbers from others with book sales tracking data will emerge in the coming weeks.

Are you a budding Author? Want to understand the publishing industry for people with less fame or recognition? And how to sell more books despite not being a SPARE?

Or perhaps you have too many spare unsold books in your garage, or in boxes under your bed? (Not Harry’s book SPARE, but your own books that you self-published but haven’t managed to distribute)?

Click here to review the course Publishing for Authors , currently in BETA format, to be released on 17 January 2023.

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A summer camp in the Adirondacks. A rich girl gone missing, 14 years after her older brother also disappeared. A prominent local family harboring dark secrets. Liz Moore’s new novel, “The God in the Woods,” turns these elements into a complex and suspenseful meditation on parenting and social class and the rituals of summer friendship: “Those of us with fond memories of summer camp,” Kate Tuttle wrote in her review for us , “will recognize the way campers enter into intense relationships, test themselves against childhood fears and begin to grow into who they’ll become.”

On this week’s podcast, Liz Moore chats with Gilbert Cruz about “The God in the Woods” and discusses, among other things, how she plots a mystery without an outline. “Every time I write, I convince myself that I can’t possibly stick the landing and that I’ve written myself into a corner,” Moore says. “But the only constant that I take from novel to novel is that I always have that feeling at various times, and that I can go back to the most recent fork in the road and just take the other fork for a while. Usually that leads me to some other path that feels better.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected] .