Excerpt:
Whatever you might have already heard about a frostbitten penis and a prince-on-prince physical confrontation, the most revealing chapter in Prince Harry’s new memoir, “Spare,” is one that book critics have largely ignored.
The passages I’m talking about occur shortly after Harry and Meghan’s nuptials. In Harry’s telling, wedding-planning chaos caused a bad rift between them and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Harry’s brother and sister-in-law. The foursome sit down to hash it out, and Harry invites the reader to listen in on everyone’s perceived slights. Did troubles start when William and Kate allegedly switched their seats at Harry and Meghan’s reception without permission (William and Kate denied)? What about when Meghan explained away Kate’s momentary forgetfulness as “baby brain” — she’d recently given birth — which Kate found offensive and also too personal? Did the troubles start earlier than that, when Kate thought Meghan was asking for her connections in the fashion world (Meghan denied) or when Meghan asked to borrow Kate’s lip gloss?
Reading this chapter is fascinating for a couple of reasons. First, because … what? These are not reasons for four grown adults to commence a family estrangement; these are reasons for a quick apology text thread with a couple of prayer-hand emoji. Second, because Harry’s choice to memorialize this trivial conversation in a permanent public record is a window into his mindset when he wrote the book — a mindset that is in turn likable, naive, tortured, tender and resentful. The book, at heart, is a psychological study of an earnest, wounded man, and this passage feels like we’re getting to the bottom of things. The memoirist is scraping an almost-empty peanut butter jar with a spatula for just one more sandwich.
“Spare” leaves no morsel unused, no dollop unsmeared. Harry left his official position in the royal family nearly three years ago and has spent the ensuing time trying to make sense of what happened. He talked to Oprah. He and Meghan made a Netflix series; Meghan made a podcast. He’s gotten therapy, he’s tried meditation, he’s turned to Tyler Perry, and now he’s written this: more than 400 pages of catharsis, recounting every ache, every slight, every feeling of self-doubt, big or little, recent or ancient about his transactional family and the life he never asked for. He’s purged. He’s processed. He’s come to terms with himself, or at least he believes he has, and at least we hope he’s right. Whatever other projects he might have in mind, this jar is empty. It is finished....
At one point in the book, Harry tells his therapist that he has no addictions, and she corrects him that it’s obvious he has one: the press, which has made his life misery. He can’t stop reading it or ranting about it.
And now he hasn’t been able to stop producing it, either: narratives that he obviously views as correcting the record but which end up raising questions with answers Harry might not be prepared to give. If, as he spends the book insisting, all he and Meghan ever wanted was domestic simplicity — tatty sofas, Ikea lamps — then why, upon leaving the family, did they buy a $15 million house?
It is possible that what they both need now, desperately, is to try to disappear and live a normal life. It is possible that, at this juncture and with their history, they don’t know how.
I’ve always considered myself solidly team Megxit, but halfway through “Spare” — after also consuming every minute of the Netflix series, the Oprah interview, the podcast — it became clear to me that we were dealing with a both/and situation:
It is possible for Harry and Meghan to be both morally, factually and ethically correct about their mistreatment at the hands of the royal family and the British press, and also for them to be wearisome. To themselves, to us.
Here was a boy whose trauma was both universal and specific, and who now cannot stop spilling over with all the emotions that he’d spent a lifetime learning to repress. Who is desperate to make sure we fully understand what he went through, the cumulative effect of it. To bring us into the room where his wife and his sister-in-law argued about fashion contacts and seating charts, when none of this was really about fashion contacts and seating charts, it was about two brothers who had never been given the emotional vocabulary to deal with the traumas in their lives and were trying hard to protect their wives in a way nobody had ever protected their mother.
I mean it in the kindest possible way when I say I hope Prince Harry does not feel the need to tell us this story again. The jar is empty. Anything else that comes out doesn’t feel like narrative, it just feels like pain.
Guardian Review:
"One of the few good decisions that Prince Harry has made in the last five turbulent years was to take George Clooney’s advice and hire a ghostwriter as skilled as the novelist JR Moehringer.
Spare is gripping in its ability to channel Harry’s unresolved emotional pain, his panicky, blinkered drive, his improbably winning rapscallion voice, and his skewed, conflicted worldview. Best of all, Moehringer knows how to drill down into scattered memories and extract the critical details that make this hyper-personal chronicle an unexpected literary success.
Who will forget the scene of monarch and grandson grasping dead pheasants, “their bodies still warm through my gloves” after a Sandringham shoot, confronting each other as she tries to escape in her Range Rover from what she knows is coming. “I’ve been told that, er, that I have to ask your permission to propose [to Meghan],” Harry mumbles. “Well then,” replies her majesty, “I suppose I have to say yes.” It’s one of the joys of this memoir that Harry is still puzzling over her answer.
“Was she being sarcastic? Ironic? Was she indulging in a bit of wordplay?” One imagines that gingery face screwed up in a knot of incomprehension that no sentient reader shares about what the queen actually meant."
Other Reviews:
NYT: Coverage & commentary
Guardian: Review (EXCERPT ABOVE)
Guardian: Satire review Coverage from the brilliant satirist John Crace
New Yorker: New Yorker Review