A six-part Netflix series, a tell-all Oprah interview, four tell-even-more primetime-television interviews and now this 416-page memoir, Spare. After all of that, are we any closer to knowing who Prince Harry really is?
The answer depends on which version of the British royal you’re talking about, because there are quite a few. Some who make cameos here include Harry Windsor, Capt Wales, Harold, Spike, Henry Charles Albert David, Haz.
There is the blokish, bellowing Sloane, who loves rugby, beer and pranks but has little time for books or literature, with the exception of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, yet was vaguely resentful to have been described by his father, King Charles, as “not the family scholar”.
There’s romantic Haz, the adoring husband to Meghan, who is capable of such lines as “Why should beauty feel like a punch in the throat?“ Looking at her photograph for the first time, he muses, “She believed that life was one grand adventure. I could see that. What a privilege it would be to join her on that journey. I got all of that from her face.” (Even more impressively, he got all of that from an Instagram reel in which her face was hidden behind a virtual dog’s ears, nose and long red tongue.)
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There’s the barefoot mystic Spike, happiest hopping into a safari Jeep in Botswana or jumping naked into a freezing Scottish lake, having first serenaded its resident seals. There’s the party animal who ended up taking magic-mushroom chocolates during a get-together at Courteney Cox’s house. There’s the virtual agoraphobic, who watched Friends obsessively, dried his damp laundry on radiators and did his own shopping in panicky late-night forays to the supermarket. There’s Capt Wales, the dedicated army man. There’s the prisoner in the gilded cage, trapped in “this surreal state, 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 travelled on the Underground”.
Harry recounts how William tried again and again to get him to talk about their mother. But he couldn’t. ‘Being so obtuse, so emotionally unavailable, wasn’t a choice I made. I simply wasn’t capable. I wasn’t close to ready’
The most touching manifestation is Charles’s “darling boy”, the 12-year-old who never recovered from his mother’s death – in fact, he only recently even acknowledged the truth of it to himself. It becomes abundantly clear here, if there was any doubt, that in his mind the paparazzi literally chased Diana to her grave and that he truly believes he had no choice but to flee Britain or risk losing Meghan to the same fate. This Harry is stuck in 1997 – not able to cry, not able to get the help he needs, not able to move forward, desperate to rescue his wife in part because he couldn’t rescue his mother.
Harry doesn’t really seem to know which version of himself he most wants to be; the only thing he is certain of is that he no longer wants to be the name plastered across the cover, above the portrait of him glowering intensely in the Californian sun. He doesn’t want to give up the title, but he doesn’t want to be a prince. He no longer desires any part of an institution or a life he has grown to detest.
Given all this conflict, the memoir could have ended up falling somewhere between a therapy session, a late-night outburst in the family WhatsApp group, and a submission to the Workplace Relations Commission.
That would be to sell it short, however. It is far, far better than that. It rollicks along, fuelled by just enough impactful emotional detail and gossipy insight into a profoundly weird family. As a memoir, it is superbly well executed. His ghostwriter is the renowned JR Moehringer, described as a “collaborator and friend, confessor and sometime sparring partner”.
Moehringer gets around the challenge of Harry’s poor memory for dialogue and people – not to mention the fact that he was drunk, high on cocaine or tripping on magic mushrooms during a few key episodes – by making the most of his vivid recollection of spaces and places. The constant presence of drivers and security details and bodyguards and PR teams gives it a thrillingly claustrophobic feel.
Although the literary fluency is Moehringer’s, the emotion is all Harry’s. It is in its most poignant passages – often also its tersest – that the memoir really comes to life. Harry recounts how William tried again and again to get him to talk about “that taboo subject” their mother. But he couldn’t. “Being so obtuse, so emotionally unavailable, wasn’t a choice I made. I simply wasn’t capable. I wasn’t close to ready.”
The prince himself may have no literary aspirations, but he does appear to make the odd foray into BrainyQuote.com. “Things like chronology and cause-and-effect are often just fables we tell ourselves about the past. ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’,” he writes, immediately pivoting into a voice that sounds more authentically his. “When I discovered that quotation not long ago on BrainyQuote.com, I was thunderstruck. I thought, Who the fook is Faulkner?”
There’s more than a hint of irony in the fact that Harry’s desire to set the record straight means he ends up confirming more than a few stories that might otherwise have been written off as the fevered imaginings of Fleet Street editors
Ultimately, you can’t help feeling it’s a pity he never came across another BrainyQuote favourite of life coaches and Instagram influencers: the best revenge is living well. Because for someone #blessed with so much – a wife he plainly worships; two lovely, healthy children; abundant wealth; pals like Elton John and Tyler Perry ready to swoop in and rescue him with a private jet here or luxury villa there when the going gets really tough – the Harry who mostly dominates is the least likable version of himself. He too often succumbs into sullen, resentful, entitled spare.
It has been observed more than a few times this week that, for someone who hates newspapers and journalists as much as he (repeatedly, exhaustively and, eventually, boringly) claims to, nobody has hoovered up more of the words written about Prince Harry than the prince himself. So comprehensive is his survey of all the available material that the memoir sometimes sounds like a media-studies thesis. “Notably, it was around this time that the super-narrative embedded within each story began to shift,” he writes at one point. Later: “I spent hours glued to my phone and the internet, monitoring the fallout.”
When he’s not obsessively tracking his mentions, he is locked into what he calls the sibling Olympiad with William, or feeling sore about his rank in the family pecking order. The Harry who sulks over being given “a mini room in a narrow back corridor, among the offices of Palace staff”, over Christmas at the Sandringham “Hotel Granny” needs to have a talk with himself.
[ Prince Harry: The most revealing quotes from his TV interviewOpens in new window ]
There are so many layers of irony to this whole enterprise that it is hard to know where to begin unravelling them. He insists he hates the press and the toxic media landscape – yet his solution is to ensure that barely a day goes by in which he and Meghan are not the subject of a global media frenzy. He loathes attention but doesn’t know how to exist without it. He craves independence but flies into a panic when the palace actually cuts him off. He is furious about his family’s treatment of Meghan but has no qualms about giving Camilla a kicking or dispensing with any vestiges of loyalty to Kate, whom he once saw as a sister.
There’s more than a hint of irony, too, in the fact that his desire to set the record straight means he ends up confirming more than a few stories that might otherwise have been written off as the fevered imaginings of Fleet Street editors. Palace staff did sometimes cry, he acknowledges, in a section that is dedicated to tackling the “Duchess Difficult” label foisted on Meghan but somehow ends up consolidating the image. Yes, Meghan and Kate did fall out, he concedes, though the exact nature of their grievance is never clear. A misunderstanding about fashion designers? A “hurtful” comment about baby brain and hormones? The row over the alterations to Princess Charlotte’s dress? Whatever it was, it really should have stayed in the family WhatsApp group.
The memoir begins with William and Charles, or “Pa”, insisting to Harry that they don’t get it, that they don’t understand why he felt he had to leave. “Pa? Willy? World? Here you go,” he writes. More than 400 pages later there surely is nothing left to know. We’ve learned about the frostbitten penis, the sibling rivalry, the crippling panic attacks, the rows with his neighbour about parking, the little notes his father used to leave on his pillow, the undercover excursions to TK Maxx, even how he felt alone in bed, “skin-to-skin” with Meghan, when she said she had never been more in love with him.
And yet the biggest questions haven’t been answered. Is it any clearer to anybody why Harry felt he had to do this, or what he ultimately hopes to get from it? Near the end of the book he asks, rhetorically, “When is someone in this family going to break free and live?” You can’t help feeling that ‘free’ doesn’t mean what he thinks it means. Even now, free at last to live a life of luxury and endless Netflix deals, he seems to spend much of his time carefully nurturing his grievances, as though his resentments are rare horticultural specimens that require constant feeding and vigilant attention.
