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Prince Harry Learns to Cry, and Takes No Prisoners, in ‘Spare’

At once emotional and embittered, the royal memoir is mired in a paradox: drawing endless attention in an effort to renounce fame.

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By Alexandra Jacobs

SPARE, by Prince Harry

Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and Man About Montecito, isn’t one for book learning, he reminds readers of his new memoir, “Spare.” And yet its pages are dappled with literary references, from John Steinbeck (“He kept it tight,” the prince writes admiringly of “Of Mice and Men”); to William Faulkner, whose line from “Requiem for a Nun” about the past never being dead, nor even past, he discovers on BrainyQuote.com; to Wordsworth and other poets. Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” though, hit a little too close to home. “Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper…?” Harry writes. “No, thank you.”

He prefers to sink into TV comedies like “Family Guy,” where he admires Stewie, the unnervingly mature baby, and “Friends,” where he identifies with the tortured Chandler Bing. Reading “Spare,” though, one kind of wants to snatch the remote control from his hands and press into them a copy of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.” Not because of Harry’s military endeavors (unlike Yossarian, he seems to have felt sane only in active combat) but 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 cushioned chairs opposite Oprah and Anderson Cooper . With “Harry & Meghan,” the gauzy Netflix series preceding this book, he and the Duchess now might well be overexposed . (Maybe this is part of the grand plan, to drive away inquiring minds by boring them to bits?)

My interest in the English royal family tends to dwindle after the era of previous renouncers like Edward and Wallis and the dynamically dysfunctional Princess Margaret, who “could kill a houseplant with one scowl,” Harry writes. They weren’t close; Margaret once gave him a cheap pen wrapped with a rubber fish for Christmas. I devoured early episodes of “ The Crown ” but Season 5, with its focus on Charles and Diana’s marital troubles, left me delicately yawning.

Still, I expected to enjoy “Spare,” given that it was written with the help of the talented author J.R. Moehringer, whose own memoir, “ The Tender Bar, ” I adored before it was even a glimmer in Ben Affleck’s eye , and who helped the tennis star Andre Agassi’s autobiography, “Open,” transcend the locker room. And I did. In parts.

“Spare” — its title as minimalist as Agassi’s; its cover a similar full-frontal stare — is a thing of many parts, of shreds and patches, of bitter gibes (particularly at Harry’s older brother, William, the “heir” to his “spare,” whom he calls “Willy”) and sustained existential crisis. Its basic three-act structure of childhood, Army service and wedded bliss is as subdivided as a California lot into shorter episodes and paragraphs, many only one sentence long.

Harry’s distinctly English voice (he doesn’t like kilts, for example, because of “that worrisome knife in your sock and that breeze up your arse”) at times does weird battle with the staccato patois of a tough-talking private eye doing voice-over in a film noir. Describing his “Gan-Gan” at Balmoral: “She wore blue, I recall, all blue … Blue was her favorite color.” Then, like a gun moll, the Queen Mother orders a martini.

If there’s a murder Harry is trying to solve, it’s of course that of his own mother, Princess Diana, whose death in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in 1997 , under chase by paparazzi, is the defining tragedy of his life, and thus of this book. To her younger son, only 12 at the time, the click of cameras wielded by paps, as he derisively calls them, came to sound “like a gun cocking or a blade being notched open.” (From the looks of “Harry & Meghan,” which has plenty of sanctioned shots of the couple’s courtship and toddlers, he is fighting back by hand with his own iPhone.) Diana defended herself against the constant onslaught of photographers by lobbing water balloons and, more sinisterly, by hiding in the trunks of getaway cars, a trick Harry eventually picked up. “It felt like being in a coffin,” he writes. “I didn’t care.”

Mired in a “red mist” of grief and anger, the prince self-medicates at first with candy and then, as the hated tabloids report with varying degrees of accuracy, alcohol, weed, cocaine, mushrooms and ayahuasca. (More mildly he tries magnesium supplements, and I’m not sure anyone needs to know that this loosened his bowels at a friend’s wedding.)

Along with Harry’s deployment to Afghanistan — where, he observes, “you can’t kill people if you think of them as people” — he escapes repeatedly to Africa, whose lions seem less threatening than the journalistic predators at home. In one of the book’s cringier moments, he writes that Willy, who calls him Harold though his given name is Henry, stamps his foot over choosing the continent as a cause. “Africa was his thing,” Harry explains, mimicking his brother’s petulant tone. “ I let you have veterans, why can’t you let me have African elephants and rhinos ?”

Cattily he notes Willy’s “alarming baldness, more advanced than my own,” while dinging the Princess of Wales for being slow to share her lip gloss . Candidly he shows the then-Prince Charles doing headstands in his boxer shorts and his family’s charade of an annual performance review: the Court Circular.

Like its author, “Spare” is all over the map — emotionally as well as physically. He does not, in other words, keep it tight. Harry is frank and funny when his penis gets frostbitten after a trip to the North Pole — “my South Pole was on the fritz” — leaving him a “eunuch” just before William marries Kate Middleton. In an odd feat of projection, he gives the groom an ermine thong at the reception, then applies to his own nether regions the Elizabeth Arden cream that his mother used as lip gloss — “‘weird’ doesn’t really do the feeling justice” — and worries that “my todger would be all over the front pages” before finding a discreet dermatologist.

Therapy, in which he claims William refuses to participate, and a whiff of First by Van Cleef & Arpels, help Harry learn to cry, unlocking a stream of repressed recollections of Diana, and that’s when even the most hardened reader might herself weep. Charles’s own scent, Dior’s Eau Sauvage, and his marriage to Camilla, leave him relatively cold.

And yet when his father advises of the unrelenting and often racist press coverage of Harry’s union to Meghan — “Don’t read it, darling boy” — it’s difficult not to agree. The prince claims to have a spotty memory — “a defense mechanism, most likely” — but doesn’t appear to have forgotten a single line ever printed about him and his wife, and the last section of his tell-all degenerates into a tiresome back-and-forth about who’s leaking what and why. Maybe a little more Faulkner and less Fleet Street would be helpful here?

Still bitter over the late author Hilary Mantel, unnamed here, comparing the royal family to pandas — “uniquely barbarous” and dehumanizing, he writes, while admitting “we did live in a zoo” — Harry then turns right around and calls three courtiers the Bee, the Fly and the Wasp. He seems both driven mad by “the buzz,” as the royals’ inexhaustible chronicler Tina Brown would call it, and constitutionally unable to stop drumming it up.

SPARE | By Prince Harry | 407 pp. | Illustrated | Random House | $36

Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010. More about Alexandra Jacobs

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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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Notes from Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter

By J. R. Moehringer

I was exasperated with Prince Harry. My head was pounding, my jaw was clenched, and I was starting to raise my voice. And yet some part of me was still able to step outside the situation and think, This is so weird . I’m shouting at Prince Harry. Then, as Harry started going back at me, as his cheeks flushed and his eyes narrowed, a more pressing thought occurred: Whoa, it could all end right here.

This was the summer of 2022. For two years, I’d been the ghostwriter on Harry’s memoir, “ Spare ,” and now, reviewing his latest edits in a middle-of-the-night Zoom session, we’d come to a difficult passage. Harry, at the close of gruelling military exercises in rural England, gets captured by pretend terrorists. It’s a simulation, but the tortures inflicted upon Harry are very real. He’s hooded, dragged to an underground bunker, beaten, frozen, starved, stripped, forced into excruciating stress positions by captors wearing black balaclavas. The idea is to find out if Harry has the toughness to survive an actual capture on the battlefield. (Two of his fellow-soldiers don’t; they crack.) At last, Harry’s captors throw him against a wall, choke him, and scream insults into his face, culminating in a vile dig at—Princess Diana?

Even the fake terrorists engrossed in their parts, even the hard-core British soldiers observing from a remote location, seem to recognize that an inviolate rule has been broken. Clawing that specific wound, the memory of Harry’s dead mother, is out of bounds. When the simulation is over, one of the participants extends an apology.

Harry always wanted to end this scene with a thing he said to his captors, a comeback that struck me as unnecessary, and somewhat inane. Good for Harry that he had the nerve, but ending with what he said would dilute the scene’s meaning: that even at the most bizarre and peripheral moments of his life, his central tragedy intrudes. For months, I’d been crossing out the comeback, and for months Harry had been pleading for it to go back in. Now he wasn’t pleading, he was insisting, and it was 2 A.M. , and I was starting to lose it. I said, “Dude, we’ve been over this.”

Why was this one line so important? Why couldn’t he accept my advice? We were leaving out a thousand other things—that’s half the art of memoir, leaving stuff out—so what made this different? Please, I said, trust me. Trust the book.

Although this wasn’t the first time that Harry and I had argued, it felt different; it felt as if we were hurtling toward some kind of decisive rupture, in part because Harry was no longer saying anything. He was just glaring into the camera. Finally, he exhaled and calmly explained that, all his life, people had belittled his intellectual capabilities, and this flash of cleverness proved that, even after being kicked and punched and deprived of sleep and food, he had his wits about him.

“Oh,” I said. “O.K.” It made sense now. But I still refused.

Because, I told him, everything you just said is about you. You want the world to know that you did a good job, that you were smart. But, strange as it may seem, memoir isn’t about you. It’s not even the story of your life. It’s a story carved from your life, a particular series of events chosen because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range of people, and at this point in the story those people don’t need to know anything more than that your captors said a cruel thing about your mom.

Harry looked down. A long time. Was he thinking? Seething? Should I have been more diplomatic? Should I have just given in? I imagined I’d be thrown off the book soon after sunup. I could almost hear the awkward phone call with Harry’s agent, and I was sad. Never mind the financial hit—I was focussed on the emotional shock. All the time, the effort, the intangibles I’d invested in Harry’s memoir, in Harry, would be gone just like that.

After what seemed like an hour, Harry looked up, and we locked eyes. “O.K.,” he said.

“Yes. I get it.”

“Thank you, Harry,” I said, relieved.

He shot me a mischievous grin. “I really enjoy getting you worked up like that.”

I burst into laughter and shook my head, and we moved on to his next set of edits.

Later that morning, after a few hours of sleep, I sat outside worrying. (Mornings are my worry time, along with afternoons and evenings.) I didn’t worry so much about the propriety of arguing with princes, or even the risks. One of a ghostwriter’s main jobs is having a big mouth. You win some, you lose most, but you have to keep pushing, not unlike a demanding parent or a tyrannical coach. Otherwise, you’re nothing but a glorified stenographer, and that’s disloyalty to the author, to the book—to books. Opposition is true Friendship, William Blake wrote, and if I had to choose a ghostwriting credo, that would be it.

No, rather than the rightness of going after Harry, I was questioning the heat with which I’d done so. I scolded myself: It’s not your comeback. It’s not your mother. For the thousandth time in my ghostwriting career, I reminded myself: It’s not your effing book.

Some days, the phone doesn’t stop. Ghostwriters in distress. They ask for ten minutes, half an hour. A coffee date.

“My author can’t remember squat.”

“My author and I have come to despise each other.”

“I can’t get my author to call me back—is it normal for a ghost to get ghosted?”

At the outset, I do what ghostwriters do. I listen. And eventually, after the callers talk themselves out, I ask a few gentle questions. The first (aside from “How did you get this number?”) is always: How bad do you want it? Because things can go sideways in a hurry. An author might know nothing about writing, which is why he hired a ghost. But he may also have the literary self-confidence of Saul Bellow, and good luck telling Saul Bellow that he absolutely may not describe an interesting bowel movement he experienced years ago, as I once had to tell an author. So fight like crazy, I say, but always remember that if push comes to shove no one will have your back. Within the text and without, no one wants to hear from the dumb ghostwriter.

I try not to sound didactic. A lot of what I’ve read about ghostwriting, much of it from accomplished ghostwriters, doesn’t square with my experience. Recording the author? Terrible idea—it makes many authors feel as if they’re being deposed. Dressing like the author? It’s a memoir, not a masquerade party. The ghostwriter for Julian Assange wrote twenty-five thousand words about his methodology , and it sounded to me like Elon Musk on mushrooms—on Mars. That same ghost, however, published a review of “ Spare ” describing Harry as “ off his royal tits ” and me as going “all Sartre or Faulkner,” so what do I know? Who am I to offer rules? Maybe the alchemy of each ghost-author pairing is unique.

Therefore, I simply remind the callers that ghostwriting is an art and urge them not to let those who cast it as hacky, shady, or faddish (it’s been around for thousands of years) dim their pride. I also tell them that they’re providing a vital public service, helping to shore up the publishing industry, since most of the titles on this week’s best-seller list were written by someone besides the named author.

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Signing off, the callers usually sigh and say thanks and grumble something like “Well, whatever happens, I’m never doing this again.” And I tell them yes, they will, and wish them luck.

How does a person even become a ghostwriter? What’s the path into a profession for which there is no school or certification, and to which no one actually aspires? You never hear a kid say, “One day, I want to write other people’s books.” And yet I think I can detect some hints, some foreshadowing in my origins.

When I was growing up in Manhasset, New York, people would ask: Where’s your dad? My typical answer was an embarrassed shrug. Beats me. My old man wasn’t around, that’s all I knew, all any grownup had the heart to tell me. And yet he was also everywhere. My father was a well-known rock-and-roll d.j., so his Sam Elliott basso profundo was like the Long Island Rail Road, rumbling in the distance at maddeningly regular intervals.

Every time I caught his show, I’d feel confused, empty, sad, but also amazed at how much he had to say. The words, the jokes, the patter—it didn’t stop. Was it my Oedipal counterstrike to fantasize an opposite existence, one in which I just STFU? Less talking, more listening, that was my basic life plan at age ten. In Manhasset, an Irish-Italian enclave, I was surrounded by professional listeners: bartenders and priests. Neither of those careers appealed to me, so I waited, and one afternoon found myself sitting with a cousin at the Squire theatre, in Great Neck, watching a matinée of “All the President’s Men.” Reporters seemed to do nothing but listen. Then they got to turn what they heard into stories, which other people read—no talking required. Sign me up.

My first job out of college was at the New York Times . When I wasn’t fetching coffee and corned beef, I was doing “legwork,” which meant running to a fire, a trial, a murder scene, then filing a memo back to the newsroom. The next morning, I’d open the paper and see my facts, maybe my exact words, under someone else’s name. I didn’t mind; I hated my name. I was born John Joseph Moehringer, Jr., and Senior was M.I.A. Not seeing my name, his name, wasn’t a problem. It was a perk.

Many days at the Times , I’d look around the newsroom, with its orange carpet and pipe-puffing lifers and chattering telex machines, and think, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. And then the editors suggested I go somewhere else.

I went west. I got a job at the Rocky Mountain News , a tabloid founded in 1859. Its first readers were the gold miners panning the rivers and creeks of the Rockies, and though I arrived a hundred and thirty-one years later, the paper still read as if it were written for madmen living alone in them thar hills. The articles were thumb-length, the fact checking iffy, and the newsroom mood, many days, bedlam. Some oldsters were volubly grumpy about being on the back slopes of middling careers, others were blessed with unjustified swagger, and a few were dangerously loose cannons. (I’ll never forget the Sunday morning our religion writer, in his weekly column, referred to St. Joseph as “Christ’s stepdad.” The phones exploded.) The general lack of quality control made the paper a playground for me. I was able to go slow, learn from mistakes without being defined by them, and build up rudimentary skills, like writing fast.

What I did best, I discovered, was write for others. The gossip columnist spent most nights in downtown saloons, hunting for scoops, and some mornings he’d shuffle into the newsroom looking rough. One morning, he fixed his red eyes on me, gestured toward his notes, and rasped, “Would you?” I sat at his desk and dashed off his column in twenty minutes. What a rush. Writing under no name was safe; writing under someone else’s name (and picture) was hedonic—a kind of hiding and seeking. Words had never come easy for me, but, when I wrote as someone else, the words, the jokes, the patter—it didn’t stop.

In the fall of 2006, my phone rang. Unknown number. But I instantly recognized the famously soft voice: for two decades, he’d loomed over the tennis world. Now, on the verge of retiring, he told me that he was decompressing from the emotions of the moment by reading my memoir, “ The Tender Bar, ” which had recently been published. It had him thinking about writing his own. He wondered if I’d come talk to him about it. A few weeks later, we met at a restaurant in his home town, Las Vegas.

Andre Agassi and I were very different, but our connection was instant. He had an eighth-grade education but a profound respect for people who read and write books. I had a regrettably short sporting résumé (my Little League fastball was unhittable) but deep reverence for athletes. Especially the solitaries: tennis players, prizefighters, matadors, who possess that luminous charisma which comes from besting opponents single-handedly. But Andre didn’t want to talk about that. He hated tennis, he said. He wanted to talk about memoir. He had a list of questions. He asked why my memoir was so confessional. I told him that’s how you know you can trust an author—if he’s willing to get raw.

He asked why I’d organized my memoir around other people, rather than myself. I told him that was the kind of memoir I admired. There’s so much power to be gained, and honesty to be achieved, from taking an ostensibly navel-gazing genre and turning the gaze outward. Frank McCourt had a lot of feelings about his brutal Irish childhood, but he kept most of them to himself, focussing instead on his Dad, his Mam, his beloved siblings, the neighbors down the lane.

“I am a part of all that I have met.” It might’ve been that first night, or another, but at some point I shared that line from Tennyson, and Andre loved it. The same almost painful gratitude that I felt toward my mother, and toward my bartender uncle and his barfly friends, who helped her raise me, Andre felt for his trainer and his coach, and for his wife, Stefanie Graf.

But how, he asked, do you write about other people without invading their privacy? That’s the ultimate challenge, I said. I sought permission from nearly everyone I wrote about, and shared early drafts, but sometimes people aren’t speaking to you, and sometimes they’re dead. Sometimes, in order to tell the truth, you simply can’t avoid hurting someone’s feelings. It goes down easier, I said, if you’re equally unsparing about yourself.

He asked if I’d help him do it. I gave him a soft no. I liked his enthusiasm, his boldness—him. But I’d never imagined myself writing someone else’s book, and I already had a job. By now, I’d left the Rocky Mountain News and joined the Los Angeles Times . I was a national correspondent, doing long-form journalism, which I loved. Alas, the Times was about to change. A new gang of editors had come in, and not long after my dinner with Andre they let it be known that the paper would no longer prioritize long-form journalism.

Apart from a beef with my bosses, and apart from the money (Andre was offering a sizable bump from my reporter salary), what finally made me change my no to a yes, put my stuff into storage, and move to Vegas was the sense that Andre was suffering an intense and specific ache that I might be able to cure. He wanted to tell his story and didn’t know how; I’d been there. I’d struggled for years to tell my story.

Every attempt failed, and every failure took a heavy psychic toll. Some days, it felt like a physical blockage, and to this day I believe my story would’ve remained stuck inside me forever if not for one editor at the Times , who on a Sunday afternoon imparted some thunderbolt advice about memoir that steered me onto the right path. I wanted to give Andre that same grace.

Shortly before I moved to Vegas, a friend invited me to a fancy restaurant in the Phoenix suburbs for a gathering of sportswriters covering the 2008 Super Bowl. As the menus were being handed around, my friend clinked a knife against his glass and announced, “O.K., listen up! Moehringer here has been asked by Agassi to ghostwrite his—”

“Exactly. We’ve all done our share of these fucking things—”

Louder groans.

“Right! Our mission is not to leave this table until we’ve convinced this idiot to tell Agassi not just no but hell no.”

At once, the meal turned into a raucous meeting of Ghostwriters Anonymous. Everyone had a hard-luck story about being disrespected, dismissed, shouted at, shoved aside, abused in a hilarious variety of ways by an astonishing array of celebrities, though I mostly remember the jocks. The legendary basketball player who wouldn’t come to the door for his first appointment with his ghost, then appeared for the second buck naked. The hockey great with the personality of a hockey stick, who had so few thoughts about his time on this planet, so little interest in his own book, that he gave his ghost an epic case of writer’s block. The notorious linebacker who, days before his memoir was due to the publisher, informed his ghost that the co-writing credit would go to his psychotherapist.

Between gasping and laughing, I asked the table, “Why do they do it? Why do they treat ghostwriters so badly?” I was bombarded with theories.

Authors feel ashamed about needing someone to write their story, and that shame makes them behave in shameful ways.

Authors think they could write the book themselves, if only they had time, so they resent having to pay you to do it.

Authors spend their lives safeguarding their secrets, and now you come along with your little notebook and pesky questions and suddenly they have to rip back the curtain? Boo.

But if all authors treat all ghosts badly, I wondered, and if it’s not your book in the first place, why not cash the check and move on? Why does it hurt so much? I don’t recall anyone having a good answer for that.

“Please,” I said to Andre, “don’t give me a story to tell at future Super Bowls.” He grinned and said he’d do his best. He did better than that. In two years of working together, we never exchanged a harsh word, not even when he felt my first draft needed work.

Maybe the Germans have a term for it, the particular facial expression of someone reading something about his life that’s even the tiniest bit wrong. Schaudergesicht ? I saw that look on Andre’s face, and it made me want to lie down on the floor. But, unlike me, he didn’t overreact. He knew that putting a first serve into the net is no big deal. He made countless fixes, and I made fixes to his fixes, and together we made ten thousand more, and in time we arrived at a draft that satisfied us both. The collaboration was so close, so synchronous, you’d have to call the eventual voice of the memoir a hybrid—though it’s all Andre. That’s the mystic paradox of ghostwriting: you’re inherent and nowhere; vital and invisible. To borrow an image from William Gass, you’re the air in someone else’s trumpet.

“ Open ,” by Andre Agassi, was published on November 9, 2009. Andre was pleased, reviewers were complimentary, and I soon had offers to ghost other people’s memoirs. Before deciding what to do next, I needed to get away, clear my head. I went to the Green Mountains. For two days, I drove around, stopped at wayside meadows, sat under trees and watched the clouds—until one late afternoon I began feeling unwell. I bought some cold medicine, pulled into the first bed-and-breakfast I saw, and climbed into bed. Hand-sewn quilt under my chin, I switched on the TV. There was Andre, on a late-night talk show.

The host was praising “ Open ,” and Agassi was being his typical charming, humble self. Now the host was praising the writing. Agassi continued to be humble. Thank you, thank you. But I dared to hope he might mention . . . me? An indefensible, illogical hope: Andre had asked me to put my name on the cover, and I’d declined. Nevertheless, right before zonking out, I started muttering at the TV, “Say my name.” I got a bit louder. “Say my name!” I got pretty rowdy. “Say my fucking name!”

Seven hours later, I stumbled downstairs to the breakfast room and caught a weird vibe. Guests stared. Several peered over my shoulder to see who was with me. What the? I sat alone, eating some pancakes, until I got it. The bed-and-breakfast had to be three hundred years old, with walls made of pre-Revolutionary cardboard—clearly every guest had heard me. Say my name!

I took it as a lesson. NyQuil was to blame, but also creeping narcissism. The gods were admonishing me: You can’t be Mister Rogers while ghosting the book and John McEnroe when it’s done. I drove away from Vermont with newfound clarity. I’m not cut out for this ghostwriting thing. I needed to get back to my first love, journalism, and to writing my own books.

During the next year or so, I freelanced for magazines while making notes for a novel. Then once more to the wilderness. I rented a tiny cabin in the far corner of nowhere and, for a full winter, rarely left. No TV, no radio, no Wi-Fi. For entertainment, I listened to the silver foxes screaming at night in a nearby forest, and I read dozens of books. But mostly I sat before the woodstove and tried to inhabit the minds of my characters. The novel was historical fiction, based on the decades-long crime spree of America’s most prolific bank robber, but also based on my disgust with the bankers who had recently devastated the global financial system. In real life, my bank-robbing protagonist wrote a memoir, with a ghostwriter, which was full of lies or delusions. I thought it might be fascinating to override that memoir with solid research, overwrite the ghostwriter, and become, in effect, the ghostwriter of the ghostwriter of a ghost.

I gave everything I had to that novel , but when it was published, in 2012, it got mauled by an influential critic. The review was then instantly tweeted by countless humanitarians, often with sidesplitting commentary like “Ouch.” I was on book tour at the time and read the review in a pitch-dark hotel room knowing full well what it meant: the book was stillborn. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t stand. Part of me wanted to never leave that room. Part of me never did.

I barely slept or ate for months. My savings ran down. Occasionally, I’d take on a freelance assignment, profile an athlete for a magazine, but mostly I was in hibernation. Then one day the phone rang. A soft voice, vaguely familiar. Andre, asking if I was up for working with someone on a memoir.

Phil Knight.

Andre sighed. Founder of Nike?

A business book didn’t seem like my thing. But I needed to do something, and writing my own stuff was out. I went to the initial meeting thinking, It’s only an hour of my life. It wound up being three years.

Luckily, Phil had no interest in doing the typical C.E.O. auto-hagiography. He’d sought writing advice from Tobias Wolff , he was pals with a Pulitzer-winning novelist. He wanted to write a literary memoir, unfolding his mistakes, his anxieties—his quest. He viewed entrepreneurship, and sports, as a spiritual search. (He’d read deeply in Taoism and Zen.) Since I, too, was in search of meaning, I thought his book might be just the thing I needed.

It was. It was also, in every sense of that overused phrase, a labor of love. (I married the book’s editor.) When “ Shoe Dog ” was published, in April, 2016, I reflected on the dire warnings I’d heard at Super Bowl XLII and thought, What were they talking about? I felt like a guy, warned off by a bunch of wizened gamblers, who hits the jackpot twice with the first two nickels he sticks into a slot machine. Then again, I figured, better quit while I’m ahead.

Back to magazine writing. I also dared to start another novel. More personal, more difficult than the last, it absorbed me totally and I was tunnelling toward a draft while also starting a family. There was no time for anything else, no desire. And yet some days I’d hear that siren call. An actor, an activist, a billionaire, a soldier, a politician, another billionaire, a lunatic would phone, seeking help with a memoir.

Twice I said yes. Not for the money. I’ve never taken a ghosting gig for the money. But twice I felt that I had no choice, that the story was too cool, the author just too compelling, and twice the author freaked out at my first draft. Twice I explained that first drafts are always flawed, that error is the mother of truth, but it wasn’t just the errors. It was the confessions, the revelations, the cold-blooded honesty that memoir requires. Everyone says they want to get raw until they see how raw feels.

Twice the author killed the book. Twice I sat before a stack of pages into which I’d poured my soul and years of my life, knowing they were good, and knowing that they were about to go into a drawer forever. Twice I said to my wife, Never again.

And then, in the summer of 2020, I got a text. The familiar query. Would you be interested in speaking with someone about ghosting a memoir? I shook my head no. I covered my eyes. I picked up the phone and heard myself blurting, Who?

Prince Harry.

I agreed to a Zoom. I was curious, of course. Who wouldn’t be? I wondered what the real story was. I wondered if we’d have any chemistry. We did, and there was, I think, a surprising reason. Princess Diana had died twenty-three years before our first conversation, and my mother, Dorothy Moehringer, had just died, and our griefs felt equally fresh.

Still, I hesitated. Harry wasn’t sure how much he wanted to say in his memoir, and that concerned me. I’d heard similar reservations, early on, from both authors who’d ultimately killed their memoirs. Also, I knew that whatever Harry said, whenever he said it, would set off a storm. I am not, by nature, a storm chaser. And there were logistical considerations. In the early stages of a global pandemic, it was impossible to predict when I’d be able to sit down with Harry in the same room. How do you write about someone you can’t meet?

Harry had no deadline, however, and that enticed me. Many authors are in a hot hurry, and some ghosts are happy to oblige. They churn and burn, producing three or four books a year. I go painfully slow; I don’t know any other way. Also, I just liked the dude. I called him dude right away; it made him chuckle. I found his story, as he outlined it in broad strokes, relatable and infuriating. The way he’d been treated, by both strangers and intimates, was grotesque. In retrospect, though, I think I selfishly welcomed the idea of being able to speak with someone, an expert, about that never-ending feeling of wishing you could call your mom.

Harry and I made steady progress in the course of 2020, largely because the world didn’t know what we were up to. We could revel in the privacy of our Zoom bubble. As Harry grew to trust me, he brought other people into the bubble, connecting me with his inner circle, a vital phase in every ghosting job. There is always someone who knows your author’s life better than he does, and your task is to find that person fast and interview his socks off.

As the pandemic waned, I was finally able to travel to Montecito. I went once with my wife and children. (Harry won the heart of my daughter, Gracie, with his vast “Moana” scholarship; his favorite scene, he told her, is when Heihei, the silly chicken, finds himself lost at sea.) I also went twice by myself. Harry put me up in his guesthouse, where Meghan and Archie would visit me on their afternoon walks. Meghan, knowing I was missing my family, was forever bringing trays of food and sweets.

Little by little, Harry and I amassed hundreds of thousands of words. When we weren’t Zooming or phoning, we were texting around the clock. In due time, no subject was off the table. I felt honored by his candor, and I could tell that he felt astonished by it. And energized. While I always emphasized storytelling and scenes, Harry couldn’t escape the wish that “Spare” might be a rebuttal to every lie ever published about him. As Borges dreamed of endless libraries, Harry dreams of endless retractions, which meant no end of revelations. He knew, of course, that some people would be aghast at first. “Why on earth would Harry talk about that?” But he had faith that they would soon see: because someone else already talked about it, and got it wrong.

He was joyful at this prospect; everything in our bubble was good. Then someone leaked news of the book.

Whoever it was, their callousness toward Harry extended to me. I had a clause in my contract giving me the right to remain unidentified, a clause I always insist on, but the leaker blew that up by divulging my name to the press. Along with pretty much anyone who has had anything to do with Harry, I woke one morning to find myself squinting into a gigantic searchlight. Every hour, another piece would drop, each one wrong. My fee was wrong, my bio was wrong, even my name.

One royal expert cautioned that, because of my involvement in the book, Harry’s father should be “looking for a pile of coats to hide under.” When I mentioned this to Harry, he stared. “Why?”

“Because I have daddy issues.” We laughed and got back to discussing our mothers.

The genesis of my relationship with Harry was constantly misreported. Harry and I were introduced by George Clooney, the British newspapers proclaimed, even though I’ve never met George Clooney. Yes, he was directing a film based on my memoir, but I’ve never been in the man’s presence, never communicated with him in any way. I wanted to correct the record, write an op-ed or something, tweet some facts . But no. I reminded myself: ghosts don’t speak. One day, though, I did share my frustration with Harry. I bemoaned that these fictions about me were spreading and hardening into orthodoxy. He tilted his head: Welcome to my world, dude. By now, Harry was calling me dude.

A week before its pub date, “ Spare ” was leaked. A Madrid bookshop reportedly put embargoed copies of the Spanish version on its shelves, “by accident,” and reporters descended. In no time, Fleet Street had assembled crews of translators to reverse-engineer the book from Spanish to English, and with so many translators working on tight deadline the results read like bad Borat. One example among many was the passage about Harry losing his virginity. Per the British press, Harry recounts, “I mounted her quickly . . .” But of course he doesn’t. I can assert with one-hundred-per-cent confidence that no one gets “mounted,” quickly or otherwise, in “Spare.”

I didn’t have time to be horrified. When the book was officially released, the bad translations didn’t stop. They multiplied. The British press now converted the book into their native tongue, that jabberwocky of bonkers hot takes and classist snark. Facts were wrenched out of context, complex emotions were reduced to cartoonish idiocy, innocent passages were hyped into outrages—and there were so many falsehoods. One British newspaper chased down Harry’s flight instructor. Headline: “Prince Harry’s army instructor says story in Spare book is ‘complete fantasy.’ ” Hours later, the instructor posted a lengthy comment beneath the article, swearing that those words, “complete fantasy,” never came out of his mouth. Indeed, they were nowhere in the piece, only in the bogus headline, which had gone viral. The newspaper had made it up, the instructor said, stressing that Harry was one of his finest students.

The only other time I’d witnessed this sort of frenzied mob was with LeBron James, whom I’d interviewed before and after his decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and join the Miami Heat. I couldn’t fathom the toxic cloud of hatred that trailed him. Fans, particularly Cavs loyalists, didn’t just decry James. They wished him dead. They burned his jersey, threw rocks at his image. And the media egged them on. In those first days of “Spare,” I found myself wondering what the ecstatic contempt for Prince Harry and King James had in common. Racism, surely. Also, each man had committed the sin of publicly spurning his homeland. But the biggest factor, I came to believe, was money. In times of great economic distress, many people are triggered by someone who has so much doing anything to try to improve his lot.

Within days, the amorphous campaign against “Spare” seemed to narrow to a single point of attack: that Harry’s memoir, rigorously fact-checked, was rife with errors. I can’t think of anything that rankles quite like being called sloppy by people who routinely trample facts in pursuit of their royal prey, and this now happened every few minutes to Harry and, by extension, to me. In one section of the book, for instance, Harry reveals that he used to live for the yearly sales at TK Maxx, the discount clothing chain. Not so fast, said the monarchists at TK Maxx corporate, who rushed out a statement declaring that TK Maxx never has sales, just great savings all the time! Oh, snap! Gotcha, Prince George Santos! Except that people around the world immediately posted screenshots of TK Maxx touting sales on its official Twitter account. (Surely TK Maxx’s effort to discredit Harry’s memoir was unrelated to the company’s long-standing partnership with Prince Charles and his charitable trust.)

Ghostwriters don’t speak, I reminded myself over and over. But I had to do something. So I ventured one small gesture. I retweeted a few quotes from Mary Karr about inadvertent error in memories and memoir, plus seemingly innocuous quotes from “Spare” about the way Harry’s memory works. (He can’t recall much from the years right after his mother died, and for the most part remembers places better than people—possibly because places didn’t let him down the way people did.) Smooth move, ghostwriter. My tweets were seized upon, deliberately misinterpreted by trolls, and turned into headlines by real news outlets. Harry’s ghostwriter admits the book is all lies.

One of Harry’s friends gave a book party. My wife and I attended.

We were feeling fragile as we arrived, and it had nothing to do with Twitter. Days earlier, we’d been stalked, followed in our car as we drove our son to preschool. When I lifted him out of his seat, a paparazzo leaped from his car and stood in the middle of the road, taking aim with his enormous lens and scaring the hell out of everyone at dropoff. Then, not one hour later, as I sat at my desk, trying to calm myself, I looked up to see a woman’s face at my window. As if in a dream, I walked to the window and asked, “Who are you?” Through the glass, she whispered, “I’m from the Mail on Sunday .”

I lowered the shade, phoned an old friend—the same friend whose columns I used to ghostwrite in Colorado. He listened but didn’t get it. How could he get it? So I called the only friend who might.

It was like telling Taylor Swift about a bad breakup. It was like singing “Hallelujah” to Leonard Cohen. Harry was all heart. He asked if my family was O.K., asked for physical descriptions of the people harassing us, promised to make some calls, see if anything could be done. We both knew nothing could be done, but still. I felt gratitude, and some regret. I’d worked hard to understand the ordeals of Harry Windsor, and now I saw that I understood nothing. Empathy is thin gruel compared with the marrow of experience. One morning of what Harry had endured since birth made me desperate to take another crack at the pages in “Spare” that talk about the media.

Too late. The book was out, the party in full swing. As we walked into the house, I looked around, nervous, unsure of what state we’d find the author in. Was he, too, feeling fragile? Was he as keen as I was to organize a global boycott of TK Maxx?

He appeared, marching toward us, looking flushed. Uh-oh, I thought, before registering that it was a good flush. His smile was wide as he embraced us both. He was overjoyed by many things. The numbers, naturally. Guinness World Records had just certified his memoir as the fastest-selling nonfiction book in the history of the world. But, more than that, readers were reading , at last, the actual book, not Murdoched chunks laced with poison, and their online reviews were overwhelmingly effusive. Many said Harry’s candor about family dysfunction, about losing a parent, had given them solace.

The guests were summoned into the living room. There were several lovely toasts to Harry, then the Prince stepped forward. I’d never seen him so self-possessed and expansive. He thanked his publishing team, his editor, me. He mentioned my advice, to “trust the book,” and said he was glad that he did, because it felt incredible to have the truth out there, to feel—his voice caught—“free.” There were tears in his eyes. Mine, too.

And yet once a ghost, always a ghost. I couldn’t help obsessing about that word “free.” If he’d used that in one of our Zoom sessions, I’d have pushed back. Harry first felt liberated when he fell in love with Meghan, and again when they fled Britain, and what he felt now, for the first time in his life, was heard. That imperious Windsor motto, “Never complain, never explain,” is really just a prettified omertà , which my wife suggests might have prolonged Harry’s grief. His family actively discourages talking, a stoicism for which they’re widely lauded, but if you don’t speak your emotions you serve them, and if you don’t tell your story you lose it—or, what might be worse, you get lost inside it. Telling is how we cement details, preserve continuity, stay sane. We say ourselves into being every day, or else. Heard, Harry, heard—I could hear myself making the case to him late at night, and I could see Harry’s nose wrinkle as he argued for his word, and I reproached myself once more: Not your effing book.

But, after we hugged Harry goodbye, after we thanked Meghan for toys she’d sent our children, I had a second thought about silence. Ghosts don’t speak—says who? Maybe they can. Maybe sometimes they should.

Several weeks later, I was having breakfast with my family. The children were eating and my wife and I were talking about ghostwriting. Someone had just called, seeking help with their memoir. Intriguing person, but the answer was going to be no. I wanted to resume work on my novel. Our five-year-old daughter looked up from her cinnamon toast and asked, “What is ghostwriting?”

My wife and I gazed at each other as if she’d asked, What is God?

“Well,” I said, drawing a blank. “O.K., you know how you love art?”

She nodded. She loves few things more. An artist is what she hopes to be.

“Imagine if one of your classmates wanted to say something, express something, but they couldn’t draw. Imagine if they asked you to draw a picture for them.”

“I would do it,” she said.

“That’s ghostwriting.”

It occurred to me that this might be the closest I’d ever come to a workable definition. It certainly landed with our daughter. You could see it in her eyes. She got off her chair and leaned against me. “Daddy, I will be your ghostwriter.”

My wife laughed. I laughed. “Thank you, sweetheart,” I said.

But that wasn’t what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say was “No, Gracie. Nope. Keep doing your own pictures.” ♦

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

By Erin Vanderhoof

If  Prince Harry  manages to leave just one surprising impression of royal life in his memoir ,  Spare, it’s that he seemingly had tons of time to watch movies and TV. A recurring motif of the book’s second section is the solace he finds in rewatching  Friends  as he does his laundry. Elsewhere, he shows familiarity with an array of American cartoons, from  Family Guy  to  Johnny Bravo.  But as the memoir reaches its emotional height—Harry contemplates life on his own in California with  Meghan Markle —he draws a similarity between his life and another ’90s pop-culture favorite.

“I’d been forced into this surreal state,” Harry writes, “this unending  Truman Show  in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon,  almost  never traveled on the Underground. (Once, at Eton, on a theater trip.) Sponge, the papers called me. But there’s a big difference between being a sponge and being  prohibited  from learning independence.” 

I understand why Harry feels a kinship with the 1998  Peter Weir psycho-comedy’s protagonist, the  Jim Carrey  character whose belated discovery that his entire world has been faked, filmed, and broadcast to the public upends his life and tanks his sanity. Unlike Truman, however, Harry has been very aware of the cameras, the press interest, and the story line as it’s played out. In  Spare,  Harry juxtaposes his life with the sometimes inaccurate tabloid reports that result, and his world seems less a secret reality show than a full-fledged  panopticon .

Harry’s behavior is conditioned by his visions of the press right over his shoulder, and they approach in ways that startle him. In one chapter, he is visited by a palace employee at Eton and immediately worries that the press has learned that he recently lost his virginity. Instead, he learns that a tabloid editor, whom he describes as “an infected pustule on the arse of humanity, plus a shit excuse for a journalist,” has plans to print that Harry is a drug addict who did a stint in rehab. For Harry, it’s an early lesson in how a small truth—the prince has been drinking alcohol in his basement at Highgrove, he explains, and he did take a day trip to a rehab center for charity work—can become the beginning of an urban legend. It ultimately becomes self-fulfilling when Harry does dabble in drugs like cocaine and becomes a heavy drinker.

It’s worth remembering that in Jeremy Bentham’s 18th-century conception, the panopticon was supposed to be a peaceful, secure, and economical alternative to a death sentence. To that end, you can almost understand Britain’s modern constitutional monarchy, surveilled and held accountable by the rabid press, as the peaceful and economical alternative to expropriating the royals entirely, as countries like France did with the help of the guillotine. It was nearly two centuries later that Michel Foucault, inspired by Bentham’s image, pointed out that the panopticon trades direct force for psychological control, which can be every bit as powerful. And as much as  Spare fits snugly within its genres—royal biographies, books about father-son relationships, narratives of the war on terror—Harry’s contortions against the hold of the tabloid media give it the air of a psychological thriller unlike anything we’ve ever seen from the Windsors. 

Throughout his remembrances, another tabloid-constructed idea is raised: that Harry isn’t all that bright. Though he struggles with the implication from his family and the papers, he also jokes about it with genuine ease. The book opens with an epigraph from William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” Perhaps anticipating skepticism about his familiarity with literature of the American South, Harry admits pages later that he found it while browsing brainyquote.com. It wasn’t inevitable, but Harry is charming enough to live in the ambiguity his words occasionally prompt. He can joke about never having heard of  Eat, Pray, Love  until he started dating Meghan without undermining his real frustrations with his father and brother’s assumptions about his intelligence.

The weight of royal history does snake throughout the book’s narrative, but in marked contrast to  King Charles III,  Harry is nonplussed by the importance of his forebears. In one scene right after Prince Philip’s funeral in April 2021, the bookish father wanders a Windsor graveyard with his sons and launches “into a micro-lecture about this personage over here, that royal cousin over three, all the once-eminent dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, currently residing beneath the lawn.” Harry, on the other hand, was given a ruler in history class to use as a cheat sheet because he couldn’t remember the order of the past monarchs. 

At times, there’s an understandable urge for the reader to chide Harry for his lack of appreciation of his birthright. But his sumptuous descriptions of the family’s castles and grounds show that he has plenty of admiration for historic finery and its beauty. Still, as a person who is not overawed by art for its own sake or traditional aristocratic hobbies, unlike most other members of his family, Harry becomes an ideal vessel for the values that lie underneath the royal performance. “Being a Windsor meant working out which truths were timeless, and then banishing them from your mind,” he writes as a means of explaining why he was never too concerned with his place in the line of succession. “It meant  absorbing the basic parameters of one’s identity, knowing by instinct who you were, which was forever a byproduct of who you weren’t.”

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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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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.

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Watch CBS News

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

By Aimee Picchi

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' Memoir: 59 Of The Weirdest, Most Thrilling And Most Heartbreaking Revelations

Senior Reporter, HuffPost

Senior Trends Reporter, HuffPost UK

Senior Culture Editor, HuffPost

Prince Harry’s memoir “Spare,” released this week, is 407 pages of extraordinary detail, offering an intimate look at royal life ― plus numerous unsparing mentions of the Duke of Sussex’s, uh, “willy,” which is also his nickname for his brother.

While the tome is a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in the royal family, we’ve rounded up 59 revelations from the book for you to devour ― you know, just in case your preorder is delayed or you wanted even more juicy details after combing through 34 of the royal’s biggest bombshells from his media appearances .

Read on for stories from “Spare” that made major headlines, as well as smaller anecdotes that fascinated us (like King Charles traveling with his “teddy”).

Yes, Prince Harry really quotes BrainyQuote.com

Harry quotes a famous William Faulkner line to start off the book: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” He later explains how he found the quote: “When I discovered that quotation not long ago on BrainyQuote.com, I was thunderstruck. I thought, Who the fook is Faulkner? And how’s he related to us Windsors?”

Harry references Prince William’s “alarming baldness” early in the book

“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.”

Harry’s face was once shoved in a deer carcass

After the Duke of Sussex killed his first deer, his hunting guide instructed him to kneel before the carcass. Harry thought they “were going to pray.” Instead, he writes, the guide “pushed my head inside the carcass.” When Harry tried to pull away, his guide “pushed me deeper.”

“After a minute I couldn’t smell anything, because I couldn’t breathe. My nose and mouth were full of blood, guts, and a deep, upsetting warmth.”

Harry confirms that he’s circumcised

“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, and while it’s absolutely true that the chance of getting penile frostbite is much greater if you’re not circumcised, all the stories were false. I was snipped as a baby.”

Harry used a custom “cock cushion” during one very cold expedition

After enduring a frostbitten “todger” during his trip to the North Pole, Harry writes that for his trip to the South Pole he’d “know how to take proper precautions ― snugger underwear, more padding, etc. Better yet, one very close mate hired a seamstress to make me a bespoke cock cushion. Square, supportive, it was sewn from pieces of the softest fleece and ... Enough said.”

Harry says people bathed him and his classmates at their private school

The Duke of Sussex attended Ludgrove, an exclusive school, when he was younger. He offers a behind-the-scenes look at its attendees and “matrons” ― aka “Mums-Away-From-Mums” ― who woke the boys up most mornings, showered them with affection, helped them with injuries and even, uh, washed them.

“Three times a week, after dinner, the matrons would assist the youngest boys with the nightly wash. I can still see the long row of white baths, each with a boy reclining like a little pharaoh, awaiting his personalized hair-washing ... After shampooing a boy the matrons would ease back his head, give him a slow and luxurious rinse. Confusing as hell.”

Harry recounts putting lotion on his frostbitten “todger,” using the same cream his mom once used as a lip balm

“My penis was oscillating between extremely sensitive and borderline traumatized. The last place I wanted to be was Frostnipistan,” Harry writes. A friend recommended a remedy:

“She’d urged me to apply Elizabeth Arden cream.

“My mum used to use that on her lips. You want me to put that on my todger.”

“It works, Harry. Trust me.”

“I found a tube, and the minute I opened it the smell transported me through time.

“I felt as if my mother was right there in the room. Then I took a smidge and applied it ... down there. ‘Weird’ doesn’t really do the feeling justice.”

King Charles carries a teddy bear with him everywhere, for a heartbreaking reason

Harry says that his father, King Charles, carries a teddy bear with him after being bullied so badly as a child he “nearly didn’t survive.”

“How had he?” Harry questions. “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.”

Harry says Will never told him he was proposing to Kate

Harry claims he didn’t know William had proposed to Kate Middleton until a palace announcement was made, calling it “news to me.” He also shot down claims that he gave William their mother’s engagement ring, saying it “wasn’t mine to give.”

“He’d already had it. He’d asked for it after Mummy died, and I’d been more than happy to let it go.”

Harry says he’d never hugged Queen Elizabeth

“I wanted to hug her, though of course I didn’t,” Harry writes, recalling sitting at a Jubilee event with his grandmother. “I never had done and couldn’t imagine any circumstance under which such an act might be sanctioned.”

Charles does handstands in his boxers to relieve chronic back and neck pain

Harry said his dad performed such “headstands” on the “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! ”

Harry says it was “a bare-faced lie” that he was William’s best man, or that William was his

“The public had been told that I was to be best man, but that was a bare-faced lie. The public expected me to be best man, and thus the Palace saw no choice but to say that I was. In truth, Willy didn’t want me giving a best-man speech. He didn’t think it safe to hand me a live mic and put me in a position to go off script. I might say something wildly inappropriate. He wasn’t wrong.”

Harry and William were told to bow to a statue of Queen Victoria at one of the queen’s residences

Harry writes, “I always bowed to her as I passed. Your Majesty! Willy did too. We’d been told to, but I have done it anyway.”

Harry wanted to work at a ski resort after his schooling

“Specifically, I wanted to work at the fondue hut in the center of town, which Mummy loved. That fondue could change your life. (I was really that mad.) But now I told Pa I’d given up the fondue fantasy, and he sighed with relief. Instead I was taken with notions of becoming a ski instructor...

“Pa tensed again. Out of the question.”

Elizabeth had a piper wake her up in the morning at Balmoral

In his book, Harry writes that while his granny was staying at her Balmoral residence, she had a piper “play her awake and play her to dinner.” Also, he says that sheets, blankets and quilts were “stamped with ER, Elizabeth Regina.” (“Regina” is Latin for “queen.”)

Charles wears the Dior cologne “Eau Sauvage”

Harry writes of his father’s aroma: “It was hard to smell anything over his personal scent. Eau Sauvage. He’d slather the stuff on his cheeks, his neck, his shirt. Flowery, with a hint of something harsh, like pepper or gunpowder, it was made in Paris.”

He and William talked about the car crash that killed their mother “for the first time ever” 10 years after it happened

The Duke of Sussex writes about going through the same tunnel his mom died in when he was in Paris in 2007.

“I rang Willy, told him about my night. None of it came as news to him. Turns out, he’d driven the tunnel too. He was coming to Paris for the rugby final. We decided to do it together. Afterwards, we talked about the crash, for the first time ever.”

Harry says he’s “drunk booze out of multiple prosthetic legs in my life and I can’t swear that was one of the times”

This comes from an account of his 2013 trip to the South Pole, where he was also given a souvenir beaker of the “cleanest air in the world.”

The prince reveals how he grocery shops

“I’d arrive at different times, randomly, to throw off the press. I’d wear a disguise: low baseball cap, loose coat. I’d run along the aisles at warp speed, grabbing the salmon fillets I liked, the brand of yogurt I liked. (I’d memorized a map of the store.) Plus a few Granny Smith apples and bananas. And, of course, some crisps. Then I’d sprint to the checkout.”

Harry shops at TK Maxx (the U.K.’s version of TJ Maxx)

“For my everyday casual clothes, I’d go to T.K. Maxx, the discount store. I was particularly fond of their once-a-year sale, when they’d be flush with items from Gap or J.Crew, items that had just gone out of season or were slightly damaged.”

Harry says he talked to a toilet at Courteney Cox’s house while on mushrooms

“I stepped on the pedal and the head opened its mouth. A huge open grin. I laughed, turned away, took a piss. Now the loo became a head too. The bowl was its gaping maw, the hinges of the seat were its piercing silver eyes. It said: Aaah .”

Harry peed his pants on a boat while he was dating Meghan Markle

“I swung my body over the side, into the tossing sea... and still couldn’t pee, mainly thanks to stage fright. The whole crew looking. Finally I went back to my post, sheepishly hung from the ropes, and peed my pants. Wow, I thought, if Ms. Markle could see me now.”

The Duke of Sussex says William and Kate were huge fans of “Suits” before meeting Meghan

When Harry told his brother and sister-in-law who he was dating, he writes, “their mouths fell open. They turned to each other.”

“Fuck off!” Harry says his brother exclaimed. “I was baffled, until Willy and Kate explained that they were regular ― nay, religious ― viewers of Suits. ”

William “recoiled” when Meghan hugged him the first time they met

“I introduced him to Meg, who leaned in and gave him a hug, which completely freaked him out. He recoiled. Willy didn’t hug many strangers,” Harry writes. “Meg hugged most strangers.”

Harry once borrowed Tom Hardy’s costume from “Mad Max” for an “apocalypse”-themed party

“For help with my costume, I’d turned to a friend, the actor Tom Hardy, before I left home. I’d phoned him to ask if I could borrow his costume from Mad Max.

“The whole thing?”

“Yes please, mate! The whole kit.”

Harry taught his great-grandmother, the Queen Mother, a Sacha Baron Cohen impression

The Duke of Sussex recalled one night with his “Gan-Gan,” telling her “all about Ali G, the character played by Sacha Baron Cohen. I taught her to say Booyakasha, showing her how to flick her fingers the way Sacha did. She couldn’t grasp it, she had no idea what I was talking about, but she had such fun trying to flick and say the word.”

Harry becomes first royal to publicly mention Prince Andrew’s sexual assault accusations

The duke writes that Meghan asked him if their security would be pulled after the two stepped back as working royals. Harry says no, especially “in the wake of my Uncle Andrew. He was embroiled in a shameful scandal, accused of the sexual assault of a young woman, and no one had so much as suggested that he lose his security. Whatever grievances people had against us, sex crimes weren’t on the list.”

Harry explains the “Heir and the Spare” dynamic

“I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy,” Harry writes. “I was summoned to provide backup, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow. This was all made explicitly clear to me from the start of life’s journey and regularly reinforced thereafter.”

Harry says he and William “always wore seatbelts after Mummy’s disappearance.”

Harry and William’s mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash in 1997, when the boys were 12 and 15, respectively.

Harry feels especially close to the character Stewie Griffin from “Family Guy”

“I felt an inexplicable bond with Stewie, prophet without honor.”

He says he didn’t know his aunt, Princess Margaret, whom he called “Aunt Margo”

“We spent the biggest holidays together, and yet she was almost a total stranger... Growing up, I felt nothing for her, except a bit of pity and a lot of jumpiness.”

Secret shoppers!

When they were still keeping their relationship a secret, Harry and Meghan disguised themselves to go to the grocery store together. Apparently, Harry had to find the parchment paper. “I texted her: What the F is parchment paper? She talked me onto the target.”

Prince Andrew... the purse holder?

Meghan has spoken about how she didn’t know much about the royal family, and indeed, Harry writes that she didn’t recognize Prince Andrew when she first met him. “After a moment Meg asked me something about the Queen’s assistant. I asked who she was talking about. That man holding the purse …” he writes. “That was her second son. Andrew.”

Meeting Meghan’s mom at a tense time

Harry met Doria Ragland for the first time right after The Sun published a headline, “Harry’s girl on Pornhub,” with images of Meghan from “Suits.” “We’d fought it, filed a formal complaint, but thankfully the subject didn’t come up that night over dinner.”

Harry and Meghan share a favorite food

The couple’s favorite food is roast chicken, and Meghan taught Harry how to cook it. “I remember the warmth of the kitchen, the wonderful smells. Lemon wedges on the cutting board, garlic and rosemary, gravy bubbling in a saucepan.”

Meghan urged Harry to try therapy again

After Harry snapped at Meghan one night, she said “she would never stand for being spoken to like that.” “She wasn’t going to tolerate that kind of partner. Or co-parent. That kind of life.” Harry told her he’d tried therapy, but it didn’t work. She told him to try again.

How therapy helped Harry remember his mother

Harry mentions that he always thought his memory was dead, but through therapy, he started remembering so many moments with Diana. When he brought a bottle of his mother’s perfume to therapy — First, by Van Cleef & Arpels — he unlocked even more moments. “A thousand images returned, some so bright and vivid that they were like holograms.”

Harry offers some wise travel advice

Harry told Meghan not to pose in front of the Taj Mahal because there was an iconic photo of Princess Diana there , and he didn’t want people thinking she was trying to imitate his mom. “Meg had never heard of this photo, and found the whole thing baffling, and I loved her for being baffled.”

A two-week proposal secret

Harry proposed to Meghan on Nov. 4, 2017, and they kept it a secret for two weeks. Meghan was so enthralled by the romantic moment, Harry writes, that she didn’t even think to look at the ring.

The beard that made William bark

William got in a fight with Harry because Harry wasn’t going to shave his beard for his wedding. According to the Duke of Sussex, William was also mad that Harry would get to wear his military uniform. William was denied these opportunities. “When I informed him that his opinion didn’t really matter since I’d already gone to Granny and got the green light, he became livid.”

The tabloids lied about Meghan’s security

Meghan wasn’t given security training, despite tabloid reports to the contrary. In fact, the palace almost didn’t give her security at all because Harry was sixth in line to the throne. “How I wished reports about Special Forces were even partly true,” he writes.

A personal letter with good intentions gone wrong

The queen and Prince Charles encouraged Meghan to write a note to her father, which was then edited and published in the Daily Mail. Meghan was trying to find a way to get her father, Thomas Markle, to stop talking to the press. Ultimately, it backfired.

Making appearances even during the darkest moments

One evening in 2019, Meghan expressed suicidal thoughts to Harry. The couple were expected to attend an engagement for Harry’s Sentebale charity that night. Harry told Meghan she should skip the event, and that he would make an appearance and return home quickly. But Meghan insisted on going. “Incredibly, while reassuring her, and hugging her, I couldn’t entirely stop thinking like a fucking royal , ” he writes.

Time to take action against the tabloids

In September 2019, the Sussexes felt they had no choice but to sue three British tabloids: “The lawsuit wasn’t covered as widely as, say, Meg’s daring to shut her own car door. In fact, it was barely covered at all.” William and Charles were staunchly against the lawsuit.

A royal knock-out between the brothers

Harry alleged that William physically attacked him in 2019. In “Spare,” Harry writes that the fight “all happened so fast. So very fast.”

Harry claims William called Meghan “difficult,” “rude” and “abrasive,” which set the two off on a screaming match. William allegedly began swearing and calling his brother names. Then, Harry writes, 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 told his therapist about the fight before he told Meghan

The duke says William told him he didn’t need to tell Meghan about the confrontation. Harry writes that he told his therapist first, and Meghan later noticed the scrapes and bruises on his back.

“She was terribly sad,” Harry writes, but she “wasn’t that surprised and wasn’t all that angry.”

The brothers call each other “Willy” and “Harold”

In fact, Harry has a lot of nicknames, including H, Haz, Hazza and Spike, among others.

Charles asked Harry and William not to “make my final years a misery”

In 2021, Charles pleaded with the brothers to stop fighting at Windsor after Prince Philip’s funeral, raising his hands and saying “Enough!”

In a tense meeting, a grieving Charles told his sons: “Please, boys ― Don’t make my final years a misery.” Harry writes that his father’s voice “sounded raspy, fragile. It sounded, if I’m being honest, old.”

Charles expressed delight at Diana giving birth to a “spare”

Harry tells how, after he was born, his father supposedly told the Princess of Wales: “Wonderful! Now you’ve given me an Heir and a Spare ― my work is done.”

It was, Harry writes, “a joke. Presumably. On the other hand, minutes after delivering this bit of high comedy, Pa was said to have gone off to meet with his girlfriend. So. Many a true word spoke in jest.”

Harry and William “begged” Charles not to marry Camilla

Harry claims that he and William told Charles they would welcome the now-Queen Consort into the family on the condition he did not marry her, and “begged” him not to do so. The duke says his father did not respond to their pleas.

Apparently, three Cs could lead to confusion

Charles and Camilla suggested Kate change the spelling of her given name, Catherine, to “Katherine” instead, because there were already two royal cyphers with a C and a crown above them. “It would be too confusing to have another,” he wrote. “Make it Katherine with a K, they suggested.”

Harry killed 25 people while serving in Afghanistan

The Telegraph , which obtained a Spanish-language copy of “Spare” from a bookshop in Spain, was among the first to report that Harry said flying six missions during his second tour of duty on the front line resulted in “the taking of human life” of which he was neither proud nor ashamed.

“So, my number: Twenty-five. It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed,” he wrote.

Harry claims a woman passed on a message from his mother’s spirit

The duke said the woman, who “claimed to have ‘powers,’” was strongly recommended by friends. Harry said that he “felt an energy around” the woman when he sat down with her. She said that Diana was “with” him, and that Diana knew Harry was “looking for clarity” and she felt his confusion.

She told him that Diana felt he was “living the life she couldn’t,” and he was “living the life she wanted for you.”

Harry writes that the woman also mentioned a Christmas ornament that had broken, which Harry said his son, Archie, had tried to fix. “Your mother said she had a bit of a giggle about that,” the woman said.

Harry asked a driver to replicate the journey Diana took in Paris before her death

While in Paris for the 2007 Rugby World Cup semifinal, Harry, who was 23, was driven through the Pont de l’Alma tunnel at the same speed as the car that was carrying Diana and Dodi Fayed when it crashed in August 1997.

When he later told William about the incident, his brother revealed he’d driven it too. The two later drove it together when William came to Paris for the rugby final.

Harry wanted the Diana inquiry reopened

Harry says both he and his brother “were talked out” of calling for a reinvestigation into their mother’s death “by the powers that be.” He adds that he and William felt the final written report on Diana’s death was an “insult” and “riddled with basic factual errors and gaping logical holes.”

“It raised more questions than it answered,” Harry writes.

Harry lost his virginity behind a pub

The royal called his 2001 tryst “an inglorious episode, with an older woman.”

“She liked horses, quite a lot and... treated me not unlike a young stallion,” he wrote. “Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me off to graze. Among the many things about it that were wrong: It happened in a grassy field behind a busy pub.”

Meghan Markle’s “baby brain” comment to Kate

The Duchess of Sussex said her sister-in-law had “baby brain,” a colloquial term referring to the “ memory problems, poor concentration and absent-mindedness ” that some people experience during pregnancy and just after giving birth.

Meghan, Harry, William and Kate all went to afternoon tea in June 2018 in Kensington Palace to try and repair their relationship, when the comment came up.

“You hurt my feelings, Meghan,” Kate said, before recalling a phone call where Meghan mentioned the phrase.

“Oh yes, I remember: You couldn’t remember something, and I said it’s not a big deal, it’s baby brain. Because you’d just had a baby. It’s hormones.”

Kate replied: “We’re not close enough for you to talk about my hormones.”

Meghan was reportedly confused by Kate’s response, as that kind of remark is how she spoke with her girlfriends.

Harry writes that William then pointed at Meghan and said that such a “rude” comment was “not what’s done here in Britain,” to which the duchess replied: “Kindly take your finger out of my face.”

Tyler Perry to the rescue

Actor-director-producer Tyler Perry let Harry and Meghan stay in his home in Los Angeles at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic because his mother loved Princess Diana: “After your mother visited Harlem, that was it. She could do no wrong in Maxine Perry’s book.” The couple had been facing mounting issues with their own safety.

Yet more details about Princess Charlotte’s dress…

Ahead of Harry and Meghan’s 2018 wedding, Kate texted Meghan about a “problem” with Princess Charlotte’s dress, claiming it was “too big, long and baggy.” Kate said her 3-year-old daughter “burst into tears when she tried it on.”

Meghan suggested a tailor at Kensington Palace was on hand to make alterations, but Kate said the dress needed to be completely remade just four days before the wedding.

Kate did eventually take her daughter to get her dress altered by the tailor, but Harry said he found his then-fiancée “on the floor” in tears. Kate apologized the next day with flowers and a card.

If you or someone you know needs help, dial 988 or call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline . You can also get support via text by visiting suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat . Outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of resources.

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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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The verdict on Prince Harry’s book: Juicy, humorous, resentful and sad

‘spare’ delivers behind-the-scenes vignettes of the royals — and a hefty dose of anger at the family and the media.

“Pandas and royal persons alike,” wrote Hilary Mantel in 2013 , “are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.”

Suppose now that one of those pandas attempts to leave his cage in search of fresh bamboo. So begins the odyssey of Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, who is technically still a prince and duke and still fifth in line to the British throne but who has turned his back on the monarchy for the sake of the woman he loves. An old-school gesture that puts him right up there with his great-great uncle Edward VIII, only the way he’s gone about it is so distinctly 21st century: a self-justifying, multiplatform pilgrimage — Non Mea Culpa , it might be called — which has pivoted from an Oprah sit-down to a Netflix documentary series and which now culminates — or, more likely, gathers steam — with a new memoir, “Spare.”

Tina Brown’s royal revelations spare no one, especially Meghan Markle

The title, in case you’re wondering, is the nickname bestowed on Harry in infancy. He was to be the second-born “Spare” to the “Heir,” his older brother William, future Prince of Wales. “I was the shadow,” he writes now, “the support, the Plan B. I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy.” And if you ever doubted that’s a recipe for resentment, here are 400-plus pages to set you right.

Prince Harry memoir attacks a family he seeks to change. They have no comment.

Like Harry, the book is good-natured, rancorous, humorous, self-righteous, self-deprecating, long-winded. And every so often, bewildering. More questions are answered about the Prince’s todger than you would ever have thought to ask. (It’s circumcised, and it nearly froze to death at the North Pole.) And if you’re wondering to whom Harry lost his virginity, it was an older woman who “liked horses, quite a lot, and treated me not unlike a young stallion. Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me off to graze.”

Written with and almost surely elevated by J.R. Moehringer, who helped make Andre Agassi’s memoir so memorable, the book delivers behind-the-scenes vignettes of the royals (the Queen whisking up salad dressing, Charles executing headstands in his boxers) and liberal helpings of woo-woo: Princess Diana’s spirit turning up variously in a Botswana leopard, an Eton fox and a Tyler Perry painting and even finding a way to mess up Charles and Camilla’s wedding plans. No question that his mother’s 1997 death is still the primal wound in Harry’s now 38-year-old psyche, and the book’s most affecting passages show his 12-year-old self struggling to grieve in public view. He cried just once, at her graveside, then never again, and spent years clinging to the theory that she had simply gone into hiding.

He grew into an indifferent student and a recreational drug user, known variously as “the naughty one” and “the stupid one.” (What was he thinking when he wore a Nazi uniform to a costume party? “I wasn’t.”) Two combat stints gave him a measure of confidence before he settled into the surreal life of a royal — “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.” Whatever relationships he forged couldn’t survive the full-court press of tabloid “paps” dogging his every step. “Royal fame,” he concluded, “was fancy captivity.”

Enter, as you know she must, Meghan.

By now, the stages of their affair are available to anyone who cares: the Instagram sighting, the dinner date, the week in a Botswana tent. So, too, is the mauling Markle received at the hands of British media, a toxic brew of racism and misogyny that too often, says Harry, went unchallenged by Buckingham Palace. No wonder, for Palace staff were either planting the stories or actively courting the reporters behind them. “Pa’s office, Willy’s office,” fumes Harry, “enabling these fiends, if not outright collaborating.”

“Darling boy,” his father counseled, “just don’t read it.” Not an option for Harry, who was, by his own admission, “undeniably addicted” to reading and raging at his own media coverage. But when he decided to step away from royal duties, the rage came back at him: William, according to one already well-publicized anecdote, grabbed him by the collar and knocked him to the ground. Stripped of their royal allowance and eventually their security detail, Harry and Meg fled first to Canada before settling in America, or, as Harry cheekily calls it, “the undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

Meghan and Harry made a fairy-tale escape. They still seem trapped.

So meet them in their current iteration: still gorgeous, parents to two gorgeous children — and also, the author tactfully concedes, drawing on “corporate partnerships” to “spotlight the causes we cared about, to tell the stories we felt were vital. And to pay for our security.” In a more rueful vein: “I love my Mother Country, and I love my family, and I always will. I just wish, at the second-darkest moment of my life, they’d both been there for me.”

Yet, in a perverse way, they were there for him, and he for them. The brand he and Meghan have so carefully nurtured is entirely dependent on the brand they so publicly cast off. With each morsel of palace scandal they lob into the news cycle, they feed the beast they deplore, and it will never end, and, for the Windsors’ sakes, can never end because that would mean our interest in them has run dry. One ends up almost longing for the days when royals just poisoned each other or waged civil war. If nothing else, they got it out of their systems.

Louis Bayard is the author of “The Pale Blue Eye” and “Jackie & Me.”

By Prince Harry the Duke of Sussex

Random House. 416 pp. $36

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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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What critics are saying about Prince Harry’s memoir ‘Spare’

Whether or not critics like the book has not impacted sales — it’s already a best seller.

By Margaret Darby

After months of anticipation, Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” has officially hit the shelves — not to be mistaken with the widespread leaks from the book which surfaced last week, as reported by the Deseret News .

So far, critics have not gone easy on the memoir. The Guardian called the book “a flawed attempt to reclaim the narrative.”

Regardless of how critics feel about “Spare,” the book is a hit. According to The Washington Post , the memoir is already at the top of bestseller lists.

“As far as we know, the only books to have sold more in their first day are those starring the other Harry (Potter),” said the memoir’s publisher, per Sky News .

Here are the initial reviews from critics and fans on “Spare.”

First reactions to ‘Spare’

• “At once emotional and embittered, the royal memoir is mired in a paradox: drawing endless attention in an effort to renounce fame,” Alexandra Jacobs wrote for The New York Times .
• Sean Coughlan, a royal correspondent said “Spare” is “part confession, part rant and part love letter. In places it feels like the longest angry drunk text ever sent,” per the BBC .
• According to Lucy Pavia with the Independent , the book “sets fire to the royal family.” Pavis claims the book is “beautifully” written and “doesn’t so much lift the curtain on private royal life than rip it off and shake out its contents.”
• “Harry comes across as honest and reflective, but also angry, thin-skinned, disoriented” Henry Mance wrote in the Financial Times .
• The London Times called the book a “400-page therapy session for mystic Harry,” wrote James Marriott. “Open the book and you discover quite a different Harry from the cool, square-jawed metrosexual Californian on the cover. This is a weirder, more complex Harry.”
• The Economist called the memoir an “ill-advised romp.”

Fan reactions to ‘Spare’

Fans have gone easier on the book than critics. Some fans are sympathetic to Harry and what he has gone through, while some think it’s time Harry practice a little gratitude and others simply shared lighthearted jokes about the memoir.

I'm fifty pages into "Spare" and it's so desperately sad: the tone is very different to how all the out-of-context quotes make it seem. Although he keeps making jokes - mainly self-deprecating - it just ACHES. — Caitlin Moran (@caitlinmoran) January 10, 2023

#PrinceHarry has the privilege and opportunities to have an amazing life. He has $100 Million in the bank, a wife and children and he wants us to go oh poor Harry he must speak his truth. He’s not 12, grow up and his invasion of his family’s privacy is creepy & sick. #Spare — The British Prince (@Freedom16356531) January 10, 2023

Pretty funny Harry is ridiculing Prince William’s “alarming baldness.” #Spare #BrotherBetrayal pic.twitter.com/ikzW1qr1J6 — DT Cahill (@DTCahill) January 10, 2023

#SpareUsHarry Anxiously awaiting Wills follow up Tell-Book in response to "Spare" pic.twitter.com/XXrGdf1pvh — Emily Harrison (@emharrison75) January 9, 2023

10 books to add to your reading list in April

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Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your April reading list.

April’s book releases cover some difficult topics, including Salman Rushdie discussing his 2022 maiming, Leigh Bardugo’s fiction about the dark arts and Ada Limón’s poetry anthology about our fragile world. However, like April, there is also sunshine: Leif Enger’s wild Great Lakes love story, Helen Tworkov’s beautiful memoir of Buddhism and a collection of the inimitable Maggie Nelson’s essays. Happy reading, happy spring!

I Cheerfully Refuse: A Novel By Leif Enger Grove Press: 336 pages, $28 (April 2)

An unusual and meaningful surprise awaits readers of Enger’s latest, which takes place largely on Lake Superior, as a man named Rainy tries to reunite with his beloved wife, Lark. While the world around this couple, a dystopian near-future American where billionaires control everything, could not be bleaker, the author’s retelling of the myth of Orpheus (who went to the underworld to rescue his wife) contains the authentic hope of a born optimist.

The Familiar: A Novel By Leigh Bardugo Flatiron Books: 400 pages, $30 (April 9)

Bardugo departs from novels of dark academia in a standalone to make the hairs on your neck stand up, set in 16th century Spain. A hidden Sephardic Jew and scullery maid named Luzia Cotado matches wits with fellow servant Guillén Santángel. Luzia discovers a secret of Guillén’s, but she’s already fallen in love with him. And because he knows hers, too, they might both avoid the Spanish Inquisition. It’s a gorgeous tale of enchantments both supernatural and earthly.

The Sleepwalkers: A Novel By Scarlett Thomas Simon & Schuster: 304 pages, $28 (April 9)

A couple honeymoons at a Greek resort. What could go wrong? In Thomas’ hands, plenty – especially as the author has never written a comfortable story; her books, from “PopCo ” to “Oligarchy,” crackle with unreliable characters, as well as big philosophical ideas. In this case, the new marriage’s breakdown is chronicled through letters between the spouses, and sometimes bits of ephemera, that ultimately untangle a dark mystery relating to the title.

The Garden: A Novel By Clare Beams Doubleday: 304 pages, $28 (April 10)

Few novels of literary fiction are written as well as “The Garden,” let alone given its sadly relevant retro setting, a 1940s country-estate obstetrical program. Irene Willard walks through its gates having endured five miscarriages; pregnant again, she and her war-veteran husband George desperately hope for a live birth. But as Irene discovers more about the woman who controls all here, Dr. Bishop, she fears carrying to term as much as she once feared pregnancy loss.

Reboot: A Novel By Justin Taylor Pantheon: 304 pages, $28 (April 23)

David Crader, former teen TV heartthrob, just wants to reboot his career when his old show “Rev Beach” has a moment. His life has devolved through substance abuse, divorce and underemployment. But when he and colleagues launch a remake, devolution continues: The protagonist’s struggles are mirrored by climate-change issues, from flooding to wildfires. Despite that darkness, Taylor’s gift for satire might make this a must-read for 2024 beach bags.

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World By Ada Limón (Editor) Milkweed Editions: 176 pages, $25 (April 2)

A wondrous artist herself, Limón is currently poet laureate of the United States, and this anthology is part of her signature project, “You Are Here,” which will also feature poetry as public art in seven national parks. Released in conjunction with the Library of Congress, the collection features 50 previously unpublished poems by luminaries including Jericho Brown, Joy Harjo, Carl Phillips and Diane Seuss, each focusing on a piece of regional landscape.

Like Love: Essays and Conversations By Maggie Nelson Graywolf Press: 336 pages, $32 (April 2)

While all of the pieces in Nelson’s new book have previously been published elsewhere, they’re made fresh here both through being collected and through their chronological placement. Readers can practically watch Nelson’s incisive mind growing and changing as she speaks with colleagues such as Hilton Als and Judith Butler, or as she writes about queerness, motherhood, violence, the lyrics of Prince and the devastating loss of a friend.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder By Salman Rushdie Random House: 204 pages, $28 (April 16)

On Aug. 12, 2022, the author Salman Rushdie was speaking at upstate New York’s Chautauqua festival when a man rushed the stage and attempted to murder him. Rushdie, a target of Iranian religious leaders since 1989, was permanently injured. In this book, he shares his experience for the first time, having said that this was essential for him to write. In this way, he answers violence with art, once again reminding us all that freedom of expression must be protected.

Lotus Girl: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America By Helen Tworkov St. Martin’s Essentials: 336 pages, $29 (April 16)

Tworkov, founder of the magazine Tricycle, chronicles her move from a 1960s young-adult interest in Buddhism to travels through Asia and deep study in the United States of the different strands that follow the Buddha’s teachings. Tworkov mentions luminaries such as the artist Richard Serra, the composer Charles Mingus and the Dalai Lama, but she’s not name-dropping. Instead, she’s strewing fragrant petals from her singular path to mindfulness that may help us find ours.

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War By Erik Larson Crown: 592 pages, $35 (April 30)

Even diehard Civil War aficionados will learn from Larson’s look at the six months between Lincoln’s 1860 election and the surrender of Union troops under Maj. Robert Anderson at Charleston’s Ft. Sumter. Larson details Anderson’s secret Christmas redeployment and explores this individual’s contradictions as a former slave owner who loyally follows Lincoln’s orders. The author also shares first-person perspective from the famous diaries of the upper-class Southerner Mary Chesnut. All together, the book provides a riveting reexamination of a nation in tumult.

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