What does Prince Harry’s book reveal?
The Duke’s “personal journey from trauma to healing”. There are chapters about his childhood, his time in the military and serving in Afghanistan, and his life as a husband and father
Have any extracts leaked from Prince Harry’s book?
What are the biggest talking points in Prince Harry’s book?
Where do we start?! Prince Harry writes in the book that Prince William physically attacked him during an argument at Harry’s home in 2019, leaving the Duke with injuries to his back.
“William 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.”
Another bombshell moment revealed that Prince William and Princess Kate “howled” over Prince Harry’s Nazi uniform, which he wore to a costume party in 2005. Harry refers to it as, “one of the biggest mistakes” of his life.
“I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought. Nazi uniform, they said,” Harry writes. He added that when he tried it on for them, “They both howled. Worse than Willy’s leotard outfit! Way more ridiculous! Which, again, was the point.”
Harry also speaks about meeting with William and King Charles at Prince Philip’s funeral in April 2021. According to the memoir, Charles stood between his sons “looking up at our flushed faces” and Harry quotes him as saying: “Please, boys. Don’t make my final years a misery.”
There’s also a story about his frostbitten penis
King Charles, as he became upon the death of Queen Elizabeth, in September, will not find much to like in “Spare,” which may offer the most thoroughgoing scything of treacherous royals and their scheming courtiers since the Prince of Denmark’s bloody swath through the halls of Elsinore. Queen Camilla, formerly “the Other Woman” in Charles and Diana’s unhappy marriage, is,
Harry judges, “dangerous,” having “sacrificed me on her personal PR altar.” William’s wife, Kate, now the Princess of Wales, is haughty and cool, brushing off Meghan’s homeopathic remedies.
William himself is domineering and insecure, with a wealth of other deficits: “his familiar scowl, which had always been his default in dealings with me; his alarming baldness, more advanced than my own; his famous resemblance to Mummy, which was fading with time.” Charles is, for the most part, more tenderly drawn
. In “Spare,” the King is a figure of tragic pathos, whose frequently repeated term of endearment for Harry, “darling boy,” most often precedes an admission that there is nothing to be done—or, at least, nothing he can do—
about the burden of their shared lot as members of the nation’s most important, most privileged, most scrutinized, most publicly dysfunctional family. “Please, boys—don’t make my final years a misery,” he pleads, in Harry’s account of the burial-ground showdown.
That passage indicates another spectral figure haunting the text of “Spare”—that of Harry’s ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer. Harry, or his publishing house—which paid a reported twenty-million-dollar advance for the book—could not have chosen better.
Moehringer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter turned memoirist and novelist, as well as the ghostwriter of, most notably, Andre Agassi’s thrillingly candid memoir,
“Open.” In that book, published in 2009, a tennis ace once reviled for his denim shorts and flowing mullet revealed himself to be a troubled, tennis-hating neurotic with father issues and an unreliable hairpiece. When the title and the cover art of “Spare” were made public, late last year,
the kinship between the two books—single-word title; closeup, set-jaw portrait—indicated that they were to be understood as fraternal works in the Moehringer œuvre. Moehringer has what is usually called a novelist’s eye for detail, effectively deployed in “Spare.”
That patched, starched bed linen at Balmoral, emblazoned with E.R., the formal initials of the Queen, is, of course, a metaphor for the constricting, and quite possibly threadbare, fabric of the institution of monarchy itself
Moehringer has also bestowed upon Harry the legacy that his father was unable to force on him: a felicitous familiarity with the British literary canon. The language of Shakespeare rings in his sentences.
Those wanton journalists who publish falsehoods or half-truths? They treat the royals as insects: “What fun, to pluck their wings,” Harry writes, in an echo of “King Lear,” a play about the fragility of kingly authority.
During his military training as a forward air controller, a role in which he guided the flights and firepower of pilots from an earthbound station,
Harry describes the release of bombs as “spirits melting into air”—a phrase drawn from “The Tempest,” a play about a duke in exile across the water.
Elevating flourishes like these give readers—perhaps British ones in particular—a shiver of recognition, as if the chords of “Jerusalem” were being struck on a church organ.
But they also remind those readers of the necessary literary artifice at work in the enterprise of “Spare,”
as Moehringer shapes Harry’s memories and obsessions, traumas and bugbears, into a coherent narrative: the peerless ghostwriter giving voice to the Shakespeareless prince
Has King Charles read Prince Harry’s memoir?
It’s not known whether Prince Harry gave his family a preview copy of Spare, but we doubt it. In a conversation with ITV’s Tom Bradby, he said he didn’t think his dad would read the book.
The royals have been out since the book’s release, and King Charles maintained a dignified silence while on a trip to Aberdeenshire when he was asked if he was ‘hurt by the comments’ in Prince Harry’s memoir. He did not acknowledge the question.
Prince William also ignored a reporter who asked if he had a chance to read Harry’s autobiography Spare during his first royal engagement since the release of the book.
What does SPARE mean for Prince Harry’s book title?
Prince Harry has had this label on his head for his entire life. ‘The heir and the spare’ or ‘the spare to the heir’ is a common way to refer to the monarch and their sibling.
In the olden days when disease was rampant and death among children common, having multiple “spares” ensured the family’s line wouldn’t end.
Prince Harry wishes to support British charities with donations from his proceeds from SPARE. The Duke of Sussex has donated $1,500,000 to Sentebale, an organisation he founded with Prince Seeiso in their mothers’ legacies, which supports vulnerable children and young people in Lesotho and Botswana affected by HIV/AIDS.
Prince Harry will also donate to the non-profit organization WellChild in the amount of £300,000.
WellChild, of which he has been Royal patron for 15 years, makes it possible for children and young people with complex health needs to be cared for at home instead of hospital, wherever possible.
As painful as Charles must find the book’s revealing content, he might grudgingly approve of Harry’s Shakespearean flourishes in delivering it.
Thirty-odd years ago, in giving the annual Shakespeare Birthday Lecture at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon, the future monarch spoke of the eternal relevance of the playwright’s insights into human nature, citing, among other references,
Hamlet’s monologue with the phrase “What a piece of work is a man!” Shakespeare, Charles told his audience, offers us “blunt reminders of the flaws in our own personalities, and of the mess which we so often make of our lives.” In “Spare,”
Harry describes his father’s devotion to Shakespeare, paraphrasing Charles’s message about the Bard’s works in terms that seem to refer equally to that other pillar of British identity, the monarchy:
“They’re our shared heritage, we should be cherishing them, safeguarding them, and instead we’re letting them die.”
Harry counts himself among “the Shakespeareless hordes,” bored and confused as a teen-ager when his father drags him to see performances of the Royal Shakespeare Company; disinclined to read much of anything, least of all the freighted works of Britain’s national author.
(“Not really big on books,” he confesses to Meghan Markle when, on their second date, she tells him she’s having an “Eat, Pray, Love” summer, and he has no idea what she’s on about.)
Harry at least gives a compelling excuse for his inability to discover what his father so valued, though it’s probably not one that he gave to his schoolmasters at Eton. “I tried to change,” he recalls. “I opened Hamlet. Hmm:
Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper . . . ? I slammed it shut. No, thank you.”
Moehringer has fashioned the Duke of Sussex’s life story into a tight three-act drama, consisting of his occasionally wayward youth; his decade of military service, which included two tours of duty in Afghanistan; and his relationship with Meghan.
Throughout, there are numerous bombshells, which—thanks to the o’er hasty publication of the book’s Spanish edition—did not so much melt into air as materialize into clickbait.
These included the allegation that, in 1998, Camilla leaked word to a tabloid of her first meeting with Prince William—according to Harry, the opening sally in a campaign to secure marriage to Charles and a throne by his side. (Harry does not mention that, at the time,
Camilla’s personal assistant took responsibility for the leak—she’d told her husband, a media executive, who’d told a friend, who’d told someone at the Sun, who’d printed it. Bloody journalists.)
They also include less consequential but more titillating arcana, such as Harry’s account of losing his virginity,
in a field behind a pub, to an unnamed older woman, who treated him “not unlike a young stallion. Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me off to graze.”
The Daily Mail, Harry’s longtime media nemesis, had a field day with that revelation, door-stepping a now forty-four-year-old businesswoman to come up with the deathless headline
“Horse-loving ex-model six years older than Harry, who once breathlessly revealed the Prince left her mouth numb with passionate kissing in a muddy field, refuses to discuss whether she is the keen horsewoman who took his virginity in a field.