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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.

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.

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.