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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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The Haunting of Prince Harry

By Rebecca Mead

Balmoral Castle, in the Scottish Highlands, was Queen Elizabeth’s preferred resort among her several castles and palaces, and in the opening pages of “ Spare ” (Random House), the much anticipated, luridly leaked, and compellingly artful autobiography of Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, its environs are intimately described. We get the red-coated footman attending the heavy front door; the mackintoshes hanging on hooks; the cream-and-gold wallpaper; and the statue of Queen Victoria, to which Harry and his older brother, William, always bowed when passing. Beyond lay the castle’s fifty bedrooms—including the one known in the brothers’ childhood as the nursery, unequally divided into two. William occupied the larger half, with a double bed and a splendid view; Harry’s portion was more modest, with a bed frame too high for a child to scale, a mattress that sagged in the middle, and crisp bedding that was “pulled tight as a snare drum, so expertly smoothed that you could easily spot the century’s worth of patched holes and tears.”

It was in this bedroom, early in the morning of August 31, 1997, that Harry, aged twelve, was awakened by his father, Charles, then the Prince of Wales, with the terrible news that had already broken across the world: the princes’ mother, Princess Diana, from whom Charles had been divorced a year earlier and estranged long before that, had died in a car crash in Paris. “He was standing at the edge of the bed, looking down,” Harry writes of the moment in which he learned of the loss that would reshape his personality and determine the course of his life. He goes on to describe his father’s appearance with an unusual simile: “His white dressing gown made him seem like a ghost in a play.”

What ghost would that be, and what play? The big one, of course, bearing the name of that other brooding princely Aitch: Hamlet. Within the first few pages of “Spare,” Shakespeare’s play is alluded to more than once. There’s a jocular reference: “To beard or not to beard” is how Harry foreshadows a contentious family debate over whether he should be clean-shaven on his wedding day. And there’s an instance far graver: an account, in the prologue, of a fraught encounter between Harry, William, and Charles in April, 2021, a few hours after the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen’s husband and the Royal Family’s patriarch, at Windsor. The meeting had been called by Harry in the vain hope that he might get his obdurate parent and sibling, first and second in line to the throne, to see why he and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, had felt it necessary to flee Britain for North America, relinquishing their royal roles, if not their ducal titles. The three men met in Frogmore Gardens, on the Windsor estate, which includes the last resting place of many illustrious ancestors, and as they walked its gravel paths they talked with increasing tension about their apparently irreconcilable differences. They “were now smack in the middle of the Royal Burial Ground,” Harry writes, “more up to our ankles in bodies than Prince Hamlet.”

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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.

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.”

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.

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.”

The leaks have done the book’s sales no harm, and neither have Harry’s pre-publication interviews on “Good Morning America” and “60 Minutes”; in the U.K., Harry did an hour-and-a-half-long special with Tom Bradby, the journalist to whom Meghan tearfully bemoaned, in the fall of 2019, that “not many people have asked if I’m O.K.” But “Spare” is worth reading not just for its headline-generating details but also for its narrative force, its voice, and its sometimes surprising wit. Harry describes his trepidation in telling his brother that he intended to propose to Meghan: William “predicted a host of difficulties I could expect if I hooked up with an ‘American actress,’ a phrase he always managed to make sound like ‘convicted felon’ ”—an observation so splendid that a reader can only hope it was actually Harry’s.

There is much in the book that people conversant with the contours of the Prince’s life, insofar as they have hitherto been reported, will find familiar. At the same time, Harry bursts any number of inaccurate reports, including a rumored flirtation with another convicted fel— sorry, American actress, Cameron Diaz: “I was never within fifty meters of Ms. Diaz, further proof that if you like reading pure bollocks then royal biographies are just your thing.” Not a few of the incidents Harry chooses to describe in detail are centered on images or stories already in the public domain, such as being beset by paparazzi when leaving night clubs—he explains that he started being ferried away in the trunk of his driver’s car so as to avoid lashing out at his pursuers—and being required to perform uncomfortable media interviews while serving in Afghanistan in exchange for the newspapers’ keeping shtum about his deployment, for security reasons. (An Australian publication blew the embargo, and Harry was swiftly extracted from the battlefield.)

Given that what Harry dredges up from his past are so often things that have been publicly documented, one wonders whether Moehringer was obliged to indulge Harry’s extended dilation upon media-inflicted wounds , through Zoom sessions that even sympathetic readers will find exhausting to contemplate. There is a certain amount of score-settling and record-straightening, which, though obviously important to the author, can be wearying to a reader, who may feel that if she has to read another word about those accursed bridesmaids’ dresses—of who said what to whom, and who caused whom to cry—she just might burst into tears herself. More significantly, though, there are broadsides against unforgivable intrusions committed by the press, including phone hacking. (Harry is still engaged in lawsuits against a number of British newspapers that allegedly intercepted his voice mails more than a dozen years ago.)

And then there are pages and pages devoted to Harry’s personal trials, which even the most dogged reporter on Fleet Street would not dare dream of uncovering. Chief among these is Harry’s struggle to overcome penile frostnip after a charitable Arctic excursion with a group of veterans, which ends up in a clandestine visit to a Harley Street doctor; he writes, “North Pole, I told him. I went to the North Pole and now my South Pole is on the fritz.” “On the fritz” is an Americanism that we can hope Harry picked up while guiding American pilots—he calls them Yanks—back to base in Afghanistan, rather than the exchange being the ingenious invention of his ghostwriter. Moehringer, on the whole, does a good job of conveying the laddish argot of a millennial British prince, who addresses his friends as “mate” and—repeatedly—calls his penis his “todger.”

Above all, “Spare” is worth reading for its potential historical import, which is likely to resonate, if not to the crack of doom, then well into the reign of King Charles III, and even into that of his successor. As was the case in 1992 with the publication of “ Diana: Her True Story ,” by Andrew Morton—to whom, it was revealed after her death, the Princess of Wales gave her full coöperation, herself the ghost behind the writer—“Spare” is an unprecedented exposure of the Royal Family from the most deeply embedded of informants. The Prince in exile does not hesitate to detail the pettiness, the vanity, and the inglorious urge toward self-preservation of those who are now the monarchy’s highest-ranking representatives.

It’s not clear that even now, having authored a book, Harry entirely understands what a book is; when challenged by Tom Bradby about his decision to reveal private conversations after having railed so forcefully about the invasive tactics of the press, Harry replied, “The level of planting and leaking from other members of the family means that in my mind they have written countless books—certainly, millions of words have been dedicated to trying to trash my wife and myself to the point of where I had to leave my country.” Pity the poor ghostwriter who has to hear his craft compared to the spewing verbiage of the media churn—by its commissioning subject, no less. (Man, what a piece of work.) Remarkably, Prince Harry has suggested that he sees the book as an invitation to reconciliation, addressed to his father and brother—a way of speaking to them publicly when all his efforts to address them privately have failed to persuade. “Spare” is, you might say, Prince Harry’s “Mousetrap”—a literary device intended to catch the conscience of the King, and the King after him.

If so, the ruse seems about as likely to end well for Harry as Hamlet’s play-within-a-play efforts did for him. Moehringer, at least, knows this, even if Harry may hope that his own royal plot will swerve unexpectedly from implacable tragedy to restitutive melodrama. In a soaring coda, Moehringer has the Prince once again reflecting on the royal dead, describing the family he belongs to as nothing less than a death cult. “We christened and crowned, graduated and married, passed out and passed over our beloveds’ bones. Windsor Castle itself was a tomb, the walls filled with ancestors,” Harry writes. It’s a powerful motif: the Prince—shattered in childhood by his mother’s death, his every step determined by the inescapable legacy of the countless royal dead—as an unwilling Hamlet pushed, rather than leaping, into the grave.

Recalling the meeting with his father and brother in the Frogmore burial ground with which the book began, Harry invokes the most famous soliloquy from the play of Shakespeare’s that he says he once slammed shut: “Why were we here, lurking along the edge of that ‘undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns?’ ” Then comes a final, lovely, true, and utterly poetry-puncturing observation: “Though maybe that’s a more apt description of America.” In moving to the paradisaical climes of California, Harry has been spared a life he had no use for, which had no real use for him. The unlettered Prince has gained in life what Hamlet achieved only in death: his own story shaped on his own terms, thanks to the intervention of a skillful Horatio. You might almost call it Harry’s crowning achievement. ♦

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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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Prince Harry’s Spare is a sad and self-indicting portrait of royalty on the brink

The press is the villain but there are no heroes in Prince Harry’s new memoir.

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Spare , the explosive new memoir from Prince Harry, is a conflicted book. It feels like a diatribe from someone who has only recently learned that it is physically possible to talk openly about his life and his anger, and who now has no idea how to modulate himself. The result is occasionally insufferable, but also oddly fascinating. At times you wonder if it should ever have been made public.

By turns artless and lyrical, affectionate and bitter, Spare ’s 400 pages read in a chaotic swirl. It spirals from the death of Harry’s mother Princess Diana in 1997, across his stunted and laddish adolescence, through his manly army days and his marriage to Meghan Markle, and up to the point that he decided to step down as a senior member of the British royal family in 2020.

Throughout, Harry’s ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer channels Harry’s voice with disarming candor. Intimate details of royal life stream out unceasingly: the brown peat-sweetened water in the baths at Balmoral, the petty squabbles over parking spots at Kensington Palace, the miserly Windsor Christmas traditions. (Princess Margaret, upon gifting Harry a cheap ballpoint pen, points out that it has a tiny rubber fish wrapped around it. “Wow,” says Harry.)

Moehringer, who won a Pulitzer under his own name for his 2000 Los Angeles Times article “ Crossing Over ” and ghostwrote Andre Agassi’s celebrated memoir Open , presents Harry to the reader as a likably jockish sort, straightforward and uninterested in literary flourishes. His sentences are simple and sparse, often broken into single words. Harry (via Moehringer) introduces a Faulkner reference by noting that he found it on brainyquote.com, and he is charmingly overwhelmed by Meghan’s literary sophistication when she references Eat Pray Love , a book Harry informs us he has never heard of.

More Harry’s speed, it seems, are stories about how he lost his virginity (an older woman behind a pub) and how his penis was frostbitten during a trek to the North Pole (“Now my South Pole is on the fritz”). These he presents to the reader with a sort of dirty wink, an establishing of his credentials as a lad’s lad who would certainly never want to get in the way of anyone’s good time.

And yet even Harry, the subtext goes, can see that there is something badly wrong with the relationship between the British monarchy and the British press — especially when it comes to the way the British press treated Meghan, the British monarchy’s first member of color. So what’s everyone else’s excuse?

What, especially, is the excuse of Harry’s father and brother, King Charles and Prince William, that fraught, fragile family unit left behind after Diana’s death? They are the people to whom Harry was at one point closest in the world, and from whom he is now estranged. His relationships with them, and with his lost mother, are the beating heart of Spare .

Harry writes with palpable tenderness about Charles and William, whom he calls Pa and Willy. (In turn, Charles calls Harry “darling boy,” and William calls Harry “Harold.”) Charles appears during Harry’s childhood as an absentmindedly sweet man who leaves notes on Harry’s pillow about how proud he is of him. Every morning, Charles does headstands in his underwear for physical therapy, and he is attached to his childhood teddy bear, which he totes around everywhere. Meanwhile, William, the only person who truly understands the trauma of Diana’s death and of growing up in the glare of paparazzi flashbulbs, is in the first section of the book a partner in crime, a comrade, the first person Harry turns to with problems large and small: both when one of Diana’s old friends writes a tell-all, and when one of Harry’s school friends convinces him to shave off all his hair.

Yet Charles and William are both, in Harry’s telling, corrupted by the force of the crown, which pushes them to prioritize their own reputations and consider Harry’s expendable. Heirs, always, over spares.

“I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy,” he writes bluntly. “I was summoned to provide backup, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow.” In real life, William seems to be in little need of organ donations, but both he and Charles could always use something to take the pressure of the press’s attention off of them. Harry provides a handy distraction.

To that end, Charles allows his office to form an alliance with a journalist who falsely reports that a teenage Harry has gone to rehab for his cocaine use. Rather than denouncing the story, they use it to make Charles look sympathetic as the harried single father to a teen addict. (Harry darkly sees the hand of Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles’s longtime mistress and now queen consort, at work here, as the source for the piece is a known Camilla ally.)

The pattern continues for decades, with Charles and Camilla continually prioritizing their own rehabilitation narrative over the reputations of their children, and justifying the practice because they are the ones closest to the throne. They even, Harry reports, try to pressure Kate to change her name from Catherine to Katherine so as to avoid having too many royal “C”s. (Kate apparently declined.)

Meanwhile, William, Harry writes, is incensed with the way Harry gets to ignore the rules that regiment William’s own life: The heir must always be beyond reproach, but the spare gets to have fun. William has to shave his beard, but Harry gets to wear his even when in military uniform, in violation of protocol. William has to get married in his bright red Irish Guards uniform even though he prefers to wear the Household Cavalry frock coat uniform, but Harry gets to wear his uniform of choice to his own wedding.

To compensate for the loss of autonomy, Harry writes, William pulls rank constantly. As a teen, he tells Harry not to talk to him when they are both at Eton. As an adult, he seems put off that Meghan goes for a hug rather than a curtsy upon first meeting him. He squabbles over how he and Harry should split up their charitable concerns and tries to veto both Harry’s Invictus Games for wounded veterans and his environmental advocacy in Africa. “I let you have veterans,” he tells Harry, “why can’t you let me have African elephants and rhinos?”

When the tabloids falsely report that Meghan made Kate cry during the lead-up to her wedding with Harry (the truth, as Meghan told Oprah , is that Kate made Meghan cry), Harry traces the story to William, who fed it to Charles and Camilla, who fed it to the press. No correction, he writes, will ever be forthcoming from any of them, “because it would embarrass the future queen. The monarchy always, at all costs, had to be protected.”

Later, Harry writes that William has grown suspicious of the enlightened new attitudes Harry espouses post-Meghan, and post-therapy (suggested by Meghan). He seems to feel almost abandoned, as though Harry has left him behind in the suffocating structure of the monarchy. He refuses to join Harry in therapy, calling him “brainwashed.”

In the midst of one argument, William throws Harry to the floor so forcefully that a dog food dish shatters below him. The act is both violently aggressive and oddly plaintive, like the last resort of a spurned lover. “Come on, we always used to fight,” William says. “You’ll feel better if you hit me.” Harry refuses. As William leaves, he asks Harry not to tell Meghan about the incident and says, “I didn’t attack you, Harold.”

As in all families, deep betrayals and petty nonsense seem to hold equal emotional weight for the Windsors. Harry is justly furious with Camilla for the public relations rehab maneuver, but he’s also angry that she converted one of his many old bedrooms into her dressing room after he moved out, and that she once seemed bored talking to him at afternoon tea. He’s glad she makes his father happy, but he resents her for taking Charles away from him, in the same way that he resents Kate, whom he seems to genuinely like, for taking William away from him.

Harry is ambivalent not just about his family but also about the press, the central villain of this story and an object of fascination for him. He despises them, actively blames them for his mother’s death, compares the sound of a paparazzo’s clicking shutter to the sound of gunfire. He also reads their coverage obsessively, to the point that absorbing press coverage of the royal family seems to be his main hobby. He has nicknames for his least favorite journalists and follows the minutia of their careers with interest. When he bitterly mocks one reporter for starting two sentences in a row with the word “but” in a negative story written about him when he was 15 years old, he does so with the cadence of a man who’s been workshopping the bit in his head nonstop for multiple decades. A therapist suggests that he is addicted to the press, and he doesn’t dispute it.

The root trauma here is, of course, Diana: radiant, beloved, unreachable Diana. Harry was 12 years old when Diana died in a car crash in Paris. After her death, he had to march behind her coffin in a funeral procession while the world watched, and then shake hands and exchange pleasantries with the many mourners who had never met her, and whose hands were often, he writes in a striking detail, wet with their own tears. He himself only cried when Diana was interred, and then felt “ashamed of violating the family ethos.” Then he found himself unable to cry over her again until he was an adult.

In Spare , Harry writes about Diana with a child’s idealization. In his prose, she is beyond saints, beyond goddesses. When he meets a woman who remembers Diana cuddling her on a charity visit when she was a small child, he is overwhelmed with jealousy. Trauma has gnawed holes into all his own memories of his mother.

The army, in Harry’s narrative, both steadies and further traumatizes him. He feels that he grew up while on active duty, that he found his sense of purpose. (He believes wholeheartedly that the war in Afghanistan was just, although he notes that he doesn’t think the army was all that effective at swaying Afghan hearts and minds for the cause of Western democracy. He also makes a point of noting that he made sure each of the 25 people he killed were verified Taliban operatives and not civilians.) But after he returns from his tours, he begins to suffer from panic attacks every time he has to speak in public. Agoraphobia keeps him tethered to the tiny bachelor’s apartment his father has allotted him, watching Friends reruns and identifying with Chandler.

Things will be different, Harry thinks, when he is married. “You weren’t a fully vested member of the Royal Family, indeed a true human being, until you were wed,” he explains. After he’s married, he imagines, he won’t be afraid to go out in public, because his family will start to respect him. His grandmother will stop sticking him in the servant’s wing during holidays at Balmoral, because he’ll have more seniority. His father will up his allowance and give him a family home. He’ll get his beloved brother back, because he and William and Kate and whoever he marries will get to be couple friends together. And he’ll have, at long last, a partner, someone to replace the source of unconditional love he lost when his mother died.

Instead, when Harry marries, Charles tells him that he can’t afford to support both him and the Cambridges. (Supporting his children, Harry notes with outrage, was supposed to be part of Charles’s job as Prince of Wales, not something he did “out of any largesse.” After all, being the sons of the Prince of Wales rendered both William and Harry unemployable.) William darkly repeats tabloid stories about Meghan being pushy and abrasive, while Kate flinches away from Meghan’s American friendliness. And Meghan is so badly harassed by racist tabloids that she begins to struggle with suicidal ideation.

Harry does not explicitly blame the monarchy for any of these problems. In subtext, Spare is a searing indictment of the British crown, which Harry depicts as a force that warps family dynamics under the strength of its imperative: to protect the crown, and those in the direct line of succession, at the expense of everyone else. Yet textually, Harry declares his full-throated support for the monarchy and for his commander-in-chief. He writes lyrically of the “magic” of the crown itself, the beauty of its jewels, of how much he believes it means to the people of the British Commonwealth.

“The crown seemed to possess some inner energy source, something beyond the sum of its parts,” he writes, in an apparent attempt to square the difference. “But all I could think … was how tragic that it should remain locked up in this Tower.” The implication seems to be that the monarchy is strong and powerful and a force for good, but that it’s been hindered by forces that go too far to protect it. The idea appears nowhere else in Spare , and here it feels less than convincing.

Spare does not exist, though, for the monarchy. Spare exists, apparently, for William and Charles, the lost loves of Harry’s life, stolen from him by their wives, by the press, by the institution, by everything they chose before they chose him. He is writing and publishing Spare , he explains in the foreword, in order to explain to them why he felt he had to leave them and the rest of the family behind, to move to California and start over.

He can’t explain it to their faces, he writes. “It would take too long. Besides, they’re clearly not in the right frame of mind to listen. Not now, anyway. Not today. And so: Pa? Willy? World? Here you go.”

The tragedy of Spare is that everything Harry has told us makes it clear that Charles and William will take this memoir not as an explanation or a love letter but as a betrayal worse than anything they ever did to Harry, and that they may not be wrong. Even if they never read it, as seems highly possible, how can they avoid the endless stream of coverage, the interviews Harry has granted about the book, the Netflix documentary that came in December, the nonstop stream of information about Harry and Meghan that the two of them have flung out into the world? You close the book with the queasy sense that in reading it, you’ve been prying into something deathly private, that probably this book should not exist at all.

It’s as though Harry, who hates the press and its constant invasion of his privacy, has had to become press himself in order to finally bring the emotional force of his argument home. Because reading Spare , it’s hard to avoid the thought that we never had any right to these people’s lives at all.

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Spare by Prince Harry: A chaotic but stylish memoir that sets fire to the royal family

His wife might be the natural on camera, but the duke of sussex hits his stride on paper in this breathtakingly frank book, article bookmarked.

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You might feel as if you’ve already read Prince Harry ’s memoir Spare by now. The virginity lost to a stallion trainer behind a pub. The dog bowl-smashing, necklace-ripping tussle with William. The constant calling out of his family briefing the press. This book doesn’t so much lift the curtain on private royal life than rip it off and shake out its contents. But it’s also richly detailed and at times beautifully written; if Harry is going to set fire to his family, he has at least done it with some style.

Spare ’s ghostwriter JR Moehringer was behind tennis star Andre Agassi’s extraordinary memoir Open, and his choice as Harry’s collaborator was an early indication that the book would be no curling celebrity memoir. Even so, it is breathtakingly frank. His wife might be the natural on camera, but Harry seems to hit his stride on paper, his voice more authentic than the Californian inflections he slipped into while being interviewed with Meghan for their great soufflé of a Netflix docuseries (between the bombshells of Oprah and Spare , the streaming giant might be feeling justifiably short changed) even if at times his style is a little chaotic, written in a gallop of posh, staccato sentences that speak of “Ma”, “Pa”, “Willy”, and (yes) “todgers”.

Charles is less a father figure than a kind but emotionally distant uncle, who laughs in the wrong places when Harry performed in Much Ado About Nothing at Eton, and potters around Balmoral with his “wireless”. There is a disconnect between his words and deeds. He calls Harry “darling boy” but doesn’t ever hug him, even when delivering news of Diana’s death; he expresses joy at Harry’s birth to Diana but then goes straight off to see his “Other Woman” Camilla. “He’d always given the air of not being quite ready for parenthood – the responsibilities, the patience, the time,” Harry writes, but he is paradoxically an older Dad which “created problems, placed barriers between us”.

“Willy” is depicted as well-meaning but a little cold – and you get the distinct impression that they were never that close. Harry discovers his brother and Kate are engaged at the same time as everyone else. Their sibling rivalry is a “private olympiad” of petty grievances, from the size of their childhood bedrooms to ownership of causes: “I let you have veterans, why can’t you let me have African elephants and rhinos?” says William – who might also say that recollections vary. There is a whiff of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway in Harry’s assertion that “there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it than there is in so-called objective facts”.

As a boy, he deflects grief over Diana’s death by convincing himself that “Mummy” has simply faked her death and gone into hiding. The most affecting piece of writing in the book is when, as an adult, he asks to see photos of her body in the wreckage of the Paris tunnel, and observes a “supernatural” halo of light created by the camera flashes: “within some of [which] were ghostly visages, and half visages, paps and reflected paps and refracted paps on all the smooth metal surfaces and glass windscreens”.

• Royals despair as Prince Harry ‘kidnapped by cult of psychotherapy’
• Prince Harry news – live: King Charles will be ‘pained’ by Spare as tell-all book goes on sale
• Piers Morgan launches fresh attack on Prince Harry after ‘bitter’ ITV interview

A white-hot hatred of the press rages through the book – the media kills his mother, hounds him as a teen, ruins his army career, scares away girlfriends and tortures his wife. He fixates on a pair of paps nicknamed “Tweedle Dumb” and “Tweedle Dumber” and obsessively sets the record straight on decades-old stories, even one as innocuous as the claim he and William hung “Just Married” signs on Charles and Camilla’s wedding car. (Harry says he doesn’t believe this happened.)

In a row with his father and brother which bookends the memoir, Harry writes that Charles “hated [the press’s] hate, but oh how he loved their love… compulsively drawn to the elixir they offered him”. But his own fixation is compulsive too. In an online world his effort to correct every falsehood written about him looks like shouting at the sea. But there is humour in the book too, even if it’s of the squaddie variety – that account of his frostbitten penis after a trip to the North Pole culminates in an odd admission that he covered it in Elizabeth Arden and thought of his mother, who once used the cream.

Passages about army exploits and travels to Africa are worthy but a little bloated. More interesting are the rich accounts of gatherings at Balmoral, the strangely loving process of being “blooded” after stalking deer, the baths with brown running water, the Queen whipping up a salad dressing. His great aunt, Princess Margaret, giving him a Biro pen for Christmas.

Then along comes Meghan – her beauty “like a punch in the throat”. She is not just the new love of his life but his emotional life raft, one he fears the press is intent on sinking, like they did to his mother. The panic of losing her inflates between every line like a balloon. His family tells him to tough it out. You know what comes next.

So what makes him do it? Money? Revenge? A desire to emulate the Obamas – humanitarian power couple with matching Netflix and Spotify deals. But his book hardly adopts the “when they go low, we go high” ethos, and even sympathetic commentators across the pond are starting to grow weary of the Sussex confessional tour. Most likely was his desire to tell his truth (before Meghan inevitably tells hers in her own autobiography).

In his acknowledgements, Harry thanks Moehringer for persuading him that “memoir is a sacred obligation”. But for a prince raised in a golden goldfish bowl, isn’t privacy far more sacred, more precious? He has given up so much of it with Spare . I hope it’s worth it.

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Prince Harry’s Spare review — a 400-page therapy session for mystic Harry

In the prince’s telling, the royal family is like a cult from which he only narrowly escaped, writes james marriott.

Challenge yourself with today’s puzzles.

F rom the cover of Spare — perhaps the most hysterically anticipated memoir ever published — a confident and modern Prince Harry confronts his impatient readers. The furze of ginger beard is stylishly trimmed, a necklace (but presumably not that necklace) is subtly visible and he is bathed in a soft, therapeutic golden light. He looks like he should be running a tech startup or an expensive yoga retreat. This, you sense, is Harry as he believes himself to be: grown-up, truth-telling, faintly messianic.

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. So who is he? Well, a big part of him is still clearly the standard-issue braying

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Spare review: The weirdest book ever written by a royal

• Published 10 January 2023

Prince Harry reaches the royal parts never reached before

This must be the strangest book ever written by a royal.

Prince Harry's memoir, Spare, is part confession, part rant and part love letter. In places it feels like the longest angry drunk text ever sent.

It's the view from inside what he calls a "surreal fishbowl" and "unending Truman Show".

It's disarmingly frank and intimate - showing the sheer weirdness of his often isolated life. And it's the small details, rather than the set-piece moments, that give a glimpse of how little we really knew.

There are glimpses of him as a royal stoner, smoking a joint after dinner and worrying the smoke was going to blow over to his elderly neighbour the Duke of Kent.

Prince Harry's memoir hit the bookshelves on Tuesday

What other royal recollection would cover losing his virginity behind a pub, or go into such prolonged detail about a frost-bitten penis? This royal appendage gets more lines than many of his relatives. Maybe there should be a spoiler alert for the special cushion that's made.

He was also keenly conscious of girls with "throne syndrome", who would be "visibly fitting herself with a crown the moment she shook my hand".

What are the claims in Harry's memoir?

After leaks, memoir hits the bookshelves

Harry says Diana would be heartbroken over rift

Enduring anguish of being a royal 'spare'

Or there's the story about when he's in Buckingham Palace during the Golden Jubilee concert and listening to Brian May playing on the roof - and notices his grandmother Queen Elizabeth is wearing earplugs.

His pre-Meghan life in London was ostensibly full of luxury, but it also feels as though he was undercover in his own life.

Harry suffered from appalling panic attacks, awful for anyone, but debilitating for someone expected to speak and appear in public.

He describes his lonely life at home, self-medicating with psychedelic drugs, drying his clothes on a radiator and planning shopping trips like military raids, to be carried out in disguise and at speed.

Princess Diana and Harry: The book describes the trauma he felt at her loss

He doesn't have an Amazon account, but he hits TK Maxx for clothes, and carries out a weekly food shop in a supermarket, rehearsing exactly where to find his favourite salmon and yoghurts. When he's in there one day he overhears shoppers debating whether he's gay.

But it's a profoundly odd life, moving suddenly between this lack of glamour to time with the international jet set.

Harry says he watches the TV show Friends on a loop, identifying with the funny guy character of Chandler. But then on a trip to the US he is at a party with Courteney Cox, the actress who plays Chandler's on-screen wife, Monica.

And this really is a trip, because he ends up taking hallucinogenic drugs and watches a pedal-bin coming to life. It's a long way from the commentary for Trooping the Colour.

The ghost-written work is a fast-paced, quickfire account, looking out from the inside, always scratchily aware of the bodyguards outside the door and the cameras waiting to catch him. As a schoolboy, smoking cannabis with his friends, he watches the police outside there to guard him.

Leaks of the book revealed the scale of the conflict between Prince William and Prince Harry

At the very centre of this story, permeating almost every page, is the huge trauma that seems to have distorted the rest of his life - the death of his mother Princess Diana.

He adored her unreservedly and an overwhelming sense of unresolved grief is at the hub of all his other anxieties, like spokes on a wheel.

He really, really hates the press, blaming them for chasing his mother so relentlessly, including in the events leading to her death in Paris, with Harry returning obsessively to the scene of the car accident.

His anger at the news media is wide ranging, but Rupert Murdoch is singled out in particular and one of his executives is only described in anagram form, so much is his allergic reaction.

The rows with his brother Prince William are often framed by references to the closeness they had previously had with their mother.

His paralysing anxiety and self-destructiveness also seem to be consequences of the loss of his mother, taking away an emotional anchor that, until meeting Meghan, he had never replaced.

King Charles tried to offer support to Harry after the death of his mother

Warning: Some strong language is used in the following paragraphs

There is also something of a death obsession. Going into Westminster Abbey for his brother's wedding he cheerfully thinks about the 3,000 people buried in the church over the centuries.

What's missing from the book is any sense of awareness of any wider context of the rest of the world outside. It's as if he has been blinded by the paparazzi flashlights. No one worries about paying gas bills in this book. He's back and forth to Africa like he was going a few stops on the Northern Line.

Although, that would have been more exotic for him because he says the only time he got on a Tube train was on a school trip.

While copiously indiscreet about the interior of royal life - yes, that's his father doing physio exercises in his boxers - it remains strangely silent on any views about the outside world, even though he's no longer a working royal.

There are some glimpses. Harry talks about Prince William making what he calls a "vaguely anti-Brexit speech" which seems to annoy the tabloids.

"Brexit was their bread and butter. How dare he suggest it was bullshit," he writes.

The other royals are claimed by Prince Harry to be obsessing over the score sheets of how many visits they've carried out compared with other family members, looking over their shoulders in case anyone should question their purpose.

But he is also unmistakably a creature of his own upbringing, describing shooting a deer in a way that doesn't feel like the new-age therapy version of Californian Harry.

So who will be most upset about all these revelations in his book?

Netflix mostly. They paid a prince's ransom for six hours of TV waffle and the smug contents of an Instagram feed, whereas the book crackles like a burning log with something bizarre on almost every page.

Plenty of the book will get people irritated too, particularly its self-absorption. He talks about a row over people parking near his palace accommodation with more detail than you'd expect from a small war.

There are some off-the-wall claims too, such as comparing the Spice Girls' "crusade against sexism" with "Mandela's struggle against apartheid".

The leaks of the book have focused on the family conflicts and Harry's resentment at a lack of support for him and Meghan.

Camilla arrives in the story to become his stepmother, with the narrative exuding a mixture of suspicion and a determined effort to be polite. But mostly suspicion really. It feels a bit divorced dad telling everyone he's not bitter, he doesn't mind that he paid for everything, really, not bitter at all, just wishing them both well...

But taken as a whole, beyond the excerpts, a much warmer picture emerges of his father, King Charles, even when it seems that the narrator is giving him a hard time.

Charles is seen padding around in his slippers, listening to his audio-books, obsessed with Shakespeare, wearing Dior scent and falling asleep at his desk. He's seen as having faced terrible school bullying, still keeping a teddy bear as a totem of a lonely childhood.

His father tries to provide some emotional support for Harry after Diana's death, sitting up with him until he falls asleep at night, but it feels as though his good intentions had to navigate some tricky barriers.

Charles leaves notes for him trying to say nice things - but Harry questions why he couldn't say them in person. He goes to see Harry in a school play and laughs uproariously and is then criticised by his son for laughing in the wrong places.

When the adult brothers are feuding, Charles begins to sound like something of a Shakespearean figure himself, King Lear in tweed, begging his sons not to make his old age a misery.

The King is presented as old fashioned and rather unworldly. But he might be learning a new bit of text speak. TMI. Too much information...

Follow Sean on Twitter , external

Related Topics

• Princess Diana, Princess of Wales
• UK Royal Family
• Meghan, Duchess of Sussex
• Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex

More on this story

Harry book hits shelves after days of controversy

Who is JR Moehringer, Harry's celebrated ghostwriter?

Harry makes sensational claims in new memoir

• Published 7 January 2023

NEWS... BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT

Prince Harry’s book has totally changed my mind about him… and the Royal Family

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As the slow drips of detail started to seep out last week, Spare looked set to be one of the biggest book releases of the decade.

I’d like to consider myself a fairly level-headed observer of the royal family ; having grown up just outside Windsor and being able to see the castle from my bedroom (well, if you really squint on a clear day) I have often cast a curious eye across the headlines to see what the royals/my neighbours were up to.

My opinions on the Windsors are conflicting – while I know there’s deep-rooted issues with the colonialism the monarchy represents and the privilege they all enjoy, I have avidly devoured The Crown and would occasionally go gooey-eyed about the late Queen .

But the excerpts leaked from Spare in the run up to its release – from ‘Harold’ and ‘Willy’ having physical fights to Hazza snorting lines at shooting parties and shagging in fields made even me, the most casual observer of the crown, want to neck Harry’s book neat like a shot of tequila.

So that’s exactly what I did, after trekking to a colleague’s house to pick up the weighty tome, the preview arriving four hours later than planned.

Spare does not so much spill the tea on life in the royal household – it rather smashes the entire gold gilded teapot, with the carefully PR-curated representations of King Charles and Prince William shattered amongst the shards.

Harry is unflinchingly raw and honest in his writing, describing his father’s glacial manner being at odds with Harry’s ‘sillier’ self.

The pair consistently fail to connect, with the King choosing not to pull his son in for a hug when he announced his mother, Princess Diana, had died, to laughing at all the wrong points and causing blushes when Harry starred in an Eton production of Much Ado About Nothing.

His love for William, ‘Willy’, is evident, but often superseded by their ‘private olympiad’ of a sibling rivalry – constantly putting each other on the backfoot, tensions between them build to a crescendo which culminates in the much-publicised physical fight at Nott Cott.

Harry offered a less measured portrayal of his step-mother, Queen consort Camilla, whom he describes as ‘bored’ upon their first meeting, and ‘dangerous’ ahead of her wedding to his Pa.

While he rather begrudgingly writes that he hopes she makes his father happy, he is less gracious towards the memoir’s primary antagonist, the press, who Harry squarely lays the blame for most of his woes.

Journalists are given a short shrift, with one infamous editor described as a ‘loathsome toad’ and a ‘pustule on the arse of humanity.’

But the book’s bitterness is counterbalanced with Harry’s heartbreakingly beautiful descriptions of his late mother.

You can feel the palpable pain of his loss as he recalls how his younger self coped with Diana’s death by pretending she was merely in hiding, spiriting herself away from the ghastly flashbulb of photographers.

He sees Diana everywhere, sending him messages through nature, and explains his desperate need for proximity by following her charity work.

Spare has its funny moments too, although it can border on schoolboy/squaddie at times. The first half of the book is a misty-eyed look back at his days as a boarder in Ludgrove and Eton, with Harry fondly remembering smoking spliffs in the loos before watching Family Guy. The infamous frostbitten penis debacle also features, although the lengthy and bloated descriptions of Harry’s ‘todger’ begin to tire quite quickly. 

Of course, the final section of the book is dedicated to his life with Meghan, someone so breath-takingly beautiful that Harry describes looking at her like ‘a punch in the throat’. As their relationship goes public, Harry’s fear of losing Meghan, like he lost his mother, is evident – bringing a fresh, raw perspective of a story that has been rehashed for over three years.

Ahead of the release of Spare, I was beginning to tire of Harry and Meghan’s round the clock PR drive. Their recent Netflix documentary bordered on being a little self-indulgent and worthy, and failed to significantly tread any new ground following the famous Oprah interview early last year. As much as I can sympathise with their claims of poor treatment and Meghan’s struggle with her mental health, I couldn’t help but wish they’d move on from their confessional tour, and start to look forward instead of backwards.

However, it is clear that TV isn’t necessarily Harry’s forte. In print, the prince seems to have found his stride with this somewhat sad tale of a tortured man, grappling with a grief that still hangs heavy in his heart. He has J. R. Moehringer’s skilful penmanship to thank for his eloquence, keeping the lengthy read tight as he threads Harry’s anecdotes together in a vignette-style narrative . 

What I am still struggling with is Harry’s motive for writing Spare, besides the obvious financial benefit. He claims to want to reconcile with his father and brother, I can’t help but feel a book this unflinchingly frank will push him further from the fold.

For someone who speaks so furiously about press intrusion and the desire for privacy, Spare is a far more telling story than any newspaper nib. Whether it’s worth losing his family over remains to be seen.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing [email protected]  

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Prince Harry’s memoir Spare a portrait of an angry man struggling to make peace with his past

This article was published more than 1 year ago. Some information may no longer be current.

A poster advertising the launch of Prince Harry's memoir Spare, in London, on Jan. 6. LEON NEAL/Getty Images

• Title: Spare
• Author: Prince Harry
• Genre: Autobiography
• Publisher: Penguin Random House

The Duke of Sussex has often remarked in television interviews that he is very much his mother’s son. No doubt the late Diana, Princess of Wales, would have understood Prince Harry’s desire to tell his story after breaking out of the royal fold, much like she herself did upon her separation from then-Prince Charles when she collaborated with Andrew Morton for his 1992 book Diana: Her True Story, In Her Own Words .

Before I sat down to review Spare , I reached out to Morton to see what he thought of Harry’s memoir. Morton’s book about Diana altered the way people saw the monarchy and the “fairytale” marriage between her and Charles. The book also set the tone of royals coverage and debate for a generation. Were the Prince’s revelations about the Royal Family as revolutionary as his mother’s? Does this new book have the potential to challenge (or dare I say, change) people’s perceptions of the monarchy as the Diana book did in its own time?

Morton doesn’t think so, citing Spare ’s propensity for “petty point scoring,” which risks overshadowing “the genuinely sad story of a son unable to come to terms with the premature death of his mother.”

I’m inclined to agree with Morton – to a point. The book is spotted with a number of unnecessary slights, with Prince William bearing the brunt of them. But I believe that readers should look past Harry’s heated prose to the bigger, and I believe valid, claims he makes. If Harry’s claims are true, the monarchy is ripe for a reckoning.

In Spare , Harry navigates this struggle imperfectly. Some passages can certainly be seen as score-keeping – particularly when it comes to his “beloved brother” but also “arch nemesis,” Prince William. For instance, Harry highlights his brother’s “alarming baldness, more advanced than my own,” and his “fading resemblance” to their mother.

Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, is out. Here are the biggest bombshells so far

He also notes that the late Queen may have played favourites: “Willy always thought Granny had a soft spot for me, that she indulged me while holding him to an impossibly high standard,” Harry writes. Of the fact that the late Queen allowed him to keep his own beard for his 2018 wedding, he writes: “After he’d come back from an assignment with Special Forces, Willy was sporting a full beard and someone told him to be a good boy and run along and shave it. He hated the idea of me enjoying a perk he’d been denied.”

Like his mother, Harry makes some shocking claims about Camilla in his memoir, writing that the Queen Consort leaked private information to the press. Harry’s feelings for his stepmother are understandably complicated. When Charles and Camilla married, Harry says he and William were sympathetic to the couple’s years of “star-crossed longing” but also that Camilla “played a pivotal role in the unraveling” of his parents’ marriage. He says he had trepidations of gaining a step parent who had “sacrificed him on her personal PR altar” as a way to rehabilitate her image.

The book doesn’t spare the King, either. Harry talks about how in late 2001 his father made a deal with the editor of “Britain’s biggest tabloid” who had called Charles’s office to say that she had uncovered evidence of Harry doing drugs at a number of locations, including in the basement beneath Highgrove that he and William had nicknamed Club H (The “H” stood for Highgrove, not Harry). “She was hunting the spare and making no apologies for it,” he writes. Harry told his royal aide and mentor Mark Dyer – who he calls “Marko” – to tell her that she had it wrong. When that didn’t work, he thought his father’s office would put a stop to the story; instead, the editor ran a piece engineered to revamp Charles’s public image in a sympathetic light, as a “single dad coping with a drug-addled child.”

CATHAL KELLY: Prince Harry’s Spare is, ultimately, a story about brothers

PHOEBE MALTZ BOVY: Spare me: Prince Harry’s claim of victimhood doesn’t quite fly

Through all this, it is clear that Harry is a young man still reeling from the untimely death of his mother. As a teenager, Harry saw his mother’s death everywhere and in everything. He writes of how his father tried to get him to read more books – particularly Shakespeare – in his adolescent years. “I was part of the Shakespeare-less hordes. And I tried to change. I opened Hamlet. Hmm: lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper … I slammed the book shut. No thank you.” Until the age of 23, he believed that his mother was still alive and that he would one day be reunited with her. He travelled through the same Paris tunnel where she died, hoping it would give him some sort of closure. The only thing it did was bring on what he calls “Pain Part Deux.”

And, in his relationship with his wife, Meghan Markle, Harry is haunted by the press’s treatment of his mother, as it has been echoed in their treatment of the Duchess of Sussex: “I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces,” he writes.

With Megan, Harry has often said that he worries about history repeating itself. At the beginning of Spare , he quotes William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Throughout the book, Prince Harry’s past is very much alive. The book is, ultimately, a portrait of an angry young man struggling to make peace with his past, in the hopes that he may live a brighter future. Harry has the power to seek his own closure. Whether the monarchy itself, under a new King, takes any of Harry’s suggestions to heart, remains to be seen.

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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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Spare by Prince Harry review – a flawed attempt to reclaim the narrative

By turns sympathetic and absurd, this is a memoir that deals in the tropes of tabloid storytelling even as it lambasts them

T he monarchy relies on fiction. It is a constructed reality, in which grown-up people are asked to collude in the notion that a human is more than a human – that he or she contains something approaching the ineffable essence of Britishness. Once, this fiction rested on political and military power, supported by a direct line, it was supposed, to God. Nowadays it relies on the much frailer foundations of habit, the mysteries of Britain’s unwritten constitution, and spectacle: a kind of symbolism without the symbolised. Ceremonials such as the late queen’s funeral are not merely decorative; they are the institution’s means of securing its continuance. The monarchy is theatre, the monarchy is storytelling, the monarchy is illusion.

All this explains why royals are so irresistible to writers of fiction, from Alan Bennett to Peter Morgan: they are already halfway to myth. And, it seems, no one cleaves harder to the myths than the royals themselves. There’s a fascinating passage in Prince Harry’s autobiography, Spare, in which he describes his father’s delight in Shakespeare: how he would regularly take his son to Stratford, how he “adored Henry V. He compared himself to Prince Hal.” Harry himself tried Hamlet. “Hmm. Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with … parent’s usurper? I slammed it shut.” At Eton, he was cast as Conrade, one of Don John’s comic minions in Much Ado About Nothing. To his surprise, he was rather good. “Being royal, it turned out, wasn’t all that far from being on stage.”

Prince Harry portrays himself as no great reader. Studying invited reflection; reflection invited grief; emotions were best avoided. But he does himself an injustice. He is a voracious reader – of the press. For years, it seems, he devoured every syllable published about him, in outlets from the London Review of Books to the Sun to the faecal depths of below-the-line on social-media feeds. His father’s most oft-quoted refrain in the book is “Don’t read it, darling boy”; his therapist, he writes, suggested he was addicted to it. Spare is about the torment of a royal in the age of the smartphone and Instagram; a torment of a different order from even that suffered by his mother, and certainly by Princess Margaret, forbidden from marrying the man she loved by her own sister. (For Harry, Margaret is “Aunt Margo”, a cold-blooded old lady who could “kill a houseplant with one scowl” and once gave him a biro – “Oh. A biro. Wow” – for Christmas.)

The fiction of royalty can be maintained only if its characters are visible, hence its symbiotic but rarely straightforward relationship with the media. Spare contends that portrayals of the royals in sections of the press – aside from having at times involved shocking criminality, outright invention, intolerable harassment and overt racism – have also often depended on a kind of zero-sum game, in which one family member’s spokesperson will attempt to protect their client at the expense of another, trading gossip for favours. Harry, in his role as the expendable “spare”, has often been the victim of this process, he argues. Narrative tropes and archetypes as old as the hills have been invoked in the distortions: the wayward son; the warring brothers. In Meghan’s case, something even more corrosive: the witch-like woman.

It is the monarchist press for which Harry reserves special loathing. The Telegraph’s royal correspondent “always made me ill”, he writes; and he cannot bear even to name Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News UK, referring to her anagrammatically as Rehabber Kooks. As for her boss: “I didn’t care for Rupert Murdoch’s politics, which were just to the right of the Taliban’s”. Clueless as Harry may be about the sheer extent of his privilege – early in the book he writes, “It sounds posh and I suppose it was” of childhood meals of fishfingers served under silver domes by footmen – he isn’t remotely a snob, nor, I infer, temperamentally of the right.

A striking passage recounts the prince’s talking to his therapist about Hilary Mantel’s 2013 LRB essay about Kate Middleton. It became notorious, wilfully misread by the tabloids as being anti-Kate, even though it was the monstrosity of the representation of the now Princess of Wales that Mantel was skewering. Harry recalls his disgust at Mantel’s calling the royal family “pandas” – cosseted, fascinating animals kept in a zoo. “If even a celebrated intellectual could dismiss us as animals, what hope for the man or woman on the street?”

Still, he half gets what Mantel was driving at. The words “always struck me as both acutely perceptive and uniquely barbarous,” he writes. “We did live in a zoo.” Describing his unpreparedness for having his funding cut in 2020, he writes: “I recognised the absurdity, a man in his mid-30s being cut off by his father … But I’d never asked to be financially dependent on Pa. I’d been forced into this surreal state, this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never travelled on the Underground.”

In her essay, Mantel remarked that “Harry doesn’t know which he is, a person or a prince”. Spare is clearly the prince’s attempt to claw back personhood, to claim his own narrative. Of his tabloid persecutors, he writes: “I was royal and in their minds royal was synonymous with non-person. Centuries ago royal men and women were considered divine; now they were insects. What fun, to pluck their wings.” That, of course, is half-remembered Shakespeare: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport,” says the blinded Gloucester in Lear. The gods in Harry’s version are neither Olympians nor kings, but paparazzi and reporters – and so the circle has turned.

Spare is by turns compassion-inducing, frustrating, oddly compelling and absurd. Harry is myopic as he sits at the centre of his truth, simultaneously loathing and locked into the tropes of tabloid storytelling, the style of which his ghostwritten autobiography echoes. Had he seen more of the golden jubilee year of 2002, he would have observed that his impression that “Britain was intoxicated … Everyone wore some version of the union jack” was quite wrong; swaths of the UK were indifferent, some hostile. His observations about the darkness of the basement flat he once occupied in Kensington Palace, its windows blocked from the light by a neighbour’s 4x4, will seem insulting to those who can’t find a home, or afford to heat one. The logical corollary of the views he now holds would be a personal republicanism, but needless to say that is not the path he takes: “My problem,” he writes, “has never been with the concept of monarchy.” What he shows, though – whether intentionally or not – is that the monarchy makes fools of us all.

Spare by Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex (Transworld, £28). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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Prince Harry’s memoir Spare beaten to top gong by puzzle book at British Book Awards

Prince Harry’s bombshell memoir ‘ Spare ’ has been beaten in every category it was nominated for at the British Book Awards.

A puzzle book, children’s writer, comedian, and a former MP were among the winners that claimed victory over the duke at Monday night’s awards.

The 39-year-old’s book grabbed headlines when it was released last January as it included never-seen-before details of royal feuds including the accusation that his brother, the Prince of Wales, pushed him into a dog bowl in a row over Meghan Markle.

The ghost-written autobiography was given nods in the categories of Audiobook: non-fiction, which the Duke of Sussex provided, and non-fiction: narrative.

Unfortunately, Harry did not have the same success as his father, the King, did at the awards, also known as the Nibbies, when he won author of the year when it first launched in 1990.

He lost out in the non-fiction narrative category to former MP and international development secretary Rory Stewart’s book ‘Politics on the Edge’ and was beaten by comedian Fern Brady’s memoir ‘Strong Female Character’ in the non-fiction audiobook category.

Meanwhile, Harry was not shortlisted for the overall book of the year prize, which went to a puzzle book - Murdle by GT Karber - for the first time.

The judges include Mr Bates Vs The Post actor, Toby Jones, BBC Radio 5 Live presenter Nihal Arthanayake, ITV presenter Lorraine Kelly and crime author Janice Hallett announced the winner at Grosvenor House in London on Monday night.

The panel said they “loved the whole concept”, praising the book as a “really clever idea done really well” and agreed the “genius” book had expanded the market.

The book is described as ‘100 simple to impossible mysteries to solve using logic, skill, and the power of deduction’.

The duke also missed out on a nomination in the author of the year category, which was instead won by children’s author Katherine Rundell.

Harry used the tell-all book to make various claims about his family including that William called Meghan “difficult”, “rude” and “abrasive”, that the King was jealous of the Prince and Princess of Wales and Charles refused to allow the Duchess of Sussex to join the Duke in Scotland as the late Queen was dying.

The memoir sold 706,978 copies and also detailed events in his life including cocaine use and losing his virginity to an older woman.

According to Nielsen BookData, it was the fasted-selling non-fiction book in the UK since records began in 1998, despite extracts being leaked online.

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Prince Harry left secret details out of book as family would 'never forgive' him

Prince Harry's memoir Spare proved to be an explosive read, packed with plenty of startling revelations about the duke's strained relationship with his brother Prince William. However, it seems the book could have been even more controversial

• 11:59, 10 May 2024

Prince Harry claims that he left secret details out of his tell-all memoir Spare - in order to protect Prince William.

According to the Duke of Sussex , who has now left British soil after a flying visit for the Invictus Games service, the candid book could well have been two volumes had he chosen to divulge all.

Harry did not meet up with William, or their father King Charles, during his trip to the UK, despite reports that both senior royals were invited to attend the service on May 8.

Harry and William's relationship has been fraught for some time - and tensions seemed to emerge way before the duke's move to the US. In Spare, Harry details some of the more testing moments in their brotherly relationship - including an alleged physical altercation and a heated showdown at Prince Philip's funeral.

As explosive as such revelations undoubtedly were, Harry claims there was much more he could have said, with the incidents referred to in Spare apparently being just the tip of the iceberg...

Mere days after Spare was published, Harry claimed he'd purposefully avoided mentioning some anecdotes about his father and brother, as he feared they would never forgive him if he revealed them.

He stated the original manuscript for his book was twice the length of the final draft and many details about interactions between him, Charles and William were edited out as there were things he didn't want the world to know. Harry admitted he had 50 Zoom calls with his ghostwriter and sometimes struggled to decide which details to include and which to leave out.

Harry told The Telegraph : "It could have been two books, put it that way. And the hard bit was taking things out." The Duke added: "There are some things that have happened, especially between me and my brother, and to some extent between me and my father, that I just don't want the world to know. Because I don't think they would ever forgive me."

At the time of Spare's release, an expert claimed that Harry and Meghan's decision to "air their dirty laundry in public" has damaged the idea of a family monarchy . Since sensationally quitting as senior working royals, the Sussexes have made a series of controversial claims against their royal relatives - especially King Charles and Prince William .

Speaking on the Mirror's Pod Save The King podcast , Dr Owens, author of the new book After Elizabeth: Can the Monarchy Save Itself? also suggested it's time for the monarchy to drop its family image. He explained: "The story is a slightly tragic one as it has damaged this idea of a family monarchy. This idea that this is a united group who embody, if you like, the best of British family life.

"Originally King Charles' reign was going to be based around him being supported by his two trusty lieutenants - William and Harry. But when that went so disastrously wrong in early 2020 because of Harry and Meghan's decision to leave Britain, it really put paid to that vision of the family monarchy.

"And then of course we've had the Sussexes airing their dirty laundry in public for the best part of three years - and again it has done much damage to that narrative of happy family life."

Harry did not meet with his father or William during his London visit this week. Ahead of the Invictus Games service, a spokesperson said: "In response to the many inquiries and continued speculation on whether or not The Duke will meet with his father while in the UK this week, it, unfortunately, will not be possible due to His Majesty's full program. The Duke of course is understanding of his father's diary of commitments and various other priorities and hopes to see him soon."

A version of this article was published in November 2023.

Do you have a story to tell? Email: [email protected]

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One charger to rule them all? The Acefast Z4 218W GaN charger offers masterful power delivery at a great price, capable of quick-charging two 16-inch MacBook Pros at the same time, with ports to spare

Acefast z4 218w gan charging hub offers loads of ports and loads of power..

iMore Verdict

With a cool, partially see-through design and a really versatile set of charging speed options across a spread of four ports, the Acefast Z4 218W GaN charger might be the last power hub your desk ever needs.

Cool design

Smart port array

Great value for the charging speeds offered

At a push, maybe additional ports to the sides?

You can always trust iMore. Our team of Apple experts have years of experience testing all kinds of tech and gadgets, so you can be sure our recommendations and criticisms are accurate and helpful. Find out more about how we test.

Price and availability

What i love, what i don’t love, competition, should you buy it.

I love when a gadget just does what it says on the tin. I really love when a gadget does that, and then does it while looking good. I really, really love when a gadget does both of those things, and then does it at a great price point, too.

That’s exactly what the Acefast Z4 218 GaN charging hub manages to do. Chargers aren’t exactly the sexiest or most exciting products out there, but Acefast has managed to make one that’s not only highly functional, but pretty good-looking too. That it does so at an affordable price point is just the icing on the cake.

Offering four charging ports, a monitoring screen, and the ability to fast charge two devices up to 100W simultaneously, it’ll make a great addition to any gadget hoarder’s desk.

The Acefast Z4 218W GaN charger is available to buy now, direct from Acefast and retailers like Amazon. It has a listing price of $99.99, but has been up for sale with a price tag as low as $89.

That’s a great price for a really solid charger. And though there are a few competitors that offer more ports in a similar form factor, they can be as much as double the price for not all that much more useful functionality. This feels like a great sweet spot.

Versatility is the name of the game with the Acefast Z4 218W GaN. With three USB-C ports and a USB-A port up front, it offers four different charging modes. These are cycled through with a button on the front of the device, and explained via a colorful and bright 1.3-inch LCD screen. This details which port will charge at which speed across the various modes, and updates in real-time, ensuring you’re always able to maximize your charging efficiency across devices.

The headline charging stat will be that 2x 100W charging speed option across two USB-C ports — enough to keep two 16-inch MacBook Pros going simultaneously. But here’s a full rundown of all those different charging modes according to Acefast, and what each is capable of:

Mode A (213W Total): 

• USB-C1 (100W) + C2 (65W) + C3 (30W) + USB-A (18W)
• USB-C1 (100W Max): 3.3-21V/5A (PPS, 100W Max), 5V/3A (15W), 9V/3A (27W), 12V/3A (36W), 15V/3A (45W), 20V/5A (100W)
• USB-C2 (65W Max): 3.3-11V/5A (PPS, 55W Max), 5V/3A (15W), 9V/3A (27W), 12V/3A (36W), 15V/3A (45W), 20V/3.25A (65W)
• USB-C3 (30W Max): 3.3-11V/3A (PPS, 30W Max), 5V/3A (15W), 9V/3A (27W), 12V/2.5A (30W), 15V/2A (30W), 20V/1.5A (30W)
• USB-A (18W Max): 5V/3A (15W), 9V/2A (18W), 12V/1.5A (18W)

Mode B (213W Total): 

• USB-C1 (65W) + C2 (65W) + C3 (65W) + USB-A (18W)
• USB-C1/C2 (65W Max): 3.3-11V/5A (PPS, 55W Max), 5V/3A (15W), 9V/3A (27W), 12V/3A (36W), 15V/3A (45W), 20V/3.25A (65W)
• USB-C3 (65W Max): 3.3-21V/3A (PPS, 30W Max), 5V/3A (15W), 9V/3A (27W), 12V/3A (36W), 15V/3A (345W), 20V/3.25A (65W)

Mode C (218W Total): 

• USB-C1 (100W) + C2 (100W) + USB-A (18W)
• USB-C1/C2 (100W Max): 3.3-21V/5A (PPS, 100W Max), 5V/3A (15W), 9V/3A (27W), 12V/3A (36W), 15V/3A (45W), 20V/5A (100W)

Mode D (218W Total): 

• USB-C1 (100W) + C2 (100W) + C3 (18W)
• USB-C3 (18W Max): 3.3-11V/2A (PPS, 18W Max), 5V/3A (15W), 9V/2A (18W), 12V/1.5A (18W)

There’s admittedly a lot to take in there, but it demonstrates the flexibility on offer across the charger’s ports. I personally tended to leave it in Mode A most of the time — with that, I could fast-charge my M2 MacBook Air over USB-C port 1, speedily charge the new 2024 iPad Pro on USB-C port 2, with my iPhone 15 Pro still getting lots of juice over USB-C port 3, which left the USB-A port to top up things that weren’t as much of a charging priority, such as game controllers. It never got worryingly hot when under load, either.

And, as far as chargers go, it looks great. Acefast has a thing for transparent designs, and while it’s only the front piece that gives you a view inside the inner workings of the charger, it’s still always cool to see the circuitry behind your gadgetry. Matte grey plastic is used around the rest of the shell, with an Acefast logo embossed on top, while rubber feet on the bottom side stop things slipping around. It’s weighty — good for pulling cables out and plugging them in without yanking the whole charging unit around, though not quite as useful if you’re looking to take it on the go. In the box, you’ll find a detachable 1.5m plug cable for hooking up to a wall, too.

There’s really not much fault that can be thrown at the Acefast Z4 218W GaN charger. It might possibly be charging overkill for some more casual gadget users, who may find themselves slightly confused by all the charging speed options that can be cycled through. But then, that kind of user probably doesn’t need the flexibility offered by a multi-charger anyway.

In an ideal world, the Acefast Z4 218W GaN charger might include some ports around more sides than just its front — that’d let it act like a central hub for any traveling work forces gathered around a table, perhaps. But that's a niche use case, and not a real mark against what’s on offer here.

There are tons of charger options out there, and we regularly update our list of the best chargers for iPhone to keep you abreast of what’s available. But multi-chargers like this, capable of powering everything from the best MacBooks to your Apple Watch aren’t quite so common.

If you can stump up the cash, Ugreen has a great six-port 200W charger, the Nexode 200W — but it has a price tag of $199. If you need more watts across four ports, the new Anker Prime 240W GaN charger hits higher heights, but at a pricier $159, and without the cool design of the Acefast.

Buy it if…

• You need to fast-charge lots of devices simultaneously
• You dig being able to monitor charging speeds
• You want complete control over how to distribute power to your gadgets

Don’t buy it if…

• You need a portable charger
• You’re only looking to power a couple of devices at once
• The thought of deciding what device gets what power supply sounds complicated to you

Powerful, versatile, and good-looking, the Acefast Z4 218W GaN charging hub is a great center point for all your device-power needs. Well-priced and with a cool external design, it’s a nerdy bit of kit, but expertly ensures all your devices get the juice they need, at speed.

Bottom line: A powerful and versatile charger for your desk, ready to keep all your most important gadgets fully juiced.

Gerald Lynch is the Editor-in-Chief of iMore, keeping careful watch over the site's editorial output and commercial campaigns, ensuring iMore delivers the in-depth, accurate and timely Apple content its readership deservedly expects. You'll never see him without his iPad Pro, and he loves gaming sessions with his buddies via Apple Arcade on his iPhone 15 Pro, but don't expect him to play with you at home unless your Apple TV is hooked up to a 4K HDR screen and a 7.1 surround system. 

Living in London in the UK, Gerald was previously Editor of Gizmodo UK, and Executive Editor of TechRadar, and has covered international trade shows including Apple's WWDC, MWC, CES and IFA. If it has an acronym and an app, he's probably been there, on the front lines reporting on the latest tech innovations. Gerald is also a contributing tech pundit for BBC Radio and has written for various other publications, including T3 magazine, GamesRadar, Space.com, Real Homes, MacFormat, music bible DIY, Tech Digest, TopTenReviews, Mirror.co.uk, Brandish, Kotaku, Shiny Shiny and Lifehacker. Gerald is also the author of 'Get Technology: Upgrade Your Future', published by Aurum Press, and also holds a Guinness world record on Tetris. For real.

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How a mysterious illness broke apart a family

In “Forces of Nature,” Gina DeMillo Wagner writes about growing up in the shadow of her brother’s illness.

Death is on our minds. Four years into a pandemic that killed millions and left little room for collective mourning, it feels as though we remain in a long season of grief. That sentiment is reflected in the glut of recent memoirs that grapple with bereavement, as if many writers had spent their days in isolation reflecting on what else they had lost. Among them is Gina DeMillo Wagner, who captures the complexity of grieving a sibling in “ Forces of Nature: A Memoir of Family, Loss, and Finding Home ,” a moving recollection of growing up with a brother with a disability and absent parents.

Wagner’s elder brother, Alan, who died in 2016 at the age of 43, had been diagnosed as a child with Prader-Willi syndrome, a rare genetic disease that affects metabolism and behavior. Although his body grew to reflect his age, Alan’s psychological development slowed during the siblings’ childhood in Atlanta, leaving him almost entirely dependent on others. Though little was known about the disease during Alan’s childhood, symptoms of his illness were evident throughout his life. Sweeping in unpredictably, those symptoms overwhelmed Wagner’s mother, a housewife. Though it is impossible to diagnose exactly what lies behind a divorce, it is easy to imagine that the weight of Alan’s illness proved too much for his parents to bear together. Their split, which resulted in the absence of the author’s father and a yawning emotional gap from her mother, runs through Wagner’s life like a fault line.

“The forces that create faults are compression, movement, expansion, and gravity,” she writes, employing a metaphor that recurs in the book. “Whenever something is under pressure, weighted down, vibrating, or grating against itself, trying to move in opposite directions — things crack. Fractures occur. Destruction. New geographies are formed.”

The new family geography that arose after the split found Gina taking on the household responsibilities to fill in for the parental lack. Alan was prone to overeating and volatile moods (people with Prader-Willi prove nearly insatiable and lack impulse control), and Gina, in her telling, often found herself on the receiving end of his destructive rage. We cannot always recognize trauma while we are living through it, and you get the feeling that, long after the fact, Wagner is hesitant to call what she lived through traumatic even as she relives harrowing scenes on the page. It may be in part because of the nature of Alan’s illness; childlike on his best days but swelling with extra-human strength when enraged, he could not be held fully responsible for the pain he inflicted on his sister.

She does not fault him for the volatility his disability created, instead looking to the natural world to draw parallels, especially the creation of the Rocky Mountains, a region she now calls home. “I think about the core attributes of a person, their own personal bedrock,” she writes. “Their personalities, their fundamental traits seem solid unless acted upon dramatically by some outside force.” In Alan’s case, that external pressure was from the patrilineally heritable disease. For Wagner herself, the outside forces are numerous: her brother’s rage, her mother’s neglect, a school counselor who recognizes that something is wrong in the family. When the pressure eventually exerts itself too intensely, Wagner decides to leave her family before even finishing high school, estranging herself for decades to gain control over her life.

All this time later, there’s a palpable melancholia as Wagner works through her brother’s death and the process of mourning a person she loved dearly, despite the injury and anguish he caused her. “No one talks about what grief looks like when the relationship you lost was fraught,” she writes. “No one admits that a relationship with someone who is dead can be just as complicated as the relationship was when they were alive. There was suffering then, and there is suffering now.”

With a tinge of survivor’s guilt, Wagner ruminates on Alan’s last days, seemingly looking to ensure that her absence from his life did not, in a roundabout way, end it. Yet it’s hard to know what assurances might assuage her. Wagner is reluctant to accept the explanation that doctors give her of natural causes, a reluctance matching the uncertainty that relatives of those with rare diseases face when so little is known about their loved one’s medical condition.

Ultimately, instead of finding greater answers to Alan’s death, Wagner lands in the uncomfortable position of having to confront the complicated choices she made in removing herself from the family: “The deeper question is not whether Alan could have survived longer, but how did I survive all those years?”

It’s a question that readers themselves might ask as Wagner retells the story of her childhood from the vantage point of an adult reuniting with her family for her brother’s funeral. Faced with her parents in the same space again, she finds herself navigating new family fault lines. Vacillating between reflective adult observations and recollections from youth, she also reckons with her present: Could she have created a happy family of her own had the mother of a high school friend not witnessed her pain and taken her in as a teenager, providing a path for escape?

The memoir thus becomes a lovely meditation on how families are formed within hostile landscapes. Wagner is a talented stylist, limited only by an inability to explain the inexplicable — in this case, less her brother’s rare disease than her parents’ behavior. She contemplates what might have been had her mother accepted more responsibility, had her father taken a greater role in their upbringing. “Maybe his death was no one’s fault,” she writes. “Just as the abuse was never our fault, his or mine.”

In the end, this is not a story of what-ifs but rather what-nows. With the earthshaking news of Alan’s death, the shape of Wagner’s life becomes clearer — in her metaphor, it is like a landscape, which “forms a complete picture, even with its holes and valleys and rifts and green and blue debris.” From above, she writes, you can make sense of it in a way impossible on the ground. It’s this bird’s-eye perspective that provides Wagner and her readers some much-needed closure.

Courtney Tenz writes at the intersection of conflict and culture, covering women’s rights, the arts and European travel.

Forces of Nature

A Memoir of Family, Loss, and Finding Home

By Gina DeMillo Wagner

Running Wild. 310 pp. $19.99

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What are 'the kids' thinking these days? Honor Levy aims to tell in 'My First Book'

Leland Cheuk

What are the kids thinking these days? That seems be to the question behind the publication of My First Book , the buzzy debut story collection by Honor Levy.

The 26-year-old writer was the subject of a viral profile in The Cut , earlier this month, in which she described the praise she received for her story "Good Boys" on The New Yorker website as "not undeserved" and demurred when asked whether she's the voice of her generation. Social media discourse and the inevitable backlash aside, Levy's first book is an amusing, if uneven, take on growing up white, privileged, and Gen Z, the first generation to completely be born after the existence of the internet.

Readers won't find meticulously plotted story arcs, fleshed-out characters, emotional epiphanies, or any other earmarks of conventional literary fiction. Most of Levy's stories run fewer than 12 pages and feel like very long flash fiction, written in a voice dense with the chaotic patois of the internet. In her strongest stories, Levy channels the blitzkrieg of contradictory micro-observations we absorb from social media, video games, and doomscrolling to create the absurd, incomprehensible cacophony that anyone born after 1997 had to grow up enduring. These stories seem to ask: How can anyone expect a well-adjusted adult to rise from all this noise?

In "Internet Girl," the main character is 11 and very online, and Levy's portrayal of her narrator's interiority is both compellingly satirical and frighteningly plausible. She writes:

"It's 2008, and my dad gets laid off and everything is happening all at once. All at once, there are two girls and one cup and planes hitting towers and a webcam looking at me and me smiling into it and a man and a boy and a love and a stranger on the other end. All at once, there are a million videos to watch and a million more to make. All at once it's all at once. It's beginning and ending all at once all the time. I'm twenty-one. I'm eleven. I'm on the internet. I'm twenty-one."

Another strong piece is "Love Story," the collection's opener, which is about a boy and a girl having an online relationship that seems to consist entirely of texting and sending pics of their bodies to each other. Levy poignantly captures the girl's vulnerability. "Little girl lost can't even find herself," Levy writes. "Pictures of her naked body are out there everywhere, in the cloud floating, and under the sea, coursing through cables in the dark. It's so dark."

Levy smartly skewers late capitalism in "Halloween Forever," about a young woman trying to survive a surreal and drug-filled Halloween night in Brooklyn. She meets a "boy from Stanford dressed as a cowboy," who, when sufficiently coked-up, muses about the romance of the Wild West and how "The West was freedom...just like the internet originally was!" The narrator is skeptical:

"Freedom is the stuff of dreams and nightmares only and our free market doesn't make us free people, but the cowboy doesn't care. Silicon Valley must have burrowed itself deep into his brain underneath that hat. He is probably afraid of blood, or social media, or something stupid. My drink is seventeen dollars."

As the collection progresses, the unique blend of the satirical and the poignant gives way to a more essayistic approach to storytelling. In "Cancel Me," which is about cancel culture, the characters — a young woman and two "Ivy League boys with kitten-sharp teeth and Accutane-skin," all of whom have experienced cancellation for murky reasons — gradually fade into a series of observations about wokeness that aren't much different or more insightful than what one might find on X or Reddit.

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"Z Was For Zoomer," which runs more than 50 pages, seems to be a continuation of "Cancel Me," except the two male "edgelords" — someone on an internet forum who deliberately posts about controversial or taboo topics to appear edgy — are named Gideon and Ivan instead of Jack and Roger. Just as in "Cancel Me," the narrator's relationship with the men is never defined and doesn't progress. Character-driven narrative takes a back seat to dashed-off, inch-deep lines like "Identity is a Swedish prison, comfortable but you still can't leave."

It should also be mentioned that these stories won't pass the most permissive of racial Bechdel tests. The number of non-white references in this 200-page book won't go past one hand, unless you count the few references to anime and the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. The milieu of Honor Levy's fiction is undeniably white and privileged, but her best stories exaggerate that milieu to great satirical effect. Perhaps her second book will contain more of them.

Leland Cheuk is an award-winning author of three books of fiction, including the latest No Good Very Bad Asian . His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Salon , among other outlets.