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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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• Entertainment
• <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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Write to Eliana Dockterman at [email protected]

Spare by Prince Harry review: a lifelong quest for meaning often shows royal in an unflattering light

Spare is available to download on Amazon’s Audible here , with a free trial as well as paid membership

Prince Harry is a man in search of a purpose - a fact made abundantly clear from the outset (I mean, even before you’ve read a page, the title of the book is about as subtle as an Apache helicopter), and hammered home across 400-odd pages, where he seems to use the word “spare” again and again, like a cudgel to beat himself with.

Basically, as the third in line to the throne, Harry started life as a “spare” - only “necessary” should his brother William meet an untimely end. It’s a raw deal, psychologically speaking. He is now seventh in line (“very spare”?), so what’s next?

A search for meaning dominates the book. Harry is rarely happier than when at the controls of a £42 million Apache helicopter. “I can tell from the way you fly,” an instructor tells him, “this is what you were meant to do”. Bliss: a purpose and one that serves his country to boot (Harry loves Britain - the Union Jack flag pops up throughout the book). But deployment with the army in Afghanistan eventually proves too dangerous. Ruined, like much in Harry’s life, by the pesky press, whose leaking (or reporting, depending on which way you see it) of the details puts him and those around him in danger. His frustration is immeasurable and somewhat understandable. Yet while he blames the press he doesn’t touch on the brute fact that it’s his status which makes him a target. Harry never seriously considers that it simply might not be possible to be both a royal son and a soldier on active duty in the 21st century.

Some years later, he finds a place where he is even happier than when flying Apaches - and it’s with Meghan. After their early meetings he wonders: “What is this? What’s the word? Is it… The One? Have I found her? At long, long last?” Again, the desire for purpose and meaning is telling and Meghan gives it to him in spades. By his telling, she profoundly changes – and makes sense of – his life, which he describes (not inaccurately) as one which has been lived in a “gilded cage”.

He means royalty itself - though, this relentless search for a life’s purpose, a higher meaning (premised, as it seems to be for him, on the idea that everyone has their little box, it is just a matter of finding it - and climbing in) is surely constricting too?

And then there is also the cage of his past. The book opens – where else? – with the death of Diana. An awful event for any boy of twelve is, as we all know, intensified almost beyond belief by the grief of the nation and blanket coverage in the media. Harry is trapped by the memory of his mother, who he describes in effusive, angelic terms as being “light, pure and radiant light”. She is the divine being who hovers throughout the narrative and often floats, almost literally, before Harry’s eyes.

Then there is his obsession with the press which also seems to bind him. By his own admission he is addicted to reading stories about himself and his loved ones. His father, King Charles, his brother William and the late Queen Elizabeth all repeatedly plead with him not to read them. But he simply can’t or won’t stop.

This results in a number of scarcely believable scenes. When a blizzard of negative stories about Meghan begins to rage, for instance, she makes a (fairly sensible) decision to not to look at the internet. “She wanted to protect herself,” he writes, “keep that poison out of her brain. Smart”.

Harry, though, refuses to do anything quite so practical. To win the “battle for her reputation and physical safety”, he “needed to know exactly what was fact, what was false, and that meant asking her every few hours about something else that had appeared online”. It reduces Meghan to tears. Harry blames the press, and seems to take no responsibility for reading this stuff out to his girlfriend, in the process overriding her clearly stated wishes to just ignore it

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The tales Harry relates of press intrusion do leave you agog. Was there no peace on earth for this man, or his family? Photographers pop up everywhere, all the time. He cannot escape. He doesn’t always help himself, it has to be said. Once, on a lads trip to Vegas in 2012, he unwisely strips off as part of a jolly late night game (alcohol, as ever, was involved) and lo, the photos soon appear in the press. Other photos too - like those of him in a Nazi costume at a fancy dress party in 2005 (a catastrophic error he ungallantly tries to blame on William and Kate), and the 2003 photos of him kissing a girl in a club. Horrible and intrusive, but you do wonder: in nearly a decade, why didn’t you learn?

Part of the answer appears to be because he didn’t want to. Because he wanted to be free. Freedom is important to Harry (and important, too, to his new audience in America, where the Sussexes’ story is one of breaking free, telling their own truths, escaping the system). But what does freedom really mean to him? As we have  seen in the last few days, an important aspect of that is the liberty to talk about his family and the institution. But there are other things too.

He writes lovingly, and rather endlessly, about Africa, a continent which appears in this book as a refuge. It is where Harry finds solace and happiness in the brutal years after his mother’s death and freedom from intrusion. It is where he longs to take Meghan, having fallen head over heels with her instantly (in fact almost just from a clip of her on Instagram – “for thirty-two years I’d watched a conveyor belt of faces pass by and only a handful ever made me look twice. This woman stopped the conveyor-belt. This woman smashed the conveyor-belt to bits” – which I thought a touch dehumanising).

Harry suggests for their early courtship a trip to Botswana. His pitch to her is this: “Birthplace of all humankind. Most sparsely populated nation on earth. True garden of Eden, with 40 per cent of the land given over to Nature”. No mention of the people, except that there aren’t many. He’s not the only royal with a questionable attitude to the continent. At one point Prince William gets furiously angry with Harry and demands that Africa be his thing (the rhinos and elephants, that is) as Harry already has the Invictus Games. It’s not a good look.

The Harry that finds freedom in Africa is a different man to the one obsessed with the press – even his friends and girlfriends tell him he’s a different “Spike” (one of his endless nicknames) when there.

That’s not to say that he’s not fun when he’s back in Blighty. Harry had a deserved reputation as a party boy. In this book he drinks and takes drugs with great abandon. Indeed after his magical week in Botswana with Meghan, he heads off on a multi-phase lads trip complete with jetskiing in crocodile infested waters, bush cocktails and African beer, and “certain controlled substances”. Then there’s the marijuana, a habit which starts in his teens at Eton and appears to go on until possibly the present – he talks about smoking a joint at Tyler Perry’s house in Los Angeles, where he and Meghan briefly lived in 2020.

The partying is a piece of his silly side. Harry declares that he likes nothing more than making people laugh – a sweet, winning trait. He loves a bawdy joke too. Which perhaps explains why there is so much information – more than I expected – about his penis.

On a trip to the North Pole, Harry discovers frostnip (the forbear to frostbite) on his member. He goes to the doctor where, in another unintentionally revealing moment, he notes repeatedly that the doctor - who is preoccupied with something else - fails to look at him and so recognise exactly who he is. The doctor makes Harry wait and the prince feels slighted. The penis stuff goes on and on – you sense then, that Harry is still something of an unreformed ‘lad’. And it’s all wrapped up - as one of the book’s most startling passages shows - with his childhood.

A friend recommends Harry apply Elizabeth Arden cream to his frostnipped penis. “My mum used that on her lips. You want me to put that on my todger? It works, Harry. Trust me. I found a tube, and the minute I opened it the smell transported me through time. I felt as if my mother was right there in the room. Then I took a smidge and applied it… down there. ‘Weird’ doesn’t really do the feeling justice”.

That’s another unavoidable conclusion drawn from this book: Harry’s was a childhood arrested. Diana is a constant presence – Harry even visits a medium in LA to speak to her. Her son’s great quest is to avenge her, to fight the fight she was unable to do at the time, projecting, one feels, onto his own family many of his feelings about his mother and his relationship to her.

This arrested childhood also shows in the way that Harry speaks. William is Willy, Charles is Pa (not Dad, or Father) and Diana is Mummy. Always. There are references to “legends,” “lads,” and endless nicknames – Boose, Henners, Brent, Bidders, Jakie, Skippy and so on. He often sounds, when the ghostwriter allows him, like a teenager.

But his language is not always cuddly. On the subject of the press his vitriol is astounding (of course I may be somewhat biased myself on this subject). Rebekah Brooks, who he names bizarrely as “Rehabber Kooks” for a story she published about him – apparently not wanting to dignify her with a proper name, is described as a “loathsome toad… an infected pustule on the arse of humanity”. Another journalist, whom Harry agrees to be interviewed by, is portrayed as an addict: “I blurted something about not being normal, which caused the reporter’s mouth to fall open. Here we go . He was getting his headline, his news fix. Were his eyes rolling up into his head?” We weren’t there, Harry, so tell us: were they?

His extreme vitriol towards, and hatred for, the press is a family trait, but one which in Harry appears to reach extremes beyond what his father and brother experience. Clearly and obviously Harry feels it is not fair that he does entirely control the narrative of his life. That would be nice if it were possible, but that’s not how life works, royal or commoner.

A telling exchange takes place near the end, when King Charles tells Harry “the Institution can’t just tell the media what to do”. Harry writes: “Again, I yelped with laughter. It was like Pa saying he couldn’t just tell his valet what to do”. Once more – how revealing.

As a way to tell his own story, Spare is a triumph. But it shows its author often in an unflattering light: vain, status-obsessed, bitter and confused. It’s by turns elegantly written (the ghost writer J. R. Moehringer has done a very good job) and has sections that really ring true with Harry’s voice.

Why, though, did Harry write it? To tell his side of the story, to blow the whistle on the behaviour of the press and the way his family works, to avenge (perhaps) his mother. In these, it succeeds. He is a man, though, ever in search of a purpose. By the end, one senses he has found a new one: to tell the truth and change the world. Those are noble goals. But they may not be easy to achieve. It is hard not to fear, somehow, that the likeable, sweet, rather simple prince may soon find himself in search of meaning once more.

Prince Harry’s ‘unflinching’ memoir, Spare, to be published in January

Publishing simultaneously in 16 different languages, the book is billed as ‘full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom’

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Prince Harry’s highly anticipated memoir, titled Spare, is to be published in January.

The book was originally due to be released in late 2022, and when it was announced Harry promised it would be a “firsthand account of my life that’s accurate and wholly truthful”.

Publisher Penguin Random House said the book takes readers “immediately back to one of the most searing images of the 20th century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother’s coffin as the world watched in sorrow – and horror”

“With its raw, unflinching honesty, Spare is a landmark publication full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief,” said the publisher.

Spare will be released on 10 January in 16 languages worldwide, and an audiobook read by Prince Harry will be released on the same day.

Markus Dohle, global CEO of Penguin Random House, said Prince Harry “shares a remarkably moving personal journey from trauma to healing, one that speaks to the power of love and will inspire and encourage millions of people around the world”.

Prince Harry’s proceeds from Spare will be given to charity. He has given $1.5m to Sentebale, an organisation he founded with Prince Seeiso of Lesotho in their mothers’ legacies, which supports vulnerable children and young people in Lesotho and Botswana affected by HIV/Aids.

He will also donate £300,000 to WellChild, an organisation that makes it possible for children and young people with complex health needs to be cared for at home instead of hospital. He has been a patron of WellChild for 15 years.

When announcing the memoir in 2021, Prince Harry said he was writing the book “not as the prince I was born but as the man I have become”.

“I’ve worn many hats over the years, both literally and figuratively, and my hope is that in telling my story – the highs and lows, the mistakes, the lessons learned – I can help show that no matter where we come from, we have more in common than we think,” he added. “I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to share what I’ve learned over the course of my life so far and excited for people to read a firsthand account of my life that’s accurate and wholly truthful.”

The book is expected to cover from childhood to the present day, including the prince’s time in the military and serving in Afghanistan, and his life as a husband and father.

The Duke of Sussex and his wife Meghan have been the subjects of a number of books written by others in recent years.

Among them are journalist Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand’s Finding Freedom, an unofficial biography of the couple . A follow-up by Scobie, which is as yet untitled, is due to be released next year.

Tom Bower’s Revenge, subtitled Meghan, Harry and the War between the Windsors, came out earlier this year, with Bower interviewing Markle’s estranged father, Thomas Markle, for the book.

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Watch CBS News

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

By Aimee Picchi

January 10, 2023 / 11:12 AM EST / MoneyWatch

Prince Harry's memoir's title, "Spare," is a nod to his position as the backup son in the line of royal succession. The book, however, is hardly an afterthought in bookstores, with the title jumping to the top of several bestseller lists as it hit store shelves on Tuesday.  

As "Spare" made its debut it ranked No. 1 on Amazon's nonfiction bestseller list, while it was also atop Barnes & Noble's top 100 sellers the same day. However, it may take a week or more to show up on the gold standard of bestseller lists, the New York Times, as its current nonfiction bestseller list is based on data from sales before December 31, which is prior to the publication date of the book.

• As Prince Harry's book "Spare" hits shelves, what do the Brits make of it?
• Here are some of the major revelations from Prince Harry's leaked memoir, "Spare"
• Prince Harry: The 60 Minutes Interview Transcript

In the memoir, the 38-year-old Harry details his life as part of the royal family, warts and all — and it may be the warts that are boosting book sales. The memoir covers his decades-long struggle with grief after his mother Princess Diana died in a car crash and discusses conflicts he has had with his father, King Charles; his stepmother, the Queen Consort Camilla; and his brother, Prince William, who is heir to the throne. 

In the book, Harry writes about his father waking up him and his brother, then 12 and 15, respectively, to tell them of their mother's death. 

"Pa didn't hug me. He wasn't great at showing emotions under normal circumstances. But his hand did fall once more on my knee and he said, 'It's going to be okay,'" Harry wrote in his recounting of hearing the painful news. 

In an interview with Anderson Cooper of "60 Minutes," Harry said, "Nothing was okay."

Book bombshells

The book details Harry's experiments with psychedelics in search of relief from his trauma, as well as his military career and his revelation that he killed 25 people in Afghanistan while serving in the British armed forces.

Other bombshells include his claim that William physically assaulted him over tension related to Meghan Markle, whom Harry married in 2018. William reportedly called Meghan "abrasive," "difficult" and "rude," the book says. 

"It all happened so fast. So very fast. [William] grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and  he knocked me to the floor .   I landed on the dog's bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out," Harry wrote in "Spare."

Reviews: The good, the bad and the ugly

So far, reviews of the book have been mixed, with some critics praising the memoir while others not. The Economist called it an "ill-advised romp." 

"'Spare' is by turns compassion-inducing, frustrating, oddly compelling and absurd," The Guardian wrote in its Monday review of the book. 

Other reviewers praised the book, but with caveats. The Financial Times noted, "You may question whether you should be reading anything more about Harry, let alone a 416-page book." 

But, its reviewer added, "Of all Harry and Meghan's output since they stepped down from royal duties in 2020 — the interview with Oprah Winfrey, the Spotify podcasts, the six-hour Netflix documentary — 'Spare' is the most bearable and revelatory."

Not exactly high praise, but it may be enough to convince readers to open their pocketbooks and order a copy. 

• Prince Harry Duke of Sussex

Aimee Picchi is the associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and personal finance. She previously worked at Bloomberg News and has written for national news outlets including USA Today and Consumer Reports.

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Prince Harry's much talked about memoir 'Spare' is on bookstore shelves

NPR's Leila Fadel talks to Martin Pengelly of The Guardian , who obtained a copy of Spare before it was published. The book has created a major scandal involving the British royal family.

Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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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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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:.

» Click here to read Jesse Kornbluth's review.

Review #1 by Roberta O’Hara

There are two sides to every story. Those sides are perception --- or, perhaps better put, perception of truth.

With all the hoopla that has been in the ether the past few months surrounding SPARE, along with the Netflix series and the countless interviews, I made a conscious decision to approach Prince Harry’s memoir with the above in mind. There are two sides to every story. The tabloid gossip and so-called news has been brutal, even heartbreaking at times, for a world that has watched (perhaps too closely) the shattered childhoods of Princess Diana’s boys. I wanted to give Harry an honest read.

What I didn’t expect was to walk away from the book not only maintaining that perception is in the eye of the one doing the experiencing, but also feeling a new-found respect and sympathy for Harry.

"What I didn’t expect was to walk away from the book not only maintaining that perception is in the eye of the one doing the experiencing, but also feeling a new-found respect and sympathy for Harry."

The idea of a “spare to the heir” takes the notion of a favorite child to new and deplorable heights. Smaller rooms, a lesser cottage, even fewer sausages at breakfast --- Harry’s role as the “other,” the almost dispensable one, was always on the surface, a constant reminder. He was, in his own words, “the shadow, the support, the Plan B” to his brother, Will. And for a child who had lost his mother, the negation and isolation compounded. Loss was a constant throughout his life. Even on Will’s wedding day, Harry sensed the “feeling that this was yet another farewell under this horrid roof. Another sundering. The brother I’d escorted into Westminster Abbey that morning was gone --- forever.”

Charles’ marriage to Camilla resulted in less time with his father. It’s no wonder that it was years before Harry could come to terms with the fact that Diana was actually dead, not just in safe hiding, away from the royal games and expectations. Harry spent the rest of his childhood and much of his young adult life looking for signs of her.

And yet, Harry couldn’t cry. He recalled tears briefly --- once --- at his mother’s funeral. But then not again for 17 years (“of suppressed grief”) when asked about Diana by his then-girlfriend, Cressida. This moment was perhaps the beginning of a catharsis long overdue. And SPARE is definitely a culmination of catharsis.

Since all the juicy bits are “out there” in the news, there aren’t surprises of shocking value. Everyone has heard about the frostbite, the physical fight with Will, and the line about Camilla doing spin control.

SPARE reinforces the brutality of the British press, the downright trickery to which they will stoop in order to get a photograph, a tidbit that they can twist into something salacious, a story of half-truths. The memoir is rife with tales of the press inserting themselves in situations to get the “news” (in quotes because calling it journalism in the purest sense of what respectable reporters do doesn’t seem justified). From Diana’s death through the rest of Harry’s life, the press has been a constant presence --- mosquitos looking for their next meal.

“For much of my adult life there had been paps [paparazzi] waiting for me outside public places. Sometimes a mob of them, sometimes a handful…. But it wasn’t just public places. I’d be walking down a side street…and they’d leap from a phone box or from under a parked car.” And Harry feared that “[s]ome person, or persons, extremely close to me and Willy, was sneaking stuff to the newspapers….” His father’s only advice: “Don’t read it, darling boy.”

Harry longed for something that made sense to him because the loss he experienced didn’t, nor did the treatment he and his family received at the hands of reporters. “Please,” he begged, “put me on a battlefield where there are clear rules of engagement.” And so he deployed to the Iraqi border, to escape. The long passages about Harry’s service stood out for me; they showed a courage not often attributed to royals whose service was more for show than actual combat. Harry’s duty was real. Much has been made about his “kills,” the press touting that he bragged about this, but in words he didn’t. He states the facts of his service plainly. Pride in his military service, yes; pride in numbers, no.

And, finally, the romance. And the racism. Meghan Markle. Harry fell quickly, and so did Meghan. Harry’s writing about their early courtship is, well, beautiful. (It’s equaled only by his stories of Botswana, where he so clearly feels a comfort level he had seldom experienced in his life to date.) But once the relationship was made public, the vicious cycle began again, and Meghan was villainized quickly. “Tormenting Meghan Markle has become a national sport that shames us,” read a headline in The Guardian .

Everyone knows the end of the story --- the wedding, the adorable children, the move to America. And now this book. Where Harry bares his soul. Where he is allowed to be vulnerable and tells his story, from his point of view. Critics and wannabe critics will argue forever about the veracity of what Harry shares, but I see it this way: a boy who lost his mother in a horribly visible way and lived in the proverbial glass castle was tortuously scarred yet managed to build a new life for himself on his terms. And finally learned how to cry --- tears of pain and joy.  

Review #2 by Jesse Kornbluth

SPARE is the fastest-selling nonfiction book  ever , with 1.43 million copies sold on its launch day. I wasn’t among those avid first-day buyers. I wasn’t one of the 17 million viewers of Oprah’s interview with Harry and Meghan, and I do not live in one of the 28 million households that watched their Netflix documentary. I hadn’t savored the press reports of the book’s revelations and inaccuracies, or read beyond the headlines of the damage the book may deliver to the Crown, or cheer their $135 million deals that look a lot like a raised finger to the family that refused to pay even their much-needed security team. Truly, my interest in the Harry and Meghan story extended no further than Tina Brown’s book, THE PALACE PAPERS , and her unforgettable quip at her publication party: “This is a book Meghan Markle wishes she’d read four years ago.”

And yet a copy of SPARE was on my desk the other day when my daughter walked in. Her face was a rictus of young disgust. As was her tone: “Ooooo…why?” I explained that the ghostwriter was J.R. Moehringer, author of one of my favorite memoirs, THE TENDER BAR . Harry is, by his own admission, not a reader. He is surely no writer. As I occasionally ghostwrite, I explained to my daughter that I was reading the book to see what I could learn from Moehringer, who reportedly earned $1 million for his services on SPARE.

"The high-level gossip regularly detonates, keeping us reading...and we feel for the kid who believes his mother is alive, just elsewhere, because then she’s not really gone. But there’s no getting around it: until Harry meets Meghan Markle, this is one sad book."

So let me pass over the book’s greatest hits --- there’s a laundry list of them here and here --- and deal with Moehringer’s considerable achievement. He structured the book as a case history of a great trauma: the death of Harry’s mother and the inability of his stiff-upper-lip father and equally traumatized brother to help him.

Not long ago, I read this: “Trauma is stored in the body and released in relationships.” I asked a therapist if she believed that was true. “100%” she said.

“Released” in relationships is not a good thing. It means that, when triggered, the trauma is expressed as anger or tears or even violence on an innocent, baffled lover, friend or relative. In the classic TRAUMA AND RECOVERY: The Aftermath of Violence — from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror , Judith Herman writes, “When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often, secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.”

Most of SPARE is a chronicle of Harry’s symptoms: drugs, endless confrontations with paparazzi, stalled relationships with women, and, of course, the ongoing war with his family. There are exciting chapters --- Harry’s experiences in the Army are vivid and detailed --- and his high-speed drive through the Paris tunnel where his mother died is a heartbreaker. But the real plot engine is dish. The high-level gossip regularly detonates, keeping us reading --- kudos to Moehringer --- and we feel for the kid who believes his mother is alive, just elsewhere, because then she’s not really gone. But there’s no getting around it: until Harry meets Meghan Markle, this is one sad book.

From the second Meghan appears, the clouds clear and the sun shines, and we are reading a thrilling love story: a wounded warrior is healed by a fantastic woman, who creates a family with him that he is dedicated to protect. Could there possibly be a happier ending?

Stories that end this well --- stories that are too good to be true --- generally omit disquieting realities. The main one: Harry and Meghan have created a family unit almost as insular as the royals. The New York Times review nibbles at this:

One kind of wants to snatch the remote control from his hands and press into them a copy of Joseph Heller’s CATCH 22…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 a cushioned chair.

Finally, a personal note. When Diana died on August 31, 1997, I was the Editorial Director of America Online. I was spending the Labor Day weekend at an off-the-grid inn a hundred miles from AOL headquarters in Dulles, Virginia. I rushed back to the office the next morning. Right… Labor Day --- the building was locked. (Unreal, but the internet wasn’t 24/7 then.) On Tuesday, my team belatedly started to build a memorial special. When it launched, it was like no special ever seen on AOL. Instead of links to news accounts, all the links went to message boards that asked for emotional responses: Grieve. Share. For her family. AOL then had three million members. In a few days, we had 4.5 million messages.

When I recall those numbers, I cut almost everyone in SPARE a little slack. Not the media --- there are killers with better ethics than the British press and its ghoulish photographers. And it’s hard to forgive Charles and Camilla, and Kate and William, for tolerating and even encouraging a racist campaign against Meghan.

But context matters. And in context, I see a traumatized family in a traumatized world. The death of Diana was like 9/11 for the royals. No one who was alive that day will ever forget it. Or not feel it. That ongoing trauma --- Diana’s long shadow --- sadly will be a silent, ghostly presence in what Harry and Meghan want to believe is their beautifully tended garden of a marriage.

Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara, and Jesse Kornbluth for HeadButler.com on January 27, 2023

Spare by Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex

• Publication Date: January 10, 2023
• Genres: Memoir , Nonfiction
• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Random House
• ISBN-10: 0593593804
• ISBN-13: 9780593593806

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Spare review roundup: Critics remark on ‘chaotic’ yet emotional outpour from Prince Harry

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Prince Harry ’s highly anticipated memoir that lifts the lid on his personal life and the inner workings of the royal family has been released today (10 January) to critics who describe the book as “absurd”, “chaotic” and “emotionally charged.”

The 416-page ghost-written autobiography, Spare , is the Duke of Sussex’s first book. Its contents, which are well-known by now, cover everything from family feuds to Harry’s virginity story and penile frostbite. It comes after Harry completes his confessional tour between TV broadcasters ( ITV , CNN, ABC) to promote the book that addresses his claims in greater detail.

The Independent’s Lucy Pavia writes that while the duke’s wife, Meghan, “might be the natural on camera”, 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”. Pavia writes: “This book doesn’t so much lift the curtain on private royal life than rip it off and shake out its contents.”

Pavia adds: “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.”

The Guardian ’s Charlotte Higgins writes that while Spare is “compassion-inducing, frustrating, oddly compelling and absurd”, it’s a “failed attempt to reclaim the narrative” by Prince Harry . Higgins continues: “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.”

Meanwhile, Spare is described as a “therapy session” for the Duke of Sussex, according to The Times ’ James Marriott, where readers get a “weirder, more complex Harry” who is “quite a different Harry from the cool, square-jawed metrosexual Californian on the cover”. Marriott expresses that “there is not enough space here to detail how much Harry hates the press”, while pointing at the hypocrisy of the tell-all memoir: “although he claims to despise the intrusions of the press, Harry craves being the centre of attention.”

Both reviews in The Guardian and The Times note how Prince Harry has taken the press reportage of his and his mother’s life very personally. Higgins notes: “For years, it seems, he devoured every syllable published about him,” while Marriott states, “Harry reads what’s written about him and knows individual journalists by name.”

Both similarly note that, throughout the memoir, Prince Harry grumbles about the things that the average person might call luxury. Marriott notes how Harry “endlessly complains that he’s forced to inhabit pokier bedrooms than his brother”. Higgins remarks that Harry’s complaint about the darkness of his Kensington Palace basement residence, where the windows were 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 Telegraph ’s Anita Singh, however, writes that some things are better left unsaid, regarding the intimate details the duke shared about his personal life. The memoir, in Singh’s words, is a painful reminder that Harry is a “boy who never recovered from his mother’s loss”. Singh added: “Your heart breaks for him on every page that mentions Diana. He doesn’t want to let go of the pain because that is all he has left to remember her by.”

Financial Times ’ Henry Mance writes that out of the Sussex’s Oprah interview and six-part Netflix documentary, Spare“ is the most bearable and revelatory” of Prince Harry’s outpour. According to Mance, Spare is the “most insightful royal book in a generation”.

The reviews, on all accounts but one, note that Harry’s ghostwriter, JR Moehringer, who previously wrote tennis player Andre Agassi’s memoir, Open , has done a good job. The narrative and the writing itself are praised as “stylish” by The Independent , while The Financial Times claims Harry’s story “is told sensitively and at times movingly” and The Telegraph says “Moehringer has done a very good job here”.

Read The Independent ’s four-star review here .

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

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

By Margaret Darby

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

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

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

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

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

First reactions to ‘Spare’

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

Fan reactions to ‘Spare’

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

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

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

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

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

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Why Is ‘Baby Reindeer’ Such a Hit? It’s All in the Ending.

The Netflix stalker series combines the appeal of a twisty thriller with a deep sense of empathy. The conclusion illustrates why it’s become one of the most-discussed shows of the year.

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By Noel Murray

This article includes spoilers for all of “Baby Reindeer.”

The mini-series “Baby Reindeer” arrived on Netflix on April 11 without much advance hype, but it quickly became one of the most talked-about TV shows of 2024.

It’s not hard to understand why. Based on the Scottish comedian Richard Gadd’s award-winning 2019 one-man stage show, “Baby Reindeer” baits its hook in the first episode, which introduces Martha (Jessica Gunning), an emotionally fragile middle-aged woman who appreciates the kindness shown to her by Donny (Gadd), a struggling stand-up comic who offers her a free drink in the pub where he works.

By the end of that first episode, Martha’s neediness has begun to shade into creepiness. And by the time Donny discovers that his new friend has a history of stalking, she’s already begun what will eventually become a torrent of abuse, as she floods his email and social media with poorly spelled messages that insult his character and sometimes threaten sexual violence.

What makes “Baby Reindeer” so effective is that as Martha pushes further and further into Donny’s personal life — attending his comedy shows, befriending his landlady, calling his parents — the audience shares his mounting feelings of powerlessness and frustration, cut with flashes of pity for the woman who is ruining his life. The show has the “slow-motion train wreck” appeal of a twisty true-crime documentary, but balanced with empathy for two profoundly broken people.

A story as dark and uneasy as this one needs a proper ending, though. “Baby Reindeer” has one that is satisfying in its particulars, if haunting in its implications.

Gadd (who wrote every episode) plants the seeds for the finale in the penultimate episode, the sixth, which ends with Donny having a career-altering meltdown while competing in a stand-up comedy contest. Donny’s comic style is highly conceptual, involving corny props and awkward jokes, designed to leave his audience wondering whether or not they’re meant to laugh. He’s like a Scottish (and much less effective) version of Steve Martin in his “Wild and Crazy Guy” days. (Or, as Donny puts it: “I’m a comedian when they laugh, a performance artist when they don’t.”)

When the crowd can’t get on his wavelength at the competition, Donny ditches his props and just talks, sharing with a stunned audience the story that we have been watching for the previous five episodes. He tells them about how when he was a young and inexperienced comedian, he took an unpaid gig working for Darrien O’Connor (Tom Goodman-Hill), a well-respected TV writer who repeatedly drugged and sexually assaulted him. He tells them about his transgender girlfriend, Teri (Nava Mau), whom he’s too embarrassed to kiss in public.

And, of course, he tells them about Martha, the angel and the devil on his shoulders: sometimes telling him how sweet, funny and handsome he is, and sometimes calling him a weak-willed, talentless degenerate.

As the show’s seventh and final episode opens, a video of Donny’s train-wreck performance has landed on YouTube (under the title “Comedian Has Epic Breakdown”), bringing him viral fame and new opportunities. The pressure of that higher profile — coupled with Martha’s ceaseless string of threatening voice mail messages — prompts Donny to confide in his unexpectedly sympathetic parents about being raped. All of these confessions feel liberating.

Not too long after, one of Martha’s threats is dire enough to get her arrested — and eventually jailed. Gadd brings the conflict between Donny and Martha to a logical conclusion, with Martha finally acknowledging the harm she’s done by pleading guilty.

So Donny lives happily … but not for ever after. More like for a day or two.

The unsettling ambiguities of the “Baby Reindeer” epilogue — the real ending, which comes after Martha is safely locked away — are a big part of what has made the show a word-of-mouth hit.

First, Donny finds himself going back over Martha’s old messages, and turning every one of their past interactions into pieces of a puzzle that he then pins up on his wall — like a detective trying to crack a complicated case. His inquiry even leads him back to the doorstep of the man who molested him, where Donny falls into an old pattern of deference and eagerness to please.

Then, in the series’s knockout closing scene, a bartender gives a teary-eyed Donny a free drink, echoing what Donny once did for Martha. What makes Donny so upset? Take your pick: He’s still processing what Martha and Darrien have done to him. He’s furious with himself for not standing up to his abuser. He attained the fame he always craved and found that it didn’t solve his problems.

The final trigger comes when, as he listens to one of Martha’s old messages, he hears her explain that she always calls him “reindeer” because he reminds her of the stuffed toy that comforted her during a rough childhood. For a moment, this former terrifying nuisance goes back to being a person worthy of understanding and even grace. Or maybe, again, it’s actually empathy: Donny ending the story in the same state in which he first encountered Martha makes manifest the bond between them.

Part of the global popularity of “Baby Reindeer” is no doubt a result of the web sleuth dimension — the online rush to identify the real figures behind Martha and Darrien. Gadd has discouraged such speculation , and innocent people have been accused.

But much of the show’s distinctive appeal comes from how, at a time when trauma narratives almost have become cliché in high-end TV drama, “Baby Reindeer” presents a more nuanced version of one. It authentically depicts trauma and mental illness as confusing, unpredictable and deeply personal, all of which is underscored by the emotional ambivalence of its conclusion.

“Baby Reindeer” relies a lot on its subjective point of view. Donny’s voice-over narration dominates every episode, recounting in vivid detail his disgust with himself. The series’s two directors, Weronika Tofilska and Josephine Bornebusch, often keep the camera trained on Donny’s face, capturing his feelings of disorientation as even his best moments are disrupted by Martha’s constant intrusions. Viewers are drawn deep into Donny’s neuroses, which include, he and we begin to understand, an addiction to being the object of one woman’s obsession.

But while this show holds close to Donny’s perspective, in a way it also sees the world through Martha’s eyes — or at least to the extent that Donny identifies with her. She’s out of his life by the end of the finale, but he still has to live with that part of himself that feels exactly how she feels.

Throughout “Baby Reindeer,” Donny struggles to explain why he’s not more proactive when it comes to Martha. Why doesn’t he warn his friends about her? Why does he take so long to get the police involved? Why doesn’t he freeze her out the first time she turns weird?

The answer is that, on some level, he gets it. He too is lost, lonely and awkward much of the time. That’s why there is no real triumph in besting Martha. For Donny, it’s like defeating himself — something he already does nearly every day.

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The Wolves of K Street review: how lobbying swallowed Washington

Brody and Luke Mullins offer an exhaustive, telling, mesmerising chronicle of the biggest business in US politics

D onald Trump decries the proverbial Washington swamp. Congress does next to nothing. The band plays on: lobbying remains big business. In 2023, the industry hit a $4.3bn payday. This year shows no end in sight to the trend . As the US gallops toward another election, The Wolves of K Street befits the season.

Brody Mullins , a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter and Pulitzer prize winner, and his brother, Luke Mullins , a contributor at Politico, deliver a graduate seminar on how lobbying emerged and became a behemoth, an adjunct of government itself, taking its collective name from the street north of the White House where many of its biggest earners sit.

Smoothly written, meticulously researched, The Wolves of K Street informs and mesmerizes.

“This is a book about men – for they were almost exclusively men – who built K Street,” Brody and Luke Mullins write.

They have produced a tightly stitched, 600-plus-page tome that begins as a true-crime story. The suicide of Evan Morris , a lobbyist for big pharma, takes center stage. In the opening scene of the book, at a posh Virginia golf club on a balmy evening in July 2015, Morris, 38, turns a gun on himself.

The seemingly almost idyllic backdrop to his death is actually a tableau of excess, complete with $150,000 initiation fees, an abandoned Porsche, an emptied bottle of $1,500 bordeaux and a scenic sunset.

Millions of corporate dollars were missing and untaxed. An anonymous letter and an FBI investigation helped ignite Morris’s untimely and violent end.

“The allegations would touch off a years-long case ,” the brothers Mullins write.

Morris’s wife and estate settled with Genentech, his employer, the Internal Revenue Service and the commonwealth of Virginia. The government never charged anyone with a crime. Death had taken its toll.

The Wolves of K Street is about way more than just one man. It is an engrossing lesson in how lunch-bucket sensibilities and the accommodation between big business and the New Deal gave way to neoliberalism, corporate activism and the decline of industrial unions.

The Democratic party, to name just one major part of American life, would never be the same again. The Mullins brothers are keenly aware of the social forces that buffet and drive US politics . They recall how Jimmy Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980 left the party of FDR, Truman and JFK to wonder how it was no longer the political home of working-class America. Democrats wonder to this day.

The Wolves of K Street traces how the US reached this point, and lobbying attained its present stature, by following “three lobbying dynasties – one Republican, two Democratic – over the critical period from the 1970s to today, when the modern lobbying industry was created, corporate interests came to power in Washington, and the nature of our economy was fundamentally changed”.

The late Tommy Boggs, son of Hale Boggs, once a Democratic House majority leader, stands out as the patriarch and pioneer of Democratic lobbying. His name came to grace Patton, Boggs and Blow, a storied DC law firm now subsumed in Squire Patton Boggs, a sprawling global entity nominally based in Ohio. Evan Morris stood out as Boggs’s “prized pupil” – or apostle.

Next came the Republicans: Charlie Black, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and the late Lee Atwater, who would manage the 1988 presidential campaign of George HW Bush.

“[They] used their links to the Reagan revolution to erect Washington’s signature GOP house of lobbying,” the Mullins write. “Each member of the partnership had his own distinct role.”

Together, they bridged the gap between corner offices and the universe of conservative activists. Furthermore, Donald Trump was a client of Black, Manafort and Stone. Stone helped boost Maryanne Trump Barry, the property magnate’s late sister, on to the federal bench.

That history is why Manafort and Stone emerged as part of Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016; why the pair were caught in the special counsel’s net when it came time to investigate Russia’s attempts to help Trump; why they received presidential pardons before Trump left office; and why they stand to be back for one more rodeo as Trump runs for the White House again.

Tony Podesta, brother of the Democratic White House veteran John Podesta, is the keystone of the third lobbying dynasty examined by Brody and Luke Mullins, an “avant-garde political fixer [who] used his experience as a brass-knuckled liberal activist to advance the interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley”.

The paths taken by Manafort and Podesta would eventually entwine. Out of the limelight, Manafort came to represent the interests of Ukraine’s anti-Nato Party of Regions and its head, Viktor Yanukovych. In 2012, seeking to stave off sanctions, Manafort enlisted Podesta to his cause.

“I used to call them the dynamic duo,” Rick Gates, Manafort’s convicted acolyte, tells the Mullins brothers.

The Wolves of K Street is also newsy, disclosing for the first time Manafort’s attempt to have Yanukovych congratulate Joe Biden in summer 2012.

“I am thinking of recommending a call from VY to Biden to congratulate Biden on his [re-]nomination” as vice-president to Barack Obama, Manafort emailed Gates, who forwarded the note to Podesta. The brother of Bill Clinton’s chief of staff cum Obama counselor approved.

“‘Only downside is [if] biden [sic] presses him personally on politics of criminal prosecutions of his political’ opponents, Podesta responded. ‘I would say worth the risk.’”

T he Wolves of K Street ends on a weary note: “No matter what new obstacles have emerged, K Street has always managed to invent new ways to exercise its power over Washington,” the Mullins brothers conclude. “New fortunes to be made, new rules to be broken. New stories to be told.”

One might well reach for Ecclesiastes, son of David: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

The Wolves of K Street is published in the US by Simon & Schuster

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