Random House, $36.00, ISBN 978-0-593-59380-6
Memoir, 2023

Now, now, I know what you guys are thinking. You have likely heard everyone else laughing at what Prince Harry wrote in Spare, his purported memoir, and you may be thinking why I would even want to buy and read this thing.

Actually, I didn’t buy it. Full disclosure: someone gifted it to me as a Christmas present, and I’m actually surprised at how quick it arrives at my doorstep. Oh well, I’m glad I received it pretty early compared to the typical Book Depository deliveries, and I’m especially glad to have read it.

Yes, you read me right: this book is an awesome romance in the old school sense, as it sets the protagonist up to be this kid with a wounded childhood that becomes molded by war and bittersweet life experiences into a more hardened man. Finally, he finds a woman to love, one that puts his raging soul at ease.

Unlike a typical hero of old-school romance, he doesn’t meet a noble tragic end. No, he finds the courage to break away from the toxic chains in his life, and together with his beloved, they run off into the great unknown, the future uncertain, but he is confident that, whatever that may hold, it will be better and happier than their current existence.

It’s a beautiful story, made especially more so by the narrative.

Maybe she was omnipresent for the very same reason that she was indescribable—because she was light, pure and radiant light, and how can you really describe light? Even Einstein struggled with that one. Recently, astronomers rearranged their biggest telescopes, aimed them at one tiny crevice in the cosmos, and managed to catch a glimpse of one breathtaking sphere, which they named Earendel, the Old English word for Morning Star. Billions of miles off, and probably long vanished, Earendel is closer to the Big Bang, the moment of Creation, than our own Milky Way, and yet it’s somehow still visible to mortal eyes because it’s just so awesomely bright and dazzling.

That was my mother.

Sure, those people looking for something high-brow may find plenty of mock in this admittedly rather overblown style of prose, but as a fan of romance and melodrama, I can’t think of a more evocative, poetic way to announce one’s mummy issues to the world.

The prologue, from which the above is taken off, starts off right away tugging at the strings of my heart, mostly because of the narrative style, and I am hooked. I initially wanted to quickly skim through that thin section to find horrible stuff to assure myself that this one is as torrid as the media claimed it is, but instead, I find myself sitting down to keep reading.

The first part of three is called, melodramatically, Out of the Night That Covers Me. 

I’m sure we all know how Harry, as a child, lost his mother, with whom he was clearly very close to. In this one, his memories of her and the way he interpreted the events that led to her death formed his entire perspective of life and love as well as of the people around him. As warped as this may seem, the way Prince Harry—or more likely, his ghostwriter—shares his story makes this feel so real, so relatable, that I can’t help but to hurt a little for him.

Her hair, Harry.

Aunt Sarah explained that, while in Paris, she’d clipped two locks from Mummy’s head.

So there it was. Proof. She’s really gone.

But then immediately came the reassuring doubt, the lifesaving uncertainty: No, this could be anybody’s hair. Mummy, her beautiful blond hair intact, was out there somewhere.

I’d know if she weren’t. My body would know. My heart would know. And neither knows any such thing.

Both were just as full of love for her as ever.

My heart is dead and cold, but that… that just hurts it and warms it at the same time.

Aunt Sarah is the much-maligned Duchess of York, who is one of the very few people that he mentions with kindness and even affection, because she was there whenever he felt grief and loneliness threatening to wash him away.

Unlike Aunt Sarah, who openly grieved for his mother, his father was cold and distant, as he always was, and his grandmother was equally so. They were, as he mentions quite often, British as well as the Windsors.

To this day nearly every biography of me, every longish profile in a paper or magazine, touches on Major Hewitt, treats the prospect of his paternity with some seriousness, including a description of the moment Pa finally sat me down for a proper heart-to-heart, reassuring me that Major Hewitt wasn’t my real father. Vivid scene, poignant, moving, and wholly made up. If Pa had any thoughts about Major Hewitt, he kept them to himself.

Seriously, a young boy shouldn’t have to deal with such things, at least not without his only surviving parent reassuring him that it was all not true. Instead, the big-nosed twit just kept being a Windsor Brit, sigh.

It is also quite painfully real to read about his childish instinct that, yes, Mom and Dad weren’t happy, and Dad might be seeing another woman. In fact, Harry in his teenage years didn’t blame Camilla. He know his parents and Camilla were all trapped in a web that they couldn’t get out of, thanks to them all being Windsor Brits.

We thought he should be happy. Yes, Camilla had played a pivotal role in the unraveling of our parents’ marriage, and yes, that meant she’d played a role in our mother’s disappearance, but we understood that she’d been trapped like everyone else in the riptide of events. We didn’t blame her, and in fact we’d gladly forgive her if she could make Pa happy. We could see that, like us, he wasn’t. We recognized the vacant looks, the empty sighs, the frustration always visible on his face. We couldn’t be absolutely sure, because Pa didn’t talk about his feelings, but we’d pieced together, through the years, a fairly accurate portrait of him, based on little things he’d let slip.

However, he began to resent her when, he claimed, she made a play for marriage with his father, using the media to spin a narrative that was in her favor. Prince Harry really, really resents the media, as it will become very evident while one is reading this thing. I have to admit: the way this memoir plays out, it’s easy to understand why.

It’s especially painful to read about how alone he was throughout his teens, isolated by everyone else due to him being what he is.

Once or twice I’d confess to a teacher or fellow student that I wasn’t merely in the wrong class but in the wrong location. I was in way, way over my head. They’d always say the same thing: Don’t worry, you’ll be all right. And don’t forget you always have your brother here!

But I wasn’t the one forgetting. Willy told me to pretend I didn’t know him.

What?

You don’t know me, Harold. And I don’t know you.

He wasn’t doing well academically in Eton, and every misstep of his was amplified by the media. It also didn’t help him get along with his father, a bookish man that couldn’t relate to a jock of a younger son.

The one piece of literature I remember enjoying, even savoring, was a slender American novel. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. We were assigned it in our English divs.

Unlike Shakespeare, Steinbeck didn’t need a translator. He wrote in plain, simple vernacular. Better yet, he kept it tight. Of Mice and Men: a brisk 150 pages.

Best of all, its plot was diverting. Two blokes, George and Lennie, gadding about California, looking for a place to call their own, trying to overcome their limitations. Neither’s a genius, but Lennie’s trouble seems to be more than low IQ. He keeps a dead mouse in his pocket, strokes it with his thumb—for comfort. He also loves a puppy so much that he kills it.

A story about friendship, about brotherhood, about loyalty, it was filled with themes I found relatable. George and Lennie put me in mind of Willy and me. Two pals, two nomads, going through the same things, watching each other’s back. As Steinbeck has one character say: “A guy needs somebody—to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody.”

So true. I wanted to share it with Willy.

Too bad he was still pretending not to know me.

That really breaks my heart, it does.

That’s the other subplot: William has never enjoyed being bundled along with Harry as part of Diana’s then PR-feud against her estranged and later ex-husband, and the moment he could sever the cord connecting him to Harry, he did so without hesitation as seen in Harry’s description of his days in Eton.

This continues for the rest of the memoir, and Harry’s bewilderment and eventual resentment feel real and understandable, again because whoever that wrote this really knows how to tell a damned good melodrama.

Okay, the second act, Bloody, but Unbowed, then moves to Harry’s days in the military, and this is when the more poetic narrative style gives way to shorter, more terse sentences that drive home how action-packed Harry’s life is becoming, how he is becoming more masculine, more of a man, and seriously, whoever wrote this thing really knows their stuff. Shame I probably would never know whom that is, because I’d love that fellow to write my memoir for me.

Sure, much is made about how exaggerated and ridiculous some of Harry’s claims in this section are, but who cares. The drama is a natural progression of this beautifully wounded and tragic protagonist’s story, as he finds purpose for the first time in his life.

Sure, he also did weed and cocaine, but honestly, who wouldn’t in his shoes. However, he claims that the revelation of his habits was weaponized by his father to redeem the man’s public image at the expense of Harry’s.

Or did I learn only later that the guiding force behind this putrid strategy was the same spin doctor Pa and Camilla had recently hired, the same spin doctor who’d leaked the details of our private summits with Camilla? This spin doctor, Marko said, had decided that the best approach in this case would be to spin me—right under the bus. In one swoop this would appease the editor and also bolster the sagging reputation of Pa. Amid all this unpleasantness, all this extortion and gamesmanship, the spin doctor had discovered one silver lining, one shiny consolation prize for Pa. No more the unfaithful husband, Pa would now be presented to the world as the harried single dad coping with a drug-addled child.

That… yeah, yikes. I can see why he resents his father too.

He became hardened and wiser and even more jaded, and found that it was even harder to fit in with a family that still pigeonholed him into the Naughty Spare, someone to prop up William and make the heir look so much better in comparison.

The fact that the media played into this game only deepens his resentment of the whole institution.

His love life suffered because his squeeze at that time claimed that she couldn’t recognize him anymore, all due to all his bad PR that he claimed was exacerbated by his own father’s PR people.

If that’s not bad enough, his brother started to find fault and berate him for this and that, and Harry attributed this to sibling rivalry on his brother’s part.

Ah, yes. So this was Granny’s crown, and hers alone, and now I remembered her telling me how unbelievably heavy it had been the first time they set it upon her head.

It looked heavy. It also looked magical. The more we stared, the brighter it got—was that possible? And the glow was seemingly internal. The jewels did their part, but the crown seemed to possess some inner energy source, something beyond the sum of its parts, its jeweled band, its golden fleurs-de-lis, its crisscrossing arches and gleaming cross. And of course its ermine base. You couldn’t help but feel that a ghost, encountered late at night inside the Tower, might have a similar glow. I moved my eyes slowly, appreciatively, from the bottom to the top. The crown was a wonder, a transcendent and evocative piece of art, not unlike the poppies, but all I could think in that moment was how tragic that it should remain locked up in this Tower.

Yet another prisoner.

Seems a waste, I said to Willy and Kate, to which, I recall, they said nothing.

Maybe they were looking at that band of ermine, remembering my wedding remarks.

Maybe not.

The third act is where things start to unravel a bit. It’s called Captain of My Soul, and I suspect this part must be written by his wife, because even the title of this part is something Saint Meghan of the Markle would insist on—everything has to be about how awesome she is, you see, and only she is allowed to be awesome; no one else.

She looked up, smiled.

I apologized. Profusely. I couldn’t imagine many people had been late for this woman.

I settled into the sofa, apologized again.

She said she forgave me.

Yes, I have a feeling that she definitely wrote this act.

This third act is the easily most boring one because, compared to the earlier parts of the memoir, the whole romance feels shallow in such a way that even the most elegant phraseology can’t hide.

Also, some scenes that are meant to be poignant, such as the Sainted Markle prostrated over his mother’s grave as some kind of sign that his mother approves of her, feel like a disquieting kind of manipulation on the woman’s part—ironically, the same kind of manipulation he accuses Camilla of doing to get her father to marry him.

Still, this act has him and William finally coming to blows, the culmination of the older brother as one of the main villains in this story memoir, as well as a beautiful, even heartfelt closure to Harry’s quest to find a way to reunite with and marry his mother in a way that won’t get them arrested or result in ugly mutant babies.

Interestingly, the media proves Harry right with their exaggerated mocking of this memoir. The most gregarious example of a “Harry is right after all” moment is when they say Harry is bitter about being the spare to the heir.

I took no offense. I felt nothing about it, any of it. Succession was like the weather, or the positions of the planets, or the turn of the seasons. Who had the time to worry about things so unchangeable? Who could bother with being bothered by a fate etched in stone? Being a Windsor meant working out which truths were timeless, and then banishing them from your mind. It meant absorbing the basic parameters of one’s identity, knowing by instinct who you were, which was forever a byproduct of who you weren’t.

I wasn’t Granny.

I wasn’t Pa.

I wasn’t Willy.

I was third in line behind them.

Every boy and girl, at least once, imagines themselves as a prince or princess. Therefore, Spare or no Spare, it wasn’t half bad to actually be one. More, standing resolutely behind the people you loved, wasn’t that the definition of honor?

Of love?

Like bowing to Victoria as you passed?

Does this seem like black and white bitterness? No, it’s a heartfelt rumination of that bloke from Phosphorescent’s Song for Zula, only he is writing his story with his tears of anguish instead of slashing his wrists.

Of course, I’m not saying that the protagonist in this memoir is anything like the real Prince Harry. Let’s be real, official memoirs are almost always an idealized vainglorious pile of bull excrement.

However, Spare is actually a beautifully written melodrama of a tragic protagonist. It is only awful if one compares this to what they read and see of him and his wife in the media—not that I’m saying that this is the wrong thing to do; I’m just saying that I choose to just enjoy this melodrama for what it is, without comparing it to the real bloke.

I find it easy to do this because the writing is gorgeous, and the person that wrote this thing knows how to bring forth the protagonist’s emotions, his pain, his sense of isolation and loneliness, his everything in a way that feels so true to life. The opening prologue may involve members of the Royal Family, for example, but the painful awkwardness of a forced family reunion with people that don’t really want to hear what you are saying—everything feels raw and real.

Also, come on. Tortured blue-blooded protagonist with a terrible childhood, a former military living a hedonistic life until he meets the soulmate that changes his life and outlook… Spare is a romance novel written from the hero’s point of view, and damn, it gets me good.

So, on the slim chance that Prince Harry actually wrote this himself, he should whine less and write more. The world will be a better place if he would do this immediately.