Honestly, where to begin with this one considering the amount of ink already spilled about it and the endless interviews. I am coming at this from the point of view of someone most interested in pre-WWI royalty, and as someone who is interested in the generational reverberations of child abuse. I am not that invested in who is right in the current generational struggle or really in any of the individuals in this book, and I tried to approach my reading with a fairly open mind. My loyalty begins and ends with Edward VII, and he died in 1910, so the current squabbles are beyond my research interests. I also don’t think you can really begin to approach the truth of anything until over 50 years have passed and the historical archives have started opening for researchers, so I take all the claims and counterclaims here with a lot of grains of salt.
All that being said, I was interested to read Harry’s narrative in his own words and to not form opinions based on quotes being bandied around in the media. I wanted to see them in context and made my way through Spare in about 3-4 days. I was left with the impression that this book shouldn’t have been written at this point, and I mainly say that because Harry seems to be in a place where he has done enough therapy to know catch phrases and feel insightful, but he hasn’t actually integrated or processed a lot of his clearly deep-seated trauma. I also had a parent die suddenly at a young age so I could really relate to a lot of his feelings of grief, shock, unreality, magical thinking realism, and the putting of the dead parent on an unreachable pedestal. When he talked about his thoughts that his mother was just in hiding and not dead, I remembered my belief that if I left all the dust untouched on the bookcases that was there when my dad was alive, this would somehow fix things. The brain reacts in wild ways to try to compensate for an unthinkable tragedy. I count myself very lucky that I was given a child therapist, that people did acknowledge my loss, and that I wasn’t paraded in front of the nation right after. It was shattering enough without all the additionally traumatic events he had to go through, and I am deeply sympathetic to him for this. His descriptions of the immediate aftermath of Diana’s death are probably the strongest in the book, or at least the ones I resonated the most with due to my personal experiences. However, Diana is clearly such a perfect and untouchable person for him that she hovers over the book and I never got the sense that she was a real person for him. At this point, I can see that my dad was a complicated person who had many good points but also flaws, and that’s thanks to fifteen+ years of therapy and my brain maturing. Harry seems to be stuck in a child’s mindset, both with regards to his mother and in many of his other personal relationships — he has trouble throughout separating himself from his family or being able to see things from their point of view. This undercut a lot of his arguments for me, as I could also see then from an alternate view, and got the sense that the truth might have been somewhere in the middle.
This book also had many moments where I felt like I was at a stressful dinner party with another family and they’re arguing in front of me. The grievances were too personal. I am very sympathetic to his message about the press and the effects of being stalked and harassed from birth, as well as the dehumanization he experienced. His descriptions of the press finding him and ruining his relationships, vacations, and private moments are heartbreaking and infuriating. But he will then list another mean litany of insults to his brother and it would undermine him for me. Starting off the book by insulting your brother’s face, hairline, and saying that he doesn’t look like your mom as much anymore (really the ultimate insult in a war of who mom loved more!) doesn’t lend itself to the appearance of trying to mend bridges and repair relationships. I think there was space to do a puff piece memoir about his relationship or one that dealt more intensely with his grief, and to put the attacks on the paparazzi in, but the insults throughout to his father and brother were so continuous that I kept questioning how he thought this would mend any bridges. The disconnect between the message of this book and the press tour was honestly confusing. If I talked about my family this way, I would expect not to really ever speak to them again, and there are plenty of memoirs that take that approach and have been very successful (see Augusten Burroughs, although he had to legally label that as a “book” instead of a “memoir” after settling with his family). I just didn’t see the clear outcome here beyond more rancor and ill will. Which if that’s what he wants, fair enough, it was clearly written and had lots of juicy tidbits. But I didn’t get the sense that’s what he actually wants, and that’s what made it so tragic for me. They seem to be used to communicating with each other through the press and not in any useful way in person, and to be involved in a family’s pain and fighting, even indirectly, was an unpleasant and sad experience.
I could say a lot else about this book, but I’ll leave it here. I’m glad I read it and I added some more information to my continuing informal research project into the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha/Windsor legacy of generational child abuse. It continues to cement my decision to keep any children I know out of boarding schools and to never become famous. I just wish he had waited another ten years or so to write this, until he had more fully begun to process his grief about his mother and figured out how to speak to his family without anger and recriminations that are just going to further their split. Again, if he wants to split, fine, that’s his choice, but this doesn’t seem to be his mission and this book is not going to help regain trust in any way. The whole thing made me terribly sad and like I was an emotional voyeur.
Warnings for: emotional child abuse, killing within a military context, grief/loss, sexual themes, suicidal ideation, miscarriage