Jennifer O'Connell: A six-part Netflix series, a tell-all Oprah interview, four tell-even-more primetime-television interviews and now this 416-page memoir, Spare. After all of that, are we any closer to knowing who Prince Harry really is?
There’s the barefoot mystic Spike, happiest hopping into a safari Jeep in Botswana or jumping naked into a freezing Scottish lake, having first serenaded its resident seals. There’s the party animal who ended up taking magic-mushroom chocolates during a get-together at Courteney Cox’s house. There’s the virtual agoraphobic, who watched Friends obsessively, dried his damp laundry on radiators and did his own shopping in panicky late-night forays to the supermarket.
Harry doesn’t really seem to know which version of himself he most wants to be; the only thing he is certain of is that he no longer wants to be the name plastered across the cover, above the portrait of him glowering intensely in the Californian sun. He doesn’t want to give up the title, but he doesn’t want to be a prince. He no longer desires any part of an institution or a life he has grown to detest.
Although the literary fluency is Moehringer’s, the emotion is all Harry’s. It is in its most poignant passages – often also its tersest – that the memoir really comes to life. Harry recounts how William tried again and again to get him to talk about “that taboo subject” their mother. But he couldn’t. “Being so obtuse, so emotionally unavailable, wasn’t a choice I made. I simply wasn’t capable. I wasn’t close to ready.
When he’s not obsessively tracking his mentions, he is locked into what he calls the sibling Olympiad with William, or feeling sore about his rank in the family pecking order. The Harry who sulks over being given “a mini room in a narrow back corridor, among the offices of Palace staff”, over Christmas at the Sandringham “Hotel Granny” needs to have a talk with himself.There are so many layers of irony to this whole enterprise that it is hard to know where to begin unravelling them.
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