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Spare

Prince Harry
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72 pages • 2 hours read

Prince Harry

Spare

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2023

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Summary

Background

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Background

Authorial Context: J. R. Moehringer as Ghostwriter

While Prince Harry is the author of Spare, his memoir was ghostwritten by J. R. Moehringer. Employing a ghostwriter is common practice for celebrities or public figures who wish to publish a memoir but lack the time or skills to write a full-length book. A ghostwriter’s involvement in a project can vary from writing the entire memoir, based on interviews, to editing and shaping the author’s work into a more coherent and engaging whole. Ghostwriters aren’t publicly credited as authors and often remain completely anonymous. However, they‘re sometimes referenced in the acknowledgments of a memoir, as Moehringer is in Spare.

J. R. Moehringer is a celebrated ghostwriter known for accurately reproducing his subject’s tone of voice. He was the ghostwriter of Andre Agassi’s 2009 memoir, Open. Moehringer’s own memoir, The Tender Bar (2005), was adapted into a movie starring Ben Affleck. A respected journalist as well, Moehringer won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2000.

Critical Context: Public Reception

Following Prince Harry’s departure from the royal family, the publication of a memoir was highly anticipated. Preceding its release, Prince Harry and Meghan’s 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey caused considerable controversy because the couple claimed a royal family member had expressed “concerns” about their baby’s skin color. Harry and Meghan gave several more high-profile interviews before the memoir’s release. All were critical of the royal family and its failure to support the couple.

Spare was translated into 15 languages, and the official publication date was January 10, 2023. However, an error led to the Spanish edition going on sale five days before the release date. Although the Spanish version was quickly withdrawn from shelves, enough copies had been sold for details of the book’s content to be distributed worldwide. The passages that caused the most controversy were Harry’s admissions of drug use, his account of losing his virginity, and his description of Prince William physically attacking him.

Following its official release date, Spare became the fastest-selling non-fiction book of all time, outselling Barack Obama’s 2020 memoir, A Promised Land. Critical responses were mixed. Positive reviews hailed Spare as refreshingly frank, moving, and historically significant as a document of royal life. Less favorable reviews found the books revelations too personal and considered it a poorly timed betrayal of the royal family, as publication closely followed the deaths of Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II.

Many reviewers were conflicted in their response to Prince Harry’s memoir. For example, Katie Spencer wrote, “There are moments where your heart breaks […] but then there are petulant musings, immature bragging and catty explanations, making it a little hard to stay on Harry’s side” (Spencer, Katie. “Prince Harry cuts a sad, self-indulgent and naive figure in his memoir Spare.” Sky News. January 6, 2023).

Among the most controversial aspects of Spare was Prince Harry’s description of his military service in Afghanistan. His admission to killing 25 Taliban fighters and his description of the targets as “chess pieces removed from the board” (217) were particularly inflammatory. Taliban leaders in Afghanistan condemned Prince Harry as a murderer, and protests against him occurred in January 2023 at a university in Helmand Province. Members of the British military also objected to Prince Harry’s admissions, declaiming them as unprofessional and misleading in their depiction of the Army’s attitude to combat, and pointing out that Harry’s provocation of the Taliban was unwise, considering his preoccupation with protecting his family.

Cultural Context: The Disruption and Modernization of the British Monarchy

Prince Harry has been accused of threatening the future of the British monarchy by breaking away from the royal family and openly critiquing their behavior. However, he claims that one of his intentions when writing Spare was to help modernize the institution. While his memoir has caused great controversy, Prince Harry isn’t the first royal to disrupt the monarchy’s status quo by breaking from tradition. During the past century, the royal family has weathered several crises that ultimately led to change and modernization.

King Edward VIII, mentioned several times in Spare, is Prince Harry’s most obvious historical precedent. Like Prince Harry, Edward fell in love with an American divorcee—Wallis Simpson—and in 1936 abdicated, stepping down from his royal duties to marry her. The Church of England had prohibited royal marriages to divorcees for hundreds of years, and King Edward’s abdication only consolidated this directive. Consequently, when Captain Peter Townsend divorced his wife and proposed to Princess Margaret in 1953, the marriage was vetoed.

By 1992, a series of well-publicized scandals led the Queen, as head of the Church of England, to reconsider the monarchy’s stance on divorce. Three years earlier, Princess Anne had separated from her husband, Captain Mark Phillips, and wanted to remarry. At the same time, the details of the unhappy marriage between the Prince and Princess of Wales became public. Princess Diana’s decision to collaborate with the 1992 biography Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton led to revelations of her husband’s adultery with Camilla Parker Bowles. The following year, Prince Charles’s affair was publicly confirmed when transcripts of his intimate conversations with Camilla were released. To save further public scandal, both Princess Anne and Prince Charles were permitted to divorce and remarry.

A further threat to the royal family’s future was the death of the Princess of Wales in 1997—an event that looms over Prince Harry’s memoir. The grieving British public looked in vain to the Palace for an official statement and observed that the flag wasn’t lowered at Buckingham Palace. While the Palace’s inaction was entirely consistent with royal protocol, the public’s outrage caused a break with tradition. The Queen paid tribute to Princess Diana in a TV broadcast, and the flag at Buckingham Palace was lowered for her funeral.

In more recent years, the Palace weathered another crisis with Prince Andrew’s alleged involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein sex scandal. Prince Andrew was stripped of his royal duties and titles in January 2022.

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