Spare Time with Prince Harry

To my surprise—and chagrin—when I read Prince Harry’s sensational new memoir, Spare, I saw myself. I’m a second child with an estranged older sister, whom I often felt my parents loved and gave more attention to than me. My mother died over ten years ago. She was beautiful, charming, and kind. A beloved teacher in a small town, she was the kind of woman who strangers still remember for her mere presence in the room. I always felt I could not live up to the expectations others had for me as her daughter, that I was no match for her effervescent goodness or “her light, pure and radiant light,” to quote Prince Harry about his much more famous mother, Princess Diana. My mother’s shadow, and the grief I feel in losing her at a relatively young age, looms large over my life. 

Here, the similarities stop. Unlike Harry, I worried every other day in the small southern US town where I grew up whether the next family argument might leave me homeless—an argument that would not be nearly as genteel as the ones Harry describes. Family arguments. Sibling rivalries. These narratives transcend class, time, and space, though, and they are ultimately what makes Harry’s memoir compelling to historians, theologians, literary scholars, paparazzi, soccer moms, and next-door neighbors in almost any town around the globe.  

In Harry’s life, we all potentially see ourselves, and we all might be slightly embarrassed to admit this is the case—barring the paparazzi, who revel in the stories we tell each other about his life and, therefore, about ourselves. “There were always stories,” begins the first chapter of Harry’s memoir. 

Encapsulated in Prince Harry’s narrative is a shared story of family struggle. Through Harry’s recollections, and his decision to reveal his memories to the world, all of us are implicitly given permission to talk about our families and our histories: we can gawk; we can criticize; we can sympathize. Did he really divulge that the current King of England exercises in his boxers in his bedroom? Was that level of sharing good or even necessary? Why belabor his brother’s balding? Was he as close to his mother as he claims? Is he as in love with his wife as he wants us to believe? Is she manipulating him? Is the media coverage of his marriage racist? Is he telling his story for money, for fame? Does he want to reconcile with his family? Who’s the better sibling, really? The better son? Who’s in the right in this complicated family?   

These are also some of the questions we might ask ourselves about our own families, about our neighbors, as we discuss not-so-dramatic plots about, say, bridesmaids’ dresses and avocado toast. Now, I invite you, dear reader, to pause and contemplate any recent conversation you may have had with a family member or friend about a recent conflict in your inner circle. What questions did the regular drama of your daily life raise, amid discussions of bridesmaids’ dresses, funeral arrangements, or new dietary or exercise regimes? Did any of them mirror the ones about Prince Harry and his “salacious” memoir? Were any of them about whether anyone should be doing this or that for this or that reason or about how they weren’t? When we talk about Harry’s memoir with each other, we lay claim to what we collectively believe to be just, or not, about his choices: that is, we share our values—and we invite whomever we’re speaking with to share theirs. The conversations we have about Spare, therefore, reveal the social mores that have solidified into shared beliefs about what we believe and have passed down as the proper modes of behaving and thinking.  

Perhaps we wish that the tradition—and therefore also the history—we create through these shared judgements about social mores were passed down in more elevated, more distinguished ways. This seems so lewd—a Prince Harry memoir as a means to articulate and pass down social and moral traditions. Drugs and sex and rich royals and Hollywood actresses? Really? Why would we talk about this, some may ask, rolling their eyes, when we could talk about high art? This judgment, too, though, passes down tradition, says something about one’s values in this particular historical moment.  

Because whether we like it or not, encapsulated in Harry’s memoir is another shared family story, one in which all of us who live in a globalized society gawk, criticize, and sympathize with almost daily: the story of Western Civilization. Is it collapsing? Is it reviving? Is it grappling with its past successfully or unsuccessfully?   

Are we finally entering a moment of kairos as we read this memoir—a moment where we might find revelation—or is this yet another tale in a long line of chronos squabbling—the same endless pattern being repeated? Stated another way, is there hope that we might learn something true and lasting from Harry’s story, or are we simply waiting for the next news cycle, the next memoir—the next in a genre of recollected memory—to catch our attention in a flash, and then will we all move on, forgetting anything we learned from this royal story? 

I call your attention to the fact that in the first week of its release, Spare sold over 3.2 million copies. It will likely rank among the bestselling of its genre. Some readers of this erudite journal might have stopped reading already or, if you’re still reading, believe I’m exaggerating the significance of this text. Yet I contend that the hope undergirding the book’s sales matters to scholars who care about modernity. The hope undergirding these sales, I believe, communicates a global desire for kairos, a desire that revelation might be possible.   

Let’s look beyond Harry himself. What do you think Prince Harry’s readers are seeking when consuming a memoir about an English prince in search of his life’s meaning?  

Memoir has overtaken the novel as the genre with the most readers and most sales. Maya Angelou, Anne Lamott, and Frank McCourt are a few famous memoirists who come to mind. Literary scholars like me who hold imaginative writing in especial esteem might find it helpful to remember here that the line between novel and memoir—between fact and fiction writing—has long been murky. We should recall that in 1709 Richard Steele wrote in The Tatler that “the word Memoir is a French word for novel.”   

Scholars may raise their eyebrows a little at the recent rise of this form, may pair the genre with the ilk of reality TV (we all know it’s fake!). Yet we should remember that readers are seeking truth in imaginative (and imaginary) spaces that have the semblance of something they know to be at least partly factual. Audiences, I suggest, are seeking revelation more than ever in memories of those who may be closer to truth than we are. In a time when fragmentation, chaos, and confusion is on the rise, when deconstruction is the mode of the day, is it surprising that to feel connected readers flock to one of the closest sources of a not-so-long-ago past told by a man many watched grow up? Harry promises readers nothing tangible, yet he offers them his story, a story they have heard before and long to hear again—told in a new way. “Dates? Sorry, I’ll need to look them up,” Harry says from the beginning, “Dialogue? I’ll try my best.”  

The book opens with Harry at his grandfather’s, Prince Philip’s, funeral. Later, at Frogmore Estate, he ruminates on 

[t]he Royal Burial Ground [there]. Final resting place of so many of us, including Queen Victoria. Also, the notorious Wallis Simpson. Also, her doubly notorious husband  Edward, the former King my great-great great uncle. . . . I wondered if they wondered at all. Were they floating in some airy realm, still mulling their choices, or were they Nowhere, thinking Nothing? Could there really be Nothing after this? Does consciousness, like time, have a stop? Or, maybe, I thought, just maybe, they’re here right now, next to the fake Gothic ruin, or next to me, eavesdropping on my thoughts.  And if so . . . maybe my mother is too? 

Prince Harry, under the auspices of his ghostwriter J. R. Moehringer, gives his readers a sense of closeness to history, even to spirituality. You might have been told there’s nothing beyond this world, that nothing we do here matters, but my mother might have mattered, maybe she’s still here, he suggests. Harry begins, and ends his book looking, as he says, for “proof. A sign. Anything” that his mother is still with him, knowing perhaps that she is the one readers want—the one they’re looking for—the divine image of Diana, a virgin goddess mother whom they seek, whom they love. Perhaps they remember her in pictures, or from their childhood, or perhaps they simply remember her as a mother figure to Harry—and William. In Harry’s story, though, it is not Diana they find: it is Harry. 

They find a young man who, upon describing his bedroom at Balmoral Castle, shares that his room was “far smaller, less luxurious” than his older brother’s, yet he also claims “he didn’t care.” “I wasn’t Willy,” he says, as he attempts to convince us that he doesn’t care, that he doesn’t care he is merely a prince while his brother is next in line to be king, and he states again, “I took no offense.” “I was the shadow, he notes on that same page, “the support, the Plan B.”  

In an over four-hundred-page memoir about kings and princes, about fighting for favor, wondering from the first pages whether anyone can hear him or see him, if anyone is “eavesdropping” on his actions, Prince Harry’s story brings another timeless, epic family story to mind: the story of Cain and Abel, the story of the first sibling rivalry in the Christian tradition. Genesis 4.4-5 reads, “The Lord looked on Abel with his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.”

While theologians argue about why the Old Testament Lord favored Abel’s offering, that universal feeling of being second in favor, of being “the shadow,” transcends the page. As Prince Harry laments, we may never know why one brother is born first and another second. Those of us who were not first know and feel the pang of his story, of sibling angst. Ishmael and Isaac. Jacob and Esau. His is a personal memoir, but it’s also a cultural “fable.” 

I left Spare wondering if I had been spared the full truth, wondering if Prince Harry, who is more a fan of John Steinbeck than William Shakespeare, will find happiness in California, somewhere west of the Eden some readers might have imagined Buckingham Palace to be at one point during their childhoods. For me, it was hard to tell. I suspect like many other readers, I’m still waiting on “a sign,” “anything” about this particular story that will convince me Prince Harry’s recollections offer truth or just more fiction about the royal family. Chronos marches on.  

LuElla D'Amico is an Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of the Incarnate Word.