Bayou Pages | “Spare” by Prince Harry

“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.” 

When I requested the Spare’s memoir from the Ouachita Parish Public Library, I was 20th in the queue. Lo and behold, the copy was ready for pickup in only three weeks, indicating the rapid pace of earlier readers. I soon saw why. The memoir is written in small snippets, chapters only 1-5 pages long. Divided into three distinct sections – Harry’s childhood and loss of his mother, his time in the Army, and his marriage to Meghan – Harry ruminates on the unfairness in being royalty and his treatment as a result. While noting his audacity to complain strikes the rest of us as righteous, he nevertheless leans in to denigrating the Royal Machine and the British Press, the longstanding, tenuous relationships that requires each entity to feed on and into the other.

While few of the events surprised me, thanks to the national media obsession with the Royals, reading Harry’s perspective of those events and learning the backstory that influenced them provided a more holistic view of the infamous family. Though the view is one-sided, Harry is the only one so far willing to engage reflection and we can only hope others will follow suit – though I doubt it. Being Royal requires staying mysteriously quiet, as the mystery adds to the allure, which ironically also propels the press/public fascination. It’s not surprising Harry and Meghan have taken a different approach by rebelling and saturating the media landscape.

If you are Royal curious, Prince Harry’s memoir is a compelling, quick read, exploring themes of grief, sibling rivalry, and alienation. The writing is beautiful, thanks to noted ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer. The first section highlights and further illuminates the graceful, yet tragic life of Princess Diana, a goddess in the eyes of the public and even more so in the eyes of her sons. The middle section on the Army is the most dense, as Harry clearly found purpose outside the Royal walls and reveled in serving his country and leading his comrades. It’s difficult to parse whether his fascination had to do with the mission at hand, the sense of brotherhood he felt denied within his own sibling relationship, or even the ability to evade the onslaught of paparazzi. The third section has the fewest surprises, as Harry felt the need to address every public humiliation of Meghan and respond in kind. Throughout the memoir, Prince Harry narrates his life as he has chosen to remember it, again proving that one’s perspective is one version of the truth. 

“It occurred to me then that identity is a hierarchy. We are primarily one thing, and then we’re primarily another, and then another, and so on, until death – in succession.”