This week we will be discussion Diana: Her True Story In Her Own Words by Andrew Morton, Foreword - In Her Own Words pg 118.
Trigger Warning!!! This book contains disordered eating, spousal abuse, emotional abuse, attempted suicide, death, and self harm.
Jacilyn: Hello readers, welcome to our first discussion of Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words by Andrew Morton. I think we can all agree, first of all, that the title of this book is entirely too long. This book is, however, created around Diana’s very own words, secretly recorded onto tapes. Michaela and I first came across this book while listening to the podcast You’re Wrong About, which did a multi-episode series on Diana with the primary sources being this book and the biography of Diana written by Tina Brown. As I mentioned in our pre-read thoughts, I was never really remotely interested in the Royal family, much less Diana. I knew that she was beloved, and I knew that she died in a tragic car accident at a young age, and that was the extent of my knowledge. Journalist Michael Hobbes, who presented Diana’s story on You’re Wrong About, did an incredible job of reminding listeners that she was a regular human, with flaws and endearing traits alike, and deserved to be remembered as such. We decided that reading this book ourselves would be a good way to step into the biography genre and see what we think!
Michaela: Unlike Jac, I have been obsessed with British history and the royal family’s history since junior high. It became a very nerdy pastime for me to do my own research on British history. So I knew of Diana and of her death and that she was incredibly important. However, I mostly studied up on the monarchy’s history before about 1960, so until listening to those couple episodes of You’re Wrong About I never fully understood what Diana’s life was and why she was so important to so many people. I listened to some other podcasts and watched some documentaries about her after listening to those episodes, and now you could say I’m slightly obsessed with learning her story. So much so that I was super excited to read a biography about her that she helped create. Typically biographies scare me, if I’m being honest, I think school kind of ruined the genre by making them all seem boring and about boring people. Which is incredibly untrue and being able to choose biographies about people you care to learn about makes a world of difference.
Listening to podcasts and watching documentaries is one thing but I am so excited to be reading through her actual words. And now learning and seeing the impact she had on the royal family and how the world sees them is so fascinating to me. I’m really excited for the discussions for this book.
Jacilyn: While reading through Morton’s introduction, this quote struck me as basically summing up why it feels important for the transcripts of her tapes to be included in the book “At this time, what I completely failed to understand was that, for a woman who was living in a system where every significant decision was made by someone else, these small choices and acts of defiance gave her a feeling of control. For her it was tremendously liberating.” And another quote that comes from a letter she wrote her father “I rather see it as a lifebelt against being drowned and it is terribly important to me…..to remember these things which are me.” One major theme of the transcripts was how she was thrown into the Royal family with no help, no training, and no support, and she quickly lost any semblance of control over her own life. Diana expresses the fears that she had had before the wedding, and says she knew about the affairs with Camilla even before she married Charles. Quite frankly, it feels like Charles took advantage of Diana, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t intentional. He showed interest to her as a sixteen year old, and then showed interest again once she was of age - it’s like he was simultaneously wooing her with the inherent power that comes from his status and age, and also appealing to her nurturing side. Diana herself says her first impression of him was that he was a terribly sad man and that she felt it was unfair for him.
Michaela: Participating in this book was a calculated risk for her. She had obviously reached this point of calmness where she knew something needed to happen to show the world what it was really like for her. She was lulled into this false sense of security of having Charles be her husband, “he was going to look after me”, and then arriving to find that no one was even there to greet her let alone care for her. Diana said in the transcript a couple times that in hindsight she can see that she was too immature to understand what was happening to her and around her. She just wasn’t ready to be married let alone be married to a “future king” which therefore she was a “future queen”. So much responsibility thrown onto an 18/19 year old.
The fact that everyone knew even before the wedding that Charles and Camilla were having a “secret friendship” is crazy to me. For years so many people tried to convince Diana that it wasn’t happening so that she came across as crazy or jealous. Then the things Charles himself said to her about it while also having these random bouts of being a good husband. Diana mentions a few instances where he was incredibly kind and loving such as with the children, before the wedding he wrote to her saying “I’m so proud of you….just look ‘em in the eye and knock ‘em dead”, and she said they were very close in the six weeks prior to Harry’s birth. The back and forth of their relationship gives me whiplash just reading it, I can’t imagine living through it. I think while Diana was immature because of her age, Charles was immature because he didn’t know how to be a person without the impending “king” title. Even Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip had years together as a family before the untimely death of King George VI, before the Queen became a queen she was a woman with a family and though she was princess she felt she had a long time to prepare if she needed to at all. The death of King George VI undoubtedly changed how they approached taking over the throne and when someone was to begin learning about their future and their responsibilities in the role. Especially considered that even King George VI wasn’t even meant to be king, his brother was.
Charles never experienced life in a relationship, particularly with Diana, that wasn’t surrounded by the negative energy and responsibility of one day being a king. The complexity of the system, the environment, the rules, the relationship, the people is so much more than this one book can share but we get to see it through the lens of Diana’s experiences. With her being an outsider to it all we really get to see just how weird and hurtful this world is for these people.
Jacilyn: They were definitely both naive and immature in a lot of ways. I think there was likely real love there at some point, but I don’t think it ever had a chance to be a healthy, sustainable love. Diana says “We fell in love gradually. It wasn’t really dramatic. One blink and it would have gone.” The card that Charles gives Diana was a rare glimpse of sweetness from him, and honestly one of the few times she mentions him alluding that he may understand some of those feelings of nervousness that she had. Don’t get me wrong, this book was very much written to portray Charles in a certain way, which was honestly an understandable measure on Diana’s part, with the divorce seeming more and more inevitable. I don’t think there’s much purposeful manipulation of truth by Diana (although, as Morton mentions, she conveniently leaves out her own affairs), but her perspective and Charles’ likely differ, and that doesn’t make either one of those perspectives more or less legitimate. I think it’s natural to want to betray yourself in a positive light, especially in these kinds of situations.
That being said. The lack of empathy Charles exhibits towards Diana, particularly in response to the bulimia and her suicide attempts, disgusts me. Both Charles and Diana were raised in households that lacked tactile affection, comfort, and little emotional support, but how that impacted their personalities were like polar opposites. Diana yearned to give and receive that sort of affection and support and love, which I think is a major reason she was seen as “the people’s princess.” She has true empathy for those who are sick in particular, and didn’t consider herself above others. Charles seems to be the opposite of that, although he did interact with his children in a much different way than his parents did with him - he didn’t seem as afraid to give them physical affection, although Diana does make note in her transcripts that Charles wasn’t always around for the boys.
Michaela: I also thought Charles’ actions and words to Diana with everything was just absolutely disgusting, there’s just no words to describe how horrible that was. I was actually surprised that Diana’s interviews never truly demonize or praise Charles, in a way. I think many people in her situation would have taken this book as an opportunity to show their spouse as negatively as possible. The way she talks about him and anything he’s ever done to her or behind her back is more or less just told to us how she viewed it at the time of the event. She looks back on these memories but her words don’t always reveal how she truly feels at the time of the interview. I would be interested to know what her tone and her face looked like during these interviews, to see what her emotions were while telling her stories. To me it feels like at the time of these transcripts she has just accepted that life happened as it did and things are going to change for her. It’s so interesting reading her actual words and how she chooses to tell the stories and the things she views as important enough to mention.
Charles said at their engagement and during an interview later on “whatever love means”, if that doesn’t set up a failure of a marriage I don’t know what would. If you don’t know what love means or when it’s being shown to you or anything like that, there is no room for any healthy relationship. I think that this statement echoes almost everything that Diana talks about pertaining to Charles and his family and what she experienced. Even Diana’s own family doesn’t seem to have a good grip on healthy love. She dealt with a lot growing up, divorce being the biggest event for her and her siblings. Then after the divorce her mother began putting all the emotional responsibility on her children. Parents should share their feelings and what is happening but the way Diana’s mother puts all her emotional load onto Diana all the way into her adulthood would almost certainly have negatively affected Diana’s mental health throughout her life.
This seems to have been a theme for Diana actually. Everyone either went to her with their emotions or ignored hers in place of someone else's. Such as her mother, Charles worrying about Camilla’s press issues, everyone glossing over Diana’s press stalkers, trying to just give her pills rather than help, her doctors catering to the royal family image rather than her health, the list goes on and on. Diana even said that she started to think it was all her fault too or that maybe she was the problem. It wasn’t until she got help from a therapist who wasn’t assigned to her by the family did she realize “Maybe it isn’t me”. Then she also started choosing her own friends, getting into astrology and clairvoyant related subjects, visiting hospitals, just generally doing more of what she wanted to do. She really started to find her people and what she wanted to do even within the strictness of the system.
Jacilyn: Absolutely, we’re just reading her insight into the happenings of her life. All things considered, she does speak very honestly. Diana talks about Raine, and how she hated her so much, and made that very clear to her face, but she also acknowledges that Raine was suffering from many of the same things she herself was. Diana also talks openly about how she refused to have any sympathy for her mother, and told her that after three failed marriages, she should “look at herself” as if that was the cause. I mean, honestly, that’s an awful thing to say to someone. But I’m thankful that there’s these spots in the transcripts where Diana says things that reflect poorly on her, because everyone is human, everyone does awful things at one point or another, and being complicated is just part of life. Very few people are truly all good or all bad, and it’s okay to acknowledge those nuances. I think it’s important.
I really don’t think Diana or Charles ever truly got to witness or experience real, genuine affection and love growing up. I think Charles truly did find real love with Camilla, and I hope that Diana was able to experience that before she died as well. I don’t know quite enough about her relationships after the separation (hopefully that will change as we keep reading) to be able to make any sort of judgement on that. But I think it’s something everyone deserves.
Diana was basically gaslit from the moment she became engaged to Charles. As the marriage disintegrates, people blame her bulimia and poor mental health, when really the disintegration of the marriage (from the very beginning) is what caused the bulimia and poor mental health. I don’t know that we could really have a full understanding of how lonely and scared Diana was. Part of why the podcast really hooked me was because of how strong Diana was. She was able to stand up for herself, make her own decisions, and separate herself from the royal family. She came into her own skin, and only truly got a chance to live fully for a very short time before she passed. Her strength and vulnerability really impacted me on an emotional level, and it became very clear to me why she was so loved.
Michaela: I really appreciate how honest she was. Though she clearly left a lot of things out that we know more about nowadays, she still was very honest even about her own negative actions.
Considering that Charles and Camilla are now married and have been since 2005, I’d say they do share genuine love. They have had a relationship, presumably on and off, since 1970, that's over 50 years of history and drama but they still chose to be together. We can’t deny that they have love for one another, they just weren’t the best people during that time. Interestingly the royal family, allegedly, are the ones who prevented them from being together originally, therefore causing all the issues down the road. It's all so complex and goes back so far. Diana isn’t innocent in this area either since we know she had affairs but there is a major difference between hers and Charles’s ongoing one. Their divorce was definitely inevitable considering everything they both were doing and had been through. I’m excited to keep reading and get into more details of everything.
I’m excited to keep reading this book and getting more into the details of her life story. We clearly have a lot of thoughts about Diana and her story, I think we could talk forever about her. So we’ll end it here this week!
Let us know how you feel about reading biographies? Are you excited to learn about Diana? Let us know!
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