This week will be our final discussion for Diana: Her True Story In Her Own Words by Andrew Morton, Chapter 12-Afterword.
Trigger Warning!!! This book contains disordered eating, spousal abuse, emotional abuse, divorce, attempted suicide, death, and self harm.
Discussion:
Michaela: Hello friends and welcome to our final discussion of Diana: Her True Story In Her Own Words by Andrew Morton! Not going to lie, friends, I’m ready to be done reading this book. I always struggle with biographies since they don’t necessarily have a through storyline. This book was no different from any other biographies besides that I was very interested to learn about the subject. That did not change, I really do love learning about Princess Diana and the impact she has had. But, my goodness….the writing in this biography specifically....not the biggest fan, I must say.
Jacilyn: I learned a lot, but I definitely wouldn’t re-read it. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed the read, but I’m happy with what I gained from it. I was kind of dreading getting to the end of the book, too, because I knew what was coming. I cried during this last bit, which I expected. Diana’s death was truly tragic. She was finally able to live her life openly, and it was cut short so quickly and so needlessly.
It was great that Diana got to leave her mark in the humanitarian role before she passed. Even though she still came up against road blocks from the “Establishment,” she still managed to earn the title of Humanitarian of the Year, and was in the process of opening a slew of hospices across the world when she passed. That’s an incredible feat, but beyond her work with philanthropy and the like, she honestly seemed to have natural skills as an ambassador. I absolutely love that. She had political skills, and I’m sure that made the Establishment feel incredibly threatened.
Michaela: I loved that at this time the newly appointed Prime Minister, Tony Blair, befriended Diana before he was elected and then afterwards he decided to actually utilize her skills when the previous Prime Ministers would not. It really did seem like the Establishment was trying to squash her down even more after the divorce by giving all of her work off to Prince Charles. Then after her death, I would actually agree with Morton on this, it felt like they wanted everyone to forget her as quickly as possible.
There isn’t a lot to talk about with these last few chapters. Morton mostly discusses her death and then the impact she had after her death. Diana’s last year of life was full of life improvements as far as anyone could see. She was finally starting to fulfill the role of a humanitarian ambassador through the support of the Prime Minister. Now being fully divorced she had a new found freedom. Then Prince Charles coming out publicly with Camilla at Camilla’s 50th birthday party made way for Diana to finally have a public love life without constant scrutiny from the press and the Establishment. Even though Prince Charles had been having a relationship this entire time, I will never get over the misogyny involved in most of what Diana had to deal with. She was beginning to build bridges with old friends and family. Her life was finally beginning to be the new and real fairytale based on love and acceptance rather than the old fairytale that a naive girl influenced by the media to believe in.
Jacilyn: I couldn’t say whether or not Tony Blair kind of used Diana for his own political gain, but I think that’s something to consider being possible. Whether or not that was the case, the outcome was exactly what Diana deserved all along. It’s really too bad that the Establishment is so mired in misogyny that they couldn’t even begin to see Diana as an asset instead of a threat. If Diana would have been lifted up and supported, that would have looked really good for the monarchy. It’s such an incredibly flawed system!
I have to be honest, Dodi’s dad, Mohamad al-Fayed seems…. Real villain-y. First of all, he basically bribed members of Parliament for his own gain, which should be illegal if it’s not already (that goes for all governments… I’m looking at you, United States.) People that do things like that can still manage to be perfectly normal and caring to people in their personal lives, while simultaneously doing awful things in their business role. And he did some really sketchy things after the death of Diana and his own damn son. He just gave me the creeps.
Michaela: Mohamed al-Fayed may be a little villainy but Diana clearly enjoyed his company and trusted him enough to spend a vacation with his family. Dodi al-Fayed definitely gave off playboy vibes, that is until he started dating Diana. Friends of Dodi and Diana have said quite a bit about how each of them changed once they started seeing each other. Maybe this was another case of Diana joining a family that needed good change in their lives and this time they might have listened to her if they had had the chance to be together longer. It really felt like their relationship was super quick and a whirlwind for both of them, which isn't necessarily a bad thing considering how happy everyone said that they were. After so many secret relationships and complicated relationships it makes me happy to know that she had this one at least for a little while with someone she trusted enough to be around her boys and someone who she said her relationship with was "bliss". The word "bliss" is used a lot by Diana, Dodi, and their friends, which I thought was a very telling description of how they felt. Gives me the warm and fuzzies a little bit to know she had that time of comfort and excitement.
Alas my friends we have come to the subject we were all dreading. Diana's death. Even though I know a lot about the accident, it was still really difficult to read about because it was truly just so devastating to her family and to the world that loved her.
Jacilyn: I’m glad Diana got the opportunity to love without hiding for a while. I love that Dodi played with the boys, and renting an entire building for them to have a dance party? Peak wholesome. But of course, the thing that made Diana feel “safe” enough to fall in love openly was Charles introducing Camilla as his significant other with a press stunt, using William in the process. Who knows if William actually accepted Camilla and felt comfortable around her at that point. If I were in his shoes, that young, I wouldn’t have the courage to snub her in front of the press like that. I’m sure that even at that age, he knew what this was about. That was incredibly wrong of Charles to do that.
Reading about Diana’s death was heartbreaking. I knew what happened with the car crash, but reading the details of the entire day leading up to the accident was eerie, and I felt the dread of knowing what was to come. Young lives were taken needlessly by someone who chose to drive not only drunk, but on drugs as well. What an awful combination. I wonder if the accident would have happened if the paparazzi weren’t so aggressive and relentless that day. I wasn’t sure what I expected out of Morton’s coverage of the accident, honestly. I halfway expected him to not-so-subtly give credence to one of the many conspiracies surrounding Diana’s death, but I was pleasantly surprised that he chose not to do that and even made clear that the conspiracy theories that arose weren’t based on any sort of truth.
Michaela: Charles using William as a springboard for a press coverage of Camilla being accepted into the family or whatever….I have no words. How horrible is that? Can we throw Charles in the trash? Just throw the whole man away.
I was very surprised that Morton didn't talk about the conspiracy theories because, honestly, from the rest of the book I had kind of expected him to. Listen, I love a good conspiracy theory and I've listened to a couple podcasts about Diana's death specifically and I might find some aspects of her death to be a little suspicious. However, realistically it was ruled as a devastating accident involving drunk driving and many paparazzi who at the time had no real regulation on them. Diana was such an important person to the world that much of the world can't accept a basic car accident as her demise. A spectacular person can only have had a spectacular death right? Wrong. When it's hard to accept the truth humans tend to make up "truths" that are easier for them to process. It's normal but also it can be problematic.
What I find most interesting about the aftermath of this accident was the public reaction across the world vs the Establishment's reaction. Morton talks about how after a few months it felt like the Establishment was trying to stamp Diana's memory and legacy out of things and honestly I have to agree. They were constantly pushing her out of the way in life and then they did the same thing in death. Should I really be surprised? It's just insane to me, that they could do that to someone that is so very clearly a beloved person. I can't fathom this attitude towards her from the Establishment. Can it be considered hatred even? I'm not sure.
Jacilyn: You know, I think it comes back to what I said earlier about the Establishment being threatened by Diana. She was drawing attention, for the first time (on a large scale, anyways), of the insufficiencies of the Establishment. I don’t even think she did it on purpose, honestly. I think her mere existence just happened to rip the curtains away. And clearly, they didn’t learn much from it. William and Harry have become different kinds of men than their father, which is great, but the women in their lives, particularly Meaghan Markle (who is a POC, and didn’t “fit” into the narrow mold the Establishment expects as much as Kate), are still treated the exact same way. In the interview with Oprah, there were so many similarities between Diana and Meaghan’s experiences in the Establishment. I have a lot of respect for Earl Spencer actually calling the Establishment out at Diana’s funeral. But honestly, as far as the Royal family themselves, I do think Diana’s death must have hit them hard… I just don’t know that they knew how to express that. It required them to function with a bit less formality which literally goes against the very fiber of their existence. With that being said, I hope that when Charles visited Diana’s coffin when he arrived in Paris, I hope he felt regret, and guilt, for the fact that he helped prevent her from living the life she deserved for so long. He didn’t kill her. That wasn’t his fault. But he is at least partly to blame for the fact that she had so little time to live her life to the fullest.
I think the public outpouring of support took most people by surprise. I wish I could remember what it was like, but we were both so young at the time. It was really hard for me to comprehend the full extent of why she was so loved, until I listened to You’re Wrong About cover her story. But as I listened, I started to feel the same way. She was a flawed human, but that’s what makes her so endearing. I have a lot of respect for the way she shared her vulnerabilities and cared so deeply for those who needed it the most.
Michaela: I really appreciated how honest Earl Spencer was in his speech about his sister. He really did not care what the Royal family or the press thought of him because he was just stating facts of what happened. I don’t think Diana was considered to be part of the actual family, she may have been married into it and her sons were part of it but she was never accepted. Then it makes sense that the family wasn’t very responsive to her death because to them she was not their actual family. I think what truly resonated with them was William and Harry’s reactions to their mother’s death. I expect that two young boys had completely human reactions of pure devastation at losing a parent and that most likely startled the rest of the family who had no such feelings towards Diana. Morton wrote about an incident involving William actually running away in the days after the accident, and his family could not find him. I can’t imagine what they were going through while grieving such a loving mother in a family that had no love or appreciation for her.
Then for almost a decade the boys barely spoke about Diana publicly or at least they did not speak about their feelings about her and her death. Morton quoted Harry admitting he had wished he spoke about her sooner and saying, “I never really dealt with what had happened. It was a lot of buried emotion. For a huge part of my life I didn’t really want to think about it” (pg. 431). But really being surrounded by a family who did not appreciate his mother, I don’t know when he would have ever had the chance to fully comprehend, grieve, and heal from Diana’s death. These boy’s quite possibly were constantly confused because they had their memories of their mother along with her supporter’s remembering as a loving humanitarian but then from the opposite end was the Establishment trying to squash her memory and trying to make it seem like she wasn’t ever that important.
Despite all of the negativity, William and Harry decided that they would take up Diana’s legacy of charity work. Not only did they take over Diana’s own charity work but they also developed their own specific causes. Diana focused on AIDS victims, leprosy victims, the landmine crisis, and the homeless. While continuing to aid all those charity causes in memory of their mother, William developed his support of the LGBTQ+ community and Harry developed his support of soldiers and veterans after he too served for a decade. Even Prince William’s wife Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, has always participated in these charities on her own and with William and Harry making a dynamic trio of charity work. Their success and contribution to charity work is a very long and impressive list, they have done so much that we could have a whole discussion just about that. The lessons they learned and absorbed from Diana later on in life is truly beautiful and excellently represents what an amazing person she was and she raised her sons to be similar.
While I was far too young to understand the significance of Diana as a woman or the impact of her death at the time. Having learned so much about her I can now completely understand the love for her and the legacy she left on the world. I think I too have fallen in love with the memory of Diana like so many people who looked up to her in her lifetime and now continue to after her death. Like you said, she was flawed but that just makes her even more relatable, real, beautiful, and endearing. Flaws don’t make you a bad person, it makes you real, it makes you a human. Something the Establishment is trying to make everyone perceive the Royal family not to be.
Jacilyn: Well my friends, this concludes our first Shelf Explored biography pick. While we both enjoyed learning more about Diana and her impact on the monarchy, we're looking forward to moving onto a fiction pick again. Let us know what you thought, and if you have any biography suggestions for us! Happy reading!
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