This week we are discussing Spare by Prince Harry, Part 1.
Content Warning!!!Before reading this book please be aware it contains contains situations and subjects related to: death, death of a parent, and harassment (media).
Spoiler Warning!!! This post is full of spoilers for Spare by Prince Harry.
Discussion:
Michaela: Hello friends and welcome to our first discussion of Spare by Prince Harry. I was really excited to read this book. I bought it right when it came out but never got around to reading it, so I’m glad we chose it for Shelf Explored Book Club. We read Diana’s biography by Andrew Morton a couple years ago, and since then I have been captivated by Diana’s story and just the workings of the royal family in general. Getting this very personal look at Prince Harry’s side of his life story is fascinating to me.
So far I’m really enjoying this read. I felt like Diana's biography, while being partially in her own words, felt very bogged down with official details and such. Harry’s writing feels like journal entries. He really successfully captures in writing how his brain worked during different eras and ages of his life. I’ve never read a biography written quite like this one.
Jacilyn: I’m enjoying it a lot more than I expected to, in all honesty. Diana’s biography certainly wasn’t the most enjoyable read, in spite of my interest in her. I’ve never really had much interest in the British monarchy outside of the Royal Diaries books I read as a kid, but I came across Diana’s story through a podcast and became fascinated. I find Diana to be really compelling, and I’m obviously not the only one. I can’t say that my interest in her really bled into an interest in the boys, though, beyond a general empathy one tends to feel towards others who have lost a parent. I’ve been vaguely aware of the controversy surrounding Harry and Meghan in the last ten years or so, but even that I’ve never been particularly tuned in to.
That being said, I know that in releasing this memoir, Harry is doing something almost unheard of in the royal family. It’s difficult not to compare Harry and Diana in the ways they buck against what’s always been held as sacred tradition, facts of life for the royal family. I hope that as he wrote this, Harry felt a bit closer to her. It was difficult not to tear up during the parts addressing her death and the way it’s impacted him. You can really feel the love and the loss and the trauma in the words.
I really appreciated that Harry continuously admits when he doesn’t remember events in their entirety. His bit towards the beginning about how there is as much truth in how he remembers things as there are in “so-called objective facts” is interesting. I recognize that each person experiences situations in different contexts, and therefore their recollections may vary. Whatever feelings these experiences evoke are valid. That being said, memories can sometimes be entirely fabricated. Not by any intention, conscious or otherwise, but it’s the way memory works. I don’t know that I’d agree with his statement about memory and “so-called objective facts”, necessarily, but I do understand why he said that and appreciate the indicators when he’s not sure if something is concrete or not.
Michaela: I’m the opposite of Jac, in that as a kid I really didn’t have any interest in the royal family but as I got older I just fell in love with learning about England and English history. I’ve gone on two trips to the UK so far and I just can’t get enough of that place. I’ve seen a lot of documentaries about English history and some about the royals. I’ve been aware of the Harry and Meghan “drama” but not fully into it so I don’t know quite as much about the new royals. Most of my “royal knowledge” is more from 1950 and before. Harry’s book, and his mother’s especially, are the biggest slap to the face for the royal institution, and honestly I love that they both had the courage to release them.
I like how he talks about how his memory works. Harry talks about not really remembering facts, dates, direct quotes, etc. but what he does remember is the setting. He can describe the setting “down to the carpet tacks”. I felt that to my core. Can I remember what anyone said to me after my grandma died when I was 13, absolutely not, but I could tell you every detail of her kitchen where I sat listening to the adults discuss the funeral. Can I remember everything said at my own wedding? Nope. But I can remember almost everything about the church and the reception decorations and set up. I never thought I would relate to a prince in any capacity, but with this one instance I felt that. I’ve never really seen anyone describe their memory working like that, but I fully understand it. Often through the book he will describe what he saw in the room, what he smelled, what he felt, and the sentences said to him are paraphrased a lot of the time. It feels like such an accurate recollection of his own memory that I felt almost transported to that moment with him. I’m just really enjoying this writing style. Biographies can be so hard to read, but this one I’m finding to be incredibly easy.
I think this aids in the amount of times I’ve had tears come to my eyes while reading Part 1. Usually it's related to his memories of his mother. Particularly when he first started talking about how 13 year old Harry was convinced Diana would never die and leave them, he thought she must be in hiding to escape all the harassment she was facing; “She’ll be back. She has to be. It’s my birthday in two weeks.”. That just broke my heart, and it keeps breaking it over and over. Towards the end of Part 1 he talks about finally seeing the file of Diana’s death, and even then at 17-18 years old he sees the picture of his mother in the car and still his brain reverts to ‘she looks fine. She looks beautiful. She’s not dead she’s hiding’. Ugh…if anyone needed therapy, that child did but the family he had didn’t even notice how much he was suffering.
It’s interesting to see this family through Harry’s lens after seeing it through Diana’s. Where Diana only saw coldness, Harry saw the coldness too but with so much potential of love. He loves his family so much, even though he doesn’t receive it back in the ways most families would. At one point he talked about desperately wanting to reach out and hug “Granny”, Queen Elizabeth, but “that’s just not done”. Then at another point he reaches for his dad’s hand for the tiniest bit of comfort. Can you imagine growing up in such a tight knit grouping but hardly having any amount of physical affection. It feels like Diana was the only one who gave him praise, vocal adoration, and physical affection; then once she died there was nothing. And “Willy”, as Harry called his brother, even refers to him constantly as Harold and pretends he doesn’t exist at their shared school. It just all sounds so sad and disappointing.
Jacilyn: Harry’s experiences as a child with his family, and especially with William, break my heart. In a world where perhaps the only other person who can understand what you’re going through is your brother, you’d think that perhaps the experience wouldn’t have been quite as lonely, but alas. I would love to know how William experienced that time in his life, and the time since, honestly. But, at the same time, with the way their privacy has been completely disregarded since their very birth, I feel guilty for wanting to know more about their lives and their experiences. I keep going back to what Michael Hobbes, a journalist and podcaster, said during the Diana series on You’re Wrong About - that the existence of the royal family and the way they are expected to exist is a human rights abuse. I feel similarly about the ways that public figures in other realms, such as politics or entertainment, are treated by the press apparatus. That’s not to say I don’t think public figures should be called out publicly for being bad humans, but there’s a line somewhere in there that I think we’ve crossed over and over again.
I made note of a lot of small things as I read this section. It would be impossible to talk about all of them, but one thing I found particularly interesting was that William and Harry loved Balmoral when Diana hated it so much. That also reminds me of Harry feeling guilty for enjoying the place they went skiing, when he knew Diana had disliked it so much after the avalanche. I can empathize with that experience, but in slightly different ways, and it’s such an awful thing for anyone to have to shoulder but especially a child.
Michaela: I kept going back to what Michael Hobbes said as well. The royal family in particular is put in this fish bowl with the entire world allowed to look in on them at any moment. The amount of times Harry says something along the lines of “It’s OK, I reassured myself, it’s OK. There aren’t any cameras around.” is atrocious and yet he used that to his advantage by releasing this book. When a family has deemed themselves put on earth by divine intervention to rule over a populace, I feel like it’s expected that the public will struggle to treat them as human. But they are incredibly human and the harassment, abuse, and invasion of privacy that they experience on a daily basis is a direct reflection of the public's lack of humanity when it comes to a “famous figure”. Everything Harry does, every choice he makes is scrutinized or fabricated by the press and therefore the public. While not every choice he made was an innocent one that doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for it to be plastered on the news.
I have so so many notes for this section, just like you said, it would be impossible to discuss every one of them. The ones that stood out to me the most were his memories of Diana’s funeral, making his great-grandmother laugh and realizing that making others laugh made him feel better, all mentions of his mother, and his love of far off places that were considered “wild”.
A few quotes I want to highlight pertaining to his mother are; “I’d know if she weren’t. My body would know. My heart would know. And neither knows any such thing. Both were full of love for her as ever.”, “The last thing Mummy saw on this earth was a flashbulb”. “Always wore seat belts after Mummy’s disappearance”, and “It made us reconsider Mummy’s so called paranoia, view it through a very different lens”. Losing a parent is one of the worst losses someone can go through, but having it be agonizingly public, under intense scrutiny, surrounded by conspiracies, while all at the same time being shielded from the facts until you’re older. I cannot imagine the weight of that. Then later in life seeing the mirror events in your own life and then your wifes… absolute insanity. Harry talks about getting his car hit by a ‘pap’ not being attentive to driving his own car so he can get a picture of Harry. Then his best friend dies in a car crash as well, though unrelated to paparazzi, it all adds to that lifelong list of tragedies you have to process. It’s really just astounding when you see all these things in hindsight.
We get glimpses of this family being as close to a family as I think they could ever get. Harry making his great-grandmother laugh was the sweetest thing and it seems like he cherishes that memory. I also liked that he acknowledges that he wishes he had had a better relationship with other family members like Princess Margaret, or Aunt Margo. From what I’ve learned about her, I think they really would have been good friends like Harry said, they’re both the “spare”, they’re both considered the more wild of the siblings, and they both suffered from different tragedies. Then we got a few moments he’d mentioned about Granny; “Heart-racing talk with Granny: Harry…Grandpa’s gone.” and when she inspected the troops she passed Harry and said “Oh..hello”. And Charles refers to Harry, at least when he was younger, as ‘darling boy’. There is this level of familial love there but it's constantly stamped down by tradition, expectation, and perceived appropriateness.
Then every time Harry finds somewhere that provides solace like when he visited Africa and stayed in Australia. He clearly loves peace, being close to wildlife, and being treated as a person. He loved working on the ranch in Australia but then that was ruined by paparazzi finding him, so he had to leave early. He did decent charity work in Australia but was still expected to give interviews about his loss. Then his only real relationship he’s talked about so far was also put on a rocky terrain because she was uncomfortable with the publicity Harry was expected to suffer through.
Everything just adds up to that human rights violation thought process. And yet here I am eating up any information we can get, because it is just that interesting and alien to me that I can’t look away. I think all of this just fascinates me and I’m just really enjoying this insight into not only the royal family, Diana’s story from a new angle, but also just humanity in response to those things.
I think that’s where we’ll leave it for this discussion. Next is Part 2 which is going to be a lot of Harry’s military career which I think will be a tough read. Until next time friends!
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