Writer J. R. Moehringer only truly understood Harry after the book was published.
Prince Harry is no stranger to controversy — and when his memoir, Spare, was released in January of this year, it caused quite a stir. From pulling no (figurative) punches against his own family members to NSFW anecdotes, he spared no detail (see what we did there?). The Prince had to have known that being so candid would ruffle some feathers — in fact, his ghostwriter tried to dissuade him from publishing certain passages. In a May 2023 op-ed for The New Yorker, J. R. Moehringer shared how he and the Prince clashed over key details in the controversial memoir — and how he himself was harassed by the press after its publication.
Coming to blows with the prince
The book goes into great depth regarding Harry’s 10-year tenure as a member of the British Army, which included two incredibly dangerous tours of Afghanistan before his retirement from service in 2015.
In one passage, it describes a grueling training exercise, during which officers taunted the prince about his late mother, Princess Diana. Having endured strenuous physical challenges, including being beaten, dehydrated, and deprived of food, Harry was forced to undergo a slew of verbal abuse from his fellow soldiers.
Writing for The New Yorker, Moehringer reveals that Harry had been desperate to include the quick retort he came up with on the spot, which he felt served as proof that he wasn’t as slow-witted as the media was fond of claiming.
The pair repeatedly came to blows over the issue before Moehringer convinced the prince that what really mattered was that people knew he’d been forced to listen to these horrific slurs about his dead mother in the first place.
Having worried that he’d pushed his luck with Harry, Moehringer says that the prince “shot me a mischievous grin,” before quipping “I really enjoy getting you worked up like that” — and conceding that Moehringer was right.
Harry’s experience only became clear after the book came out
Moehringer said for all the book left out a ton of revealing material, the most eye-opening part of the whole process from his perspective came after its publication, when he finally got a taste of the media spotlight — and misrepresentation — Harry had been complaining about all along.
Describing the frenzied media reaction to snippets of the book becoming available online, he wrote: “Facts were wrenched out of context, complex emotions were reduced to cartoonish idiocy, innocent passages were hyped into outrages — and there were so many falsehoods.” To make matters worse, Moehringer said that early news stories were based on “bad translations” from the Spanish version, which became available in Madrid a week earlier than it was due to be published.
He said that the attacks soon streamlined into a clear theme: the accuracy of the book.
“I’d worked hard to understand the ordeals of Harry Windsor, and now I saw that I understood nothing. Empathy is thin gruel compared with the marrow of experience,” Moehringer explained. He added that before long, photographers were lying in wait on the school run, and journalists were lurking outside his house.
“One morning of what Harry had endured since birth made me desperate to take another crack at the pages in Spare that talk about the media,” he said.
