BY FATIMA SOHAIL & IMALSHI HERATH
“She was Monica. And I was a Chandler. I wondered if I’d ever work up the courage to tell her. Was there enough tequila in California to get me that brave?”
Prince Harry, under the influence, at Courtney Cox’s house.
Spare, Prince Harry’s explosive new memoir, has taken the globe by storm. Despite the pervasive controversy within its pages, it’s this same shockingness, perhaps, that contributed so heavily to its success. With endless twists and turns of affection, bitterness, and his ‘todger’, Harry’s deep dive into his life, loss, and lingering anger is insufferable, and yet, oddly absorbing.
The monarchy, itself, is reliant on fiction; a collection of normal people constructing a reality to convince us otherwise. The monarchy is theatrics, it’s illusion, it’s storytelling.
Spare is the story being told.
The novel opens with a quote by William Faulkner. “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past”. Our past creates who we are as people and it is subject to change as time marches on. But is it truly necessary to share said past with other people, or in Prince Harry’s case, the whole world?
In 1997, Harry lost his mother, Diana. Adored by billions, the sudden death of “the people’s princess” was a devastating time for the English monarchy, and the global population. For Harry, however, it hit particularly hard, something Spare makes unambiguously clear.
“It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century,” the book reads, “two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother’s coffin as the world watched in sorrow – and horror.”
It left one question in the minds of everyone watching. How would the monarchy play out from that point on? What was to become of Harry and William?
His whole life, Harry had been the “carefree…, happy-go-lucky Spare to the more serious Heir”, (a truly exceptional play on words for the title, of course), but the grief overcame him. Changed him as a person.
He enlisted in the military. Did a number of controversial things. Killed numerous Taliban members (an apparent point of pride with him), attended a Natives v.s. Colonisers-themed Halloween party, dressed up as a Nazi for said Halloween party?? Saw no issue with the costume and blamed it on Kate and William?? The list goes on.
But then, as it often does, love changed it all. Harry met Meghan, and they fell in love, and got married, and everything was right in the world and nothing more happened.
Actually, though, that wasn’t really true. There was a bit more to the story.
First, Harry grew a concerning obsession with the television series Friends and developed an unhealthy adamance toward his resemblance to Chandler. When I say ‘unhealthy’, he didn’t buy a themed mug or get Matthew Perry’s autograph.
Instead, he crashed at Courtney Cox’s place.
He tried a colossal amount of illicit substances. He had a conversation with her toilet. He called her ‘Monica’ the whole night, and he experienced a premonition in which the moon predicted he would meet Meghan. What a night.
Aside from these invigorating tales, the private lives of the entire royal family are on full display throughout the novel. Harry reveals many stories that you can be fairly certain the other members would not want to be published. Aside from the obvious corruption of the crown, Harry gives us insight into King Charles’ headstands in his underwear, his obsessive attachment to his childhood teddy bear and petty remarks regarding “Willy’s” appearance, referencing “his alarming baldness” multiple times. Although the disappearance of Prince William’s hair is quite obvious to all, including small details like this in his memoir makes one wonder what the true purpose of Spare is.
Is Harry really Prince Charming exposing the royal family for the terrible people they are, or is he simply trying to tarnish their reputations?
Maybe it’s both, committing to his heroic act and exacting his humiliating revenge at the same time.
For whatever purpose it serves, Spare is eccentric, in the worst way possible. It’s long, unnecessary, and full of irrelevant sexual detail.
As he wrote about the history of the monarchy, he veered off track and began discussing the sexual sadism of Prince Edward. As he tended to the frostbite on his troublesome ‘todger’ the night before his brother’s big wedding, he wrote, in detail, about his mother. Harry often takes things one step too far by making the memoir rather crude.
Another method of exacting his revenge maybe? Maybe a statement to the press? Exposing all royal secrets before the Times can publish its latest article on Charles’ underwear escapades? If a prince can speak of topics in such a way, is he truly someone we want at the head of our monarchy? Do we really want a monarchy at all?
Perhaps that is Spare’s true purpose. To show the world that, despite being royalty and growing up having a silver spoon shoved up his a**, Prince Harry is as disgusting and obscene as every other man.
Despite his memoir being an expose on the corruption of the monarchy, Harry’s avoidance of taking the responsibility for his actions is abundantly clear. In the few attempts he makes to apologise for his actions, he quickly shifts the focus to another wrong that just so happened to be occurring at the same time, often committed by Charles, William or Camilla, and brings out his conspiracy board to somehow emerge as the victim in it all. It feels like a large and intricately woven blame-game ensnaring other members of the royal family, the press, his dead mother’s ghost or the monarchy as a whole. Although the monarchy, the family and the press have had their hand in traumatising Harry, he also benefited from the corruption he now criticises. If Spare is his attempt to right the wrongs, why does he dance around addressing his?
As Harry writes, so craftily in the pages of his book, his “problem has never been with the concept of monarchy”. He hated the press. He never wanted his personal life on display.
But if there’s one thing that Spare shows us, we never really had any access to these people’s lives at all.
Instead, the monarchy did as it always does, and made fools of us all.