I’m no expert in autobiographies, as Prince Harry’s Spare was only the 4th I had been listening to at the moment this text was written, but I did not – still don’t – really not get why people are so ready to crucify Harry for telling his story.
I’ve been following all the news ever since the book came out, I’ve read the countless of comments, the Goodreads reviews and what struck me the most was how most of the people are so opinionated and pretend to know his life better than him, just because he’s been under public eye ever since he was born. And that made me think: that is precisely what he’s been trying to pinpoint with his book.
In a world dominated by media narrative, where Harry’s portrait was crafted by the media and the tabloids from birth, he’s just trying to tell the story from his point of view.
Yes, he might sometimes seem condescending, and sometimes he leaved the impression of a child who wants to scream ‘See me! Hear me! Let this be about the real ME for once’. And why souldn’t he be entitled to do so?
There are so many other celebrities with much more scandalous lives, and yet people are not so eager to jump to conclusions and to act as judges. I am not saying it is people’s fault that they are so prejudiced and sometimes cruel towards him; it comes after years and years of ingesting what tabloids were saying about him. And this media consumption made people act just like those so-called journalists who believe they have the right to know whatever Harry does, what he eats, what he thinks. They pretend to have the right to own his narrative.
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He speaks at lenght about the long-effect grief and trauma of losing his mother had (and still have) on him. I am shocked about how many people label him as ‘bitching’ about his feelings on so many pages.
Had he not been Prince Harry, had those people read a story about a young boy losing his mother in a car crash, would they still be so cruel to him and his suffering?
Because if you ever lost someone you loved, then you know how excruciating that pain is. How long it takes to just start processing the grief, not to talk about healing.
I must admit that I resonated a lot with that part of his story. As someone who lost her brother in an accident, I could easily identify so many patterns, so many thoughts and beliefs in what he was describing for pages. How numb you can feel and how difficult it is to pretend and make your friends laugh because you don’t want to be labeled as the frail person who’s on the verge of hysteria.
I was 25 when it happened and it took me 7 years just to be able to accept that maybe it is time to let myself heal. I cannot fanthom how it was for someone his age, and more than this, for someone who is constantly under public scrutiny.
Imagine being a young boy, in pain, and you break your thumb, only to see it in the paper that you are on your deathbed. And people debating that, instead of being worried for you. Imagine going for a bad haircut as a teenager and have a whole country debate how shitty you look.
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All the things he did, even enrolling in the British army, were nothing but cries for help. When you try and try and try to feel something, but all you feel, all you are, is nothingness, what can you do but something extreme? Is that something peculiar to Harry? I don’t think so.
Tom Felton says in his book that he was caught shoplifting. He was caught smoking weed. Viola Davis spent 7 years with a man who did not love her and who was cheating on her. I am citing these examples because, as I said, I only listened to 4 biographies.
People do all sort of things just to feel something. Some lean towards drugs or alcohol, others to gambling, and so on. Gabor Mate, for example, has a very good book about truama and the things people do to be able to survive it.
So why is it so outrageous whatever Harry did? Some of the stories he told were pretty boring and common. And, of course, many people had complained about how boring the book is. That is, again, becase maybe they jumped into it with the expectation of the scandalous stories they used to see in the media.
That is, to me, the lesson of the book. It talks about how toxic, how damaging tabloids can be. And how difficult it is to grow under public eye. The Harry Potter stars, for example, were not as famous as Prince Harry, and yet, all that global attention had damaging effects on their mental health. All child actors deal with these effects, and people have so much compassion for them. As opposed to whatever Harry says about his struggles with media’s attention, after he became motherless.
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I did not expect to like this book or to become a sort of Harry’s advocate, because I jumped into it with the same media-constructed image. I laughed at him for his Oprah interview. I rolled my eyes at every ‘Meg’ and ‘Haz’ in their Netflix documentary. I asked myself, as so many other people did: why does he keep talking, if he says he wanted privacy?
And in a way, I did not expect to discover the answer after this book. It is because, once you start healing, once you start going to theraphy, and doing the work, you need to learn to own and reclaim your own story. The same you learn how not to let the bad thoughts control your narrative about your self, you need to be able to make a clear line between who you really are and who others say you are.
What he describes, his relationship with the media and with the royal apparatus, there is a lot of gaslighting there. He’s been told for years that he’s exaggerating, that he needs to man up, to deliver and to rise to people’s expectations, he was denied the right to feel his feelings and to become his own person. He was asked to always be whoever the media said he was. Are there not any people growing up in toxic families able to resonate with all that? How is it slightly different except for their status ans wealth and media coverage? Then why is it so hard to believe him?
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I was shocked about the chapters on his life in the army. That was the only place where he was treated like a normal person. The people in the army were the only ones who stood up for him when his naked photos were published by the media.
And to think that the only place he feels safe is where his life is most at risk is kind of tragic.
And so, how come people are not ouraged that the media disclosed his location so many times, putting so many people in danger? Had this happened to a regular person from the US, for example, would people still be eager to speak so harshly of him? Or would they be outraged that the press endangered someone who puts their life on the front line for an entire nation?
I’ve read books written about the war in Afghanistan before. And about the war in Iraq. Books in which those people in the army speak openly about killing the enemies. That is what they are trained to do. And people at home glorify this people for protecting them back at home. Harry does nothing different from other people from the army speaking about war. He puts those numbers in context.
He talks about walking to the North and South pole with veterans, about how he came up with the idea of Invictus Games. About his spreading awareness about PTSD. But many of the critics do not seem these stories, because the media only spoke about the numbers of enemies Harry killed. And so, that is the only story they’ve internalized.
Because if they look at the whole picture, they might come to a point where they have to confront their prejudices. And people are very afraid of realizing their beliefs are wrong.
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It is very interesting, to me, to see what he has to say about his life, and compare it to all the hundreads of thousand of people who seem to just know his life and his mind so much better than him.
Yes, he is entitled. I read a comment saying that they cannot afford rent while Harry flies to Botswana whenever he feels blue. But how is that different from the Kardashian family throwing lavish parties whenever they feel like it? Or from whatever celebrity flying around the world and wearing diamonds and owning plenty of villas and outrageously expensive clothes and private jets? He is just like any other person born into a rich family.
And even though I am not a big fan of his wife, I cannot deny how horrific it must be to be followed everywhere you went. To have each word, each blink, each smile or frown dissecated in front of millions of people around the world. No sane person would be able to handle it. Losing your freedom to walk on a street, to walk your dog or simply go to the supermarket. Would anyone be able to just be like ‘oh, how I love to be famous?’ I doubt it.
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In terms of writing style, people forget that this person, as many others who have published their bios, are not professional writers. They are no George RR Martin, Margaret Atwood, Murakami, etc.
They are just people who want to put their version of their lives out there. To earn their narratives. And while other people are praised for being brave, this man is villified as being condescending, and exaggerating and looking for pitty.
Since no one else from the royal family has no public opinion about the facts he exposed in his book, why is it so hard to accept that this is how he felt about everything? Do we, as a global population, have any right, whatsoever, to invalidate how a person felt about things? How his brain got to see some event or another? Even his mother’s loss? I don’t think we do.
And I think we would be so eager to just ally against the factors that made a person suffer, if we just labeled that person as a nice one, as it happened to Johnny Depp, for example.
If this book taught me anything, it was that it is sooo easy to judge someone and so much difficult to see the story from their perspective, to get rid of your prejudiced, tainted beliefs and learn to open to, to accept a different version of facts.
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