Prince Harry’s Controversial Book ‘Spare’ Is Fastest-Selling Memoir

Rabat – The famous or even infamous memoir sold more than 3.2 million copies worldwide after just one week of publication. Prince Harry’s “Spare” breaks Guinness Record by becoming the fastest-selling nonfiction book since records began. 

Prince Harry has long complained about the harm caused when information about himself, his wife Meghan Markle, and his children is constantly leaked to British Media. And in his new autobiography “Spare,”  he highlights the importance of privacy for the Royal Family: “As a royal, you were always taught to maintain a buffer zone between you and the rest of Creation. Even working a crowd you always kept a discreet distance between yourself and them. Distance was right, distance was safe, distance was survival. Distance was an essential bit of being royal.”

The irony is that while craving privacy, the Prince appears to have invaded his own family’s privacy, with the bombshell claims that he makes in his controversial memoir. 

A royal of great influence 

Harry’s memoir begins with Prince Philip’s funeral, and how Harry heard the news of his death. It happened one morning when he woke “to thirty-two missed calls and then one short, heart-racing talk with Granny: Harry…Grandpa’s gone.” There is one person in the Spare narrative, who surprisingly stands out as being Harry’s favorite royal relative. He is also his greatest influence: his grandfather or “Grandpa,” as he calls him. 

He writes in his book, “Long before she was Princess Diana, back when she was simply Diana Spencer, kindergarten teacher, secret girlfriend of Prince Charles, my grandfather was her loudest advocate. Some said he actually brokered my parents’ marriage. If so, an argument could be made that Grandpa was the Prime Cause in my world. But for him, I wouldn’t be here. Neither would my older brother.” 

In his memoir, Harry appears very attached to his Grandpa. He liked his ‘icy sense of humour.’ He admired him for his “strong opinions, his many passions—carriage driving, barbecuing, shooting, food, beer and the way he embraced life.” Harry recalls the last moments that he  spent with his Grandpa shortly after his 97th birthday, “He was thinking about the end. He was no longer capable of pursuing his passions, he said. And yet the thing he missed most was work. Without work, he said, everything crumbles. He didn’t seem sad, just ready. You have to know when it’s time to go, Harry.”

Trauma of his mother’s death  

Harry recounts the pain he experienced when he was trying to find closure after the traumatic death of his mother. In August 1997, when Princess Diana died in a car crash in a tunnel in Paris, Prince Harry was 12 years old. He found the news of her death so difficult to handle. To ease some of the pain, he tried to convince himself that his mother faked her death and went into hiding to escape growing scrutiny from the press and those close to her, “Mummy isn’t dead! She’s hiding!… She had no choice. It was her only hope of freedom.” Doubt would then creep in, “Hang on! Mummy would never do this to us. This unspeakable pain, she’d never allow that, let alone cause it.” Then he would search for relief again by persuading himself that “This is her way of fighting.” Harry would cling to the hope of seeing her again, very soon, perhaps at his birthday, which was coming up, “She’ll be back. She has to be. It’s my birthday in two weeks.” 

I don’t want to be Spare 

In his memoir, Harry seems to be heartbroken to be the second in-line to the throne. Being the elder son of King Charles III and Diana, Princess of Wales, Prince William is first in line to the throne. As William gets more attention, Harry feels left out, “The Heir and the Spare—there was no judgment about it, but also no ambiguity.” He tells us, “I was the shadow, the support, the Plan B. I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy. I was summoned to provide backup, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow.” This is not an assumption but a fact made clear to him from the beginning of his life he assured the reader.

Harry also makes claims that his father, King Charles, made a joke to his mother, Princess Diana, on the day of his birth, saying that she had now delivered a ‘spare,’ “I heard the story of what Pa allegedly said to Mummy the day of my birth: Wonderful! Now you’ve given me an Heir and a Spare—my work is done.” 

The war in Afghanistan 

Harry’s memoir gives a personal account of his military career. He served in Afghanistan first as a forward air controller, then transitioned to flying attack helicopters. “I was a British soldier on a battlefield, at last,” he says, “a role for which I’d been preparing all my life.” He admits to killing 25 insurgents while piloting his Apache helicopter. He describes them as “chess pieces removed from the board.” This claim drew concern and sparked worldwide outrage, particularly in the Muslim world. The Afghans were quick to react, calling for the Prince to be put on trial for such a confession. But in reality, he seems to have been quoted out of context and misunderstood for ‘boasting’ about the killings. With this in mind, he seems to suggest that in war, it can be hard to kill someone if you look at them as human beings. So, Harry referred to them as chess pieces or objects without feelings. He says that clearly in his memoir, “I didn’t think of those twenty-five as people. You can’t kill people if you think of them as people. You can’t really harm people if you think of them as people.” And when Harry opened fire at the Taliban, he did not do it for pleasure but as part of his job. He insists that he was conscious of his actions, and he always strove to do what was right and carry out his duties. “I was firing on Taliban and only Taliban, no civilians nearby,” he tells us. “I wanted to return to Britain with all my limbs, but more, I wanted to go home with my conscience intact.”

A well-written novel

If Harry intended to cause damage to his family through this book, he certainly did it with style. Unlike other memoirs published by celebrities, Spare surprisingly reads like a great novel. It is beautifully written with imagery and metaphor. An example of that is when he describes his hair, “Someone suggested that my hair was a complete disaster. Like grass on the moors.” Or perhaps the way he describes his hair, scattered on the floor after a disastrous hair cut: “When the cutter was done I looked down, saw a dozen pyramids of ginger on the floor, like red volcanoes seen from a plane, and knew I’d made a legendary mistake.”

Prince Harry’s explosive memoir, Spare, co-written by famed ghostwriter JR Moehringer, sold more than 3.2 million copies worldwide after just one week of publication. It breaks Guinness Record for the fastest-selling nonfiction book since records began. The book details his life from his mother’s death to the present time. It focuses on his own emotional pain and healing. But it also touches on stories from his childhood, his schooling, his life as a royal, his career in the British army, the troubled relationship with his brother, and his life with Meghan. Both Harry and Meghan have been accused of hypocrisy. It seems ironic that while they continue their pleas for privacy, Prince Harry ‘breaches’ Royal Family’s privacy in his bombshell memoir. That could serve to undermine his own future right to privacy.