Compellingly artful .. Another spectral figure haunting the text of Spare—that of Harry’s ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer. Harry, or his publishing house...could not have chosen better ... Moehringer has what is usually called a novelist’s eye for detail, effectively deployed in Spare ... Moehringer has fashioned the Duke of Sussex’s life story into a tight three-act drama ... Spare is worth reading not just for its headline-generating details but also for its narrative force, its voice, and its sometimes surprising wit ... There is a certain amount of score-settling and record-straightening, which, though obviously important to the author, can be wearying to a reader ... Above all, Spare is worth reading for its potential historical import, which is likely to resonate, if not to the crack of doom, then well into the reign of King Charles III, and even into that of his successor.
I expected to enjoy Spare, given that it was written with the help of the talented author J.R. Moehringer ... And I did. In parts ... Like its author, Spare is all over the map — emotionally as well as physically. He does not, in other words, keep it tight ... The prince claims to have a spotty memory...but doesn’t appear to have forgotten a single line ever printed about him and his wife, and the last section of his tell-all degenerates into a tiresome back-and-forth about who’s leaking what and why.
At its best, the prince’s memoir reads like one of those popular late-1990s novels about British singletons blundering their way out of solipsistic immaturity into self-awareness and true love ... To be clear, my idea of the best parts of Spare is unlikely to coincide with the notions of most of the book’s readers ... To my surprise, the first half of Spare turns out to be a fascinating literary venture. This is surely all down to Harry’s collaborator, J.R. Moehringer ... It’s impossible to read Spare without thinking, multiple times per page, of the intensive interviews that produced it, of how Moehringer must have pressed Harry to recall the sensual minutiae that make Spare feel so intimate ... Men like Harry, who have the opposite of a writer’s temperament and tastes, and who perhaps bullied writerly kids at school, usually show up as antagonists in literary fiction and memoir. Moehringer, on the other hand, needs to make this alien creature endearing ... And Moehringer largely succeeds at his mission ... Spare becomes more Harry’s book than Moehringer’s and in the process loses the sweetness and generosity that suffuse its first half. The writing also becomes notably more pedestrian. It left me wishing Moehringer would write a novel about a man much like Harry, a simple man in an impossible situation, seeking a meaningful place for himself in the world.
Explosive ... The result is occasionally insufferable, but also oddly fascinating. At times you wonder if it should ever have been made public ... By turns artless and lyrical, affectionate and bitter, Spare’s 400 pages read in a chaotic swirl ... Throughout, Harry’s ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer channels Harry’s voice with disarming candor. Intimate details of royal life stream out unceasingly ... Harry does not explicitly blame the monarchy for any of these problems. In subtext, Spare is a searing indictment of the British crown, which Harry depicts as a force that warps family dynamics under the strength of its imperative: to protect the crown, and those in the direct line of succession, at the expense of everyone else. Yet textually, Harry declares his full-throated support for the monarchy and for his commander-in-chief ... The tragedy of Spare is that everything Harry has told us makes it clear that Charles and William will take this memoir not as an explanation or a love letter but as a betrayal worse than anything they ever did to Harry, and that they may not be wrong.
As much as Spare fits snugly within its genres—royal biographies, books about father-son relationships, narratives of the war on terror—Harry’s contortions against the hold of the tabloid media give it the air of a psychological thriller unlike anything we’ve ever seen from the Windsors ... Spare has many of the qualities that make for a capital-m memoir. The prose is clean and streamlined, with a penchant for humorous specificity, and early sections bear the hallmarks of the rounds of revision and distillation that introduce lyricism into unadorned words.
Like Harry, the book is good-natured, rancorous, humorous, self-righteous, self-deprecating, long-winded. And every so often, bewildering ... Written with and almost surely elevated by J.R. Moehringer...the book delivers behind-the-scenes vignettes of the royals...and liberal helpings of woo-woo.
Prince Harry spills more British tea than a certain band of revolutionaries did 250 years ago ... When it comes to juicy anecdotes, Spare is anything but: No tidbit is too salacious, too trifling or too controversial to make the cut ... For all his anguished soul-bearing and scandalous confessing, though, Harry can’t bring himself to identify, much less condemn, the real source of his woes: the monarchy itself. As I eagerly gobbled up every gossipy morsel about wedding seating Harry was willing to share, I kept waiting for him to go there and critique the institution that fostered such wild entitlement and bitter resentment in the first place ... The pettiness described in Spare is staggering.
It’s not just the unrelenting stories of familial coldness or the cruelty of inherited fame in Spare that made me think of Crawford. It’s that even 45 years after the publication of her book, her allegations of abuse at the hands of her famous mother remain what define her in popular culture ... But Spare — both the term and the book — does not have to be what defines Prince Harry ... It’s a story of extremes: enormous privilege tied to celebrity that makes privacy almost impossible; deep love tied to fears of deep loss; and most of all, a sense of never being enough, and never quite fitting into the family and role he was assigned ... Spare... often had me feeling sympathy for the prince. But more frequently, I found myself cringing ... More disturbing is the way he bemoans the invasive nature of the British media, their hacking of phones, their lies, and then, in the next sentences, offers private details about his own family. For someone who hates the tabloid press, he does a good job of writing like one of its ranks, down to criticizing his brother’s receding hairline ... After finishing Spare, my question is: Now that you’ve told your story (repeatedly), who do you want to be, Prince Harry? Will you become the champion for the planet and disabled veterans? Will you finally have a private life now that there’s nothing left to disclose? Or will you find yourself unable to move on from the trauma of the House of Windsor and, like Christina Crawford, end up peddling ever-newer editions of your memoir until the family revelations are finally depleted?
Score-settling ... Repeat over-sharing is just one of the problems with Spare ... Aside from the explosive bits...Spare is a slog. It’s heavy on filler...and on anecdotes that would be of little entertainment value if the people involved didn’t happen to answer to Your Royal Highness ... Granted, there’s something to be said for getting a tour of a castle from someone who actually lived there ... But even the most dedicated royal watchers will weary of reading about daily life at Eton ... What may gall the reader most is the hypocrisy. Harry claims to want privacy, but there he is putting it all out there for Oprah, Anderson and others.
There is no doubt that Spare in full gives you a picture that individual anecdotes from this extraordinary life story do not. The dominant themes are skilfully woven like a thread through JR Moehringer’s manuscript ... There is also most certainly something of a catharsis in this process for the Prince. Having sat back and seen his story told by others—often incorrectly—he has now put it all out there for himself ... There is no doubt that Harry’s story is heartbreaking at times and it would be hard to come away from reading Spare without feeling some compassion for him. If you do end up caring about him when you finish this book, you may find yourself turning the last page and hoping that he does not wake up one day and wish he could take it all back.
A book that must rank as one of the most bizarre I’ve ever read. Yes, it is – at moments – very sad. There’s ongoing shame in it for tabloid journalism. But for a title written explicitly in the cause of securing sympathy and understanding for its so-called author, boy, does it misfire ... Sometimes, Moehringer writes. Like this. In short sentences. Bang. Bang-bang. At other times, it’s as if he’s been at Harry’s weed or something ... Here we are. Penguin Random House has helped him out and we can only hope he’s happy with his end of the deal, a pact more Faustian by far than anything his father or brother have ever signed.
One of the few good decisions that Prince Harry has made in the last five turbulent years was to take George Clooney’s advice and hire a ghostwriter as skilled as the novelist JR Moehringer. Spare is gripping in its ability to channel Harry’s unresolved emotional pain, his panicky, blinkered drive, his improbably winning rapscallion voice, and his skewed, conflicted worldview. Best of all, Moehringer knows how to drill down into scattered memories and extract the critical details that make this hyper-personal chronicle an unexpected literary success ... He writes as if he is the first privileged male to notice the unfairness of primogeniture ... Harry’s unreconstructed laddishness eventually starts to get as tiresome for the reader as it did for his family ... Harry’s most extreme misunderstanding in Spare concerns the topic he affects to know most about: how the deep state of the Palace works.
Many boring passages about the sublime beauty of the elephants of the Okavango Delta, which I suspect most of his readers will skip ... If the fluency and efficiency of the writing is the work of JR Moehringer, the book’s ghost writer — who can congratulate himself on a job well done — the vivid, haunting detail must have come from Harry. He really feels it ... Although he claims to despise the intrusions of the press, Harry craves being the centre of attention ... Spare is loaded with trivial complaints and absurd perceived slights against his status ... Very often he sounds like the irritating little brother from hell ... It’s probably of great credit to William and Kate that, even in this hostile account, they come across as sweet and well-meaning people ... It seems clear that he was looking for an escape route, a way to blow up his coddled, caged panda bear life.
Curiously lacking in self-awareness ... This has been billed as the most explosive royal memoir in history, but it feels more like the heart-rending story of a man stuck forever in the past ... For all that Harry comes across as sympathetic and vulnerable in parts, for all the deliciously gossipy bits...the book mostly feels like a long act of retribution ... The title of the book is Spare, but Harry spares no one, least of all William. Many of the sources of his resentment feel like normal sibling squabbles, except that normal sibling squabbles don’t end up forming the backbone of a bestselling memoir, locked forever into a nation’s historical record ... What save the book from being a long, entitled whingefest are the moments of genuine emotional intensity – and the gloriously bitchy insights into a family that is deeply, irretrievably weird.
My general view of the supposedly devastating revelations contained in this book is this: the publisher paid twenty million quid for this? ... One has to feel, to some degree, for the Duke of Sussex, though his account is unconvincing and horribly hurtful to some decent and honourable people who could never answer back ... His version of events is worth reading, although they must be read in conjunction with more detached versions ... Moehringer has made a decent-ish stab at simulating an English voice for his narrator ... This is a sad and a lowering book, and the saddest aspect of it is that he strangely believes that he is the person to lead a charge against the practitioners of the written word, to control and restrict it.
This book doesn’t so much lift the curtain on private royal life than rip it off and shake out its contents. But it’s also richly detailed and at times beautifully written; if Harry is going to set fire to his family, he has at least done it with some style ... It is breathtakingly frank. His wife might be the natural on camera, but Harry seems to hit his stride on paper ... Passages about army exploits and travels to Africa are worthy but a little bloated. More interesting are the rich accounts of gatherings at Balmoral.
This ghostwritten testimony, though flawed, humanises the subject ... The introduction is both startling and disarming ... Harry... turns out to be an emerging apostate who can’t quite give up the faith. Like his mother, he is still an ardent monarchist. He takes for granted his inherited position and unspeakably privileged lifestyle ... Read it for yourself ... Harry is always learning. It’s his most endearing quality.
This book doesn’t so much lift the curtain on private royal life than rip it off and shake out its contents. But it’s also richly detailed and at times beautifully written; if Harry is going to set fire to his family, he has at least done it with some style ... Breathtakingly frank ... There is humour in the book too, even if it’s of the squaddie variety.
This must be the strangest book ever written by a royal. Prince Harry's memoir, Spare, is part confession, part rant and part love letter. In places it feels like the longest angry drunk text ever sent ... It's disarmingly frank and intimate - showing the sheer weirdness of his often isolated life. And it's the small details, rather than the set-piece moments, that give a glimpse of how little we really knew ... The ghost-written work is a fast-paced, quickfire account, looking out from the inside ... What's missing from the book is any sense of awareness of any wider context of the rest of the world outside. It's as if he has been blinded by the paparazzi flashlights ... The book crackles like a burning log with something bizarre on almost every page.
In her essay, Mantel remarked that 'Harry doesn’t know which he is, a person or a prince'. Spare is clearly the prince’s attempt to claw back personhood, to claim his own narrative ... Spare is by turns compassion-inducing, frustrating, oddly compelling and absurd. Harry is myopic as he sits at the centre of his truth, simultaneously loathing and locked into the tropes of tabloid storytelling, the style of which his ghostwritten autobiography echoes ... What he shows...is that the monarchy makes fools of us all.
The book is spotted with a number of unnecessary slights, with Prince William bearing the brunt of them. But I believe that readers should look past Harry’s heated prose to the bigger, and I believe valid, claims he makes. If Harry’s claims are true, the monarchy is ripe for a reckoning ... Harry navigates this struggle imperfectly ... The book is, ultimately, a portrait of an angry young man struggling to make peace with his past, in the hopes that he may live a brighter future.
Spare... jumps chaotically from a myriad of different stylistic registers. At one point he refers to the radio as 'the wireless;' at another the British press as 'padre' — who speaks like this? Is this vernacular supposed to add charm and approachability to the millionaire prince? ... We, the reader, listen in to the trauma of belonging to a family where you are repeatedly told you do not belong — by that family, by the press, by a schooling system whose eminent success is molded on principles of exclusive brutality. It would be easy, after reading dozens of pages of self-absorption protesting otherwise, to forget that he is an insider ... There is little space for reflection on his role in the military horrors of which he partook in Afghanistan ... His strategy seems to be a principle of radical honesty... But honesty is not the same as accountability (a word that is used once in this context) of his role in a violent and... illegitimate war which replays the imperial violence of the century before it ... Instead of any serious political thinking we get a descent into autofiction about the traumas of the late ’90s and the abjection of millennial life.
Spare is filled with lyrical meditations on royal life. The book’s opening evokes none other than William Shakespeare ... Moehringer’s impressive writing propels the reader quickly through the 416-page book. It’s a shame that Spare will be remembered more for the leaks about Harry’s wife Meghan Markle and his sister-in-law Kate Middleton squabbling over bridesmaids dresses than for its lovely prose ... The book is far from perfect. It ends with Harry rehashing stories about who in his family leaked what to the press that he has now shared with Oprah Winfrey and Anderson Cooper and Michael Strahan and Netflix. The constant litigation proves exhausting. Still, celebrity memoirs are usually categorized as 'well-written' or 'revealing.' Rarely both. Spare, in that sense, is special.
It’s true that Harry’s familiar grievances... all get space in Spare, but there is so much more ... Spare is a mess of contradictions, but as an insight into the royal reality, it is as singular as it is strange ... [You] you feel for him even as you’re exasperated by him because, for all his claims to the moral high ground, Spare’s Harry keeps score, and he is petty ... After years of tabloid lies, of course Harry would be sensitive to inaccurate reporting. But he comes across as so defensive that it’s hard not to agree with Charles when he urges Harry, 'My darling boy, just don’t read it' ... In spite of his blind spots, he is so candid about so much, and that makes Spare an incomparably bonkers read.
