Spare offers a new brand of royal vulnerability we’re struggling to accept.
Over-sharer. Fame-seeker. Bragger. These are all notions reporters, journalists, reviewers and tabloids alike have used to describe the ex-royal in the lead up to the release of his tell-all memoir, which came out earlier this week. Some take aim at Harry’s revelation that he had a frostbitten penis at his brother’s wedding, asking simply: Why. Others zero in more seriously on Harry’s killings in Afghanistan. He’s boasting, some headlines say. He’s gone too far.
The spectrum of criticism is broad, but the overarching negativity is hard to ignore. Besides, if it’s privacy Harry craves, why write a book about his life? To tell his truth. That’s exactly what he told Anderson Cooper in his 60 Minutes interview.
Maybe it’s the fatigue of living through an ongoing global health emergency. Maybe it’s because we don’t have the collective capacity to feel compassion towards a person who has experienced more privilege and pampering than we could ever imagine. Maybe it’s because, just as Harry maintains, we’ve been fed so much tabloid trash about him, his wife, and his fractured family that we are unable—unwilling, actually—to take anyone’s word as truth anymore.
Whatever the answer, it seems we are tired of listening. And for Harry, this couldn’t have come at a worse time.
For years, we’ve peered voyeuristically into royal lives. And for 25, we’ve wondered how Princess Diana’s sons possibly could have coped with her death. How a 12-year-old boy could walk behind his mother’s casket under the watchful gaze of millions. And recently? How two the relationship of two seemingly inseparable brothers could crumble in a matter of years. How Britain’s family could fall apart right in front of our very eyes. How an assured, purposeful self-made actress could be driven to want to kill herself.
Spare gives us the answers we so desperately desire. They didn’t cope. He didn’t want to do the walk. The relationship with his brother, and family, was already fractured—crumbling. His wife was under attack.
A once-muzzled royal is finally, freely speaking his truth in a way none before him have. We are hearing what he has to say, sure. But are we actually listening? Processing how Harry’s completely abnormal life took his mother, and nearly his wife? Appreciating this new brand of royal vulnerability, whether we agree with it or not? Taking a person’s childhood trauma and holding it with care?
The world is deciding as we speak. But it seems the scales are currently tipped towards prioritizing random, out-of-context headlines here and brief excerpts there instead of perhaps a more wholistic, compassionate approach. One where we actually take his story in as a complete narrative and go from there.
“As a historian watching folks try so hard, in so many ways, to discredit a first person account of their experiences is almost painful,” says Twitter user @dr.murtonstoehr. And that’s exactly what minute, detail-driven headlines and stories about Spare are doing—discrediting Harry’s account of his own life by favouring a piece over the pie. “We take first person accounts quite seriously, they are quite literally, a gift,” she continues. Can you really appreciate a gift if you’ve only unwrapped one corner of it?
Prince Harry isn’t dying. He isn’t poor. He isn’t in a crisis so dire that he lacks necessary resources like clean water and the comfort of a home. But he is in the throes of some kind of internal crisis so deep, so painful that he’s been driven to air his grievances publicly in hopes of resolving them privately.
Trauma is a spectrum, and there are different types of crises. Those of war, illness, human rights. Big trauma and global crises, like the war in Ukraine and the flooding in California—those unquestionably deserve our attention. But what about private, internal crises? Personal trauma playing out on the world’s stage? Are those things worthy of our collective care?
If we spent any time at all reading the lies and half-truths that were published about Harry and his family leading up to the release of his memoir, surely we owe an ear to his truth. Whatever that may be.
Arisa Valyear 