I Read Spare So You Don't Have To!
Not too much on Harry and Meghan now...
For my first issue of my newsletter, I couldn’t wait to review Prince Harry’s memoir Spare, so you don’t have to read it! (All the newsletters will not be this long this book just has too much content for it to be short.)
Now, I completely understand the general eye roll when it comes to the royals. Because of the colonialism, thievery, and just general annoyingness of them. However, please hear me out when I say that this book was so juicy and sooooooo worth the read. However, I do personally hate the way it is formatted and don’t understand why he decided not to use quotation marks and instead italicized dialogue. Harry has an understandably complicated view of his family and often condemns their past history, thievery, and colonization throughout the book. The situation with Meghan Markle is 100000x worse than I even realized and that’s only 1/3 of the book. So, I will be telling you in my opinion the most juicy, interesting, and just so unserious funny parts of the book. I also want to say as a disclaimer that I am not usually obsessed with the royals and have never really cared about them that much. (I don’t watch The Crown or anything and don’t plan to start any time soon. However, I will be watching their Netflix show.) Except for when my family and I woke up early to watch William and Kate’s wedding all those years ago. They can choke, but that wedding was gorgeous I have to admit. The only reason I care at all about Harry’s book is because there is a black woman involved and that is the ONLY reason. Well, that and that I love mess. Let’s begin…
Spare Review
Harry being the Spare was openly talked about and accepted in his family.
Allegedly his father Charles said to Diana the day he was born “Wonderful you’ve given me an Heir and a Spare! My work here is done!” Then he went off to go meet Camilla his mistress. Men just continuously aren’t shit, my God. From then on, they (except his mum) treated him like he was a second-class citizen his entire life. For example, William and Charles were never allowed to be on the same plane because if they died at the same time there would be no one to take the crown…….as if Harry wasn’t right there…… So, for that reason, Harry and his father went on a lot of vacations together because they didn’t care about what happened to him. In the Palace’s eyes, Harry was only there in case someone in their family needed a blood transfusion or something.
When Princess Diana died, he only cried when she was being put into the ground at the graveyard and then he did not cry a single time for any reason for about 25 years.
This was just honestly so heartbreaking. He was so repressed and so hurt that he couldn’t cry for any reason until his ex-girlfriend asked him about his mom during a ski trip. For some reason, it was the right moment at the right time, and he finally opened up. He later cried again in his 30s when he finally got a good therapist. Shout out to her.
He convinced himself that Princess Diana wasn’t dead and that she was actually hiding and coming back for about 20 years.
He didn’t believe that she was dead because every piece of proof that he was given he found a way to convince himself that it wasn’t enough. He also didn’t believe that Diana would do that to him. He called William one day a few years after it happened and told him about this, and William admitted that he once thought the same thing but now he doesn’t and has accepted it. That is until he went to Paris and made his driver go through the tunnel that she died in (twice!). It was only then that he realized that she was actually dead and not coming back. He called William and William said that he had also gone through the tunnel before.
William and Kate are vile disgusting pieces of shit.
When he was a teenager, Harry, William, and Kate got invited to a costume party and he didn’t have a costume so he went to a nearby store last minute and for some reason out of all the options when he called William and Kate to ask what he should get they told him to get the nazi costume. Now, obviously, Harry should have had the brains to not wear the costume. Especially since obviously, someone was going to take a picture of him. However, after the backlash he got from that he went to Auschwitz and talked to many Jewish people who were there and did the work to understand the error of his ways and become a better person. Of Course, William and Kate got off Scott free and no one ever knew that it was actually their idea in the first place.
Also, I know it’s easy to think that he shouldn’t have done it anyway. However, his family has a very strict no-questioning policy and besides the education that he got at school, he was never properly educated about the realities of many historical events in history. Mostly due to his family’s direct involvement in European history. So, as you can imagine they kept him sheltered and ignorant for a long time. He didn’t know what he didn’t know for a long time because he believed that everyone around him was doing what was best for him and in the end, he realized that was a lie. I still think he was dumb for wearing the Nazi costume because at the very least I feel like everyone knows Nazis are bad. He also agrees that it was such a dumb mistake and he said honestly that he was just young and dumb and didn’t think and was too distracted with everything else in his life to think twice about it. Dumb excuse but at a certain point he’s human and at least he did the work to make up for it even a little bit.
More recently, William tried to get Harry to physically fight at one point over Harry wanting to leave the Palace and pushed him down and broke a dog bowl. William asked him to not tell Meghan and Harry said okay reluctantly, but Meghan saw the scratches on his back, and he told her. She wasn’t even mad she was just sad because her existence made so many people angry for some reason.
William also got very angry and yelled in Harry’s face about the fact that The Queen said it was okay for Harry to keep his beard for his wedding. The Queen denied William from keeping his for his wedding to Kate. I thought this was very unserious and hilarious like you’re in your 30s and balding please focus on that sir.
The real villain in the entire book is the press.
As I’m sure we all know, Princess Diana was killed by Paparazzi while she was driving through a tunnel in Paris. Now, Harry said that when she died the press, and the Palace had an unspoken agreement that they wouldn’t write about the kids. However, that all changed when Harry went to college. From when he was in college to quite literally right now the press has been harassing him (sometimes physically) and anyone who knew him to the point of mental exhaustion.
Every girl he ever tried to date would end up going crazy and breaking up with him because reporters would be camped outside their houses for days and be harassing any person they ever talked to try and get information about Harry. Which made trying to get close to anyone, let alone romantically, extremely hard and draining.
The Palace has a long-standing policy of never responding to any news in the press. Even when there was evidence of the press lying and when there is hard evidence of the truth. Because of that, Harry was never allowed to respond to any rumor about him his entire life. There have been entire books written about him and his family that he claims are based on lies.
Below are just some of the lies and craziest things he mentioned about the press and his family:
That he didn’t graduate college fair and square.
He said it was a struggle (he admits to not being the brightest in school), but the press said that he cheated on an art project??? How do you cheat on an art project??
They hacked into people’s phones that were close to Harry and members of his family all the time.
Harry briefly dated the actress Caroline Flack (who after looking her up I realized was the host of Love Island.) She ended up killing herself in 2020. He says it’s because after all these years the press and pressure of their time together had killed her. However, more likely it had to do with a trial about assaulting her boyfriend that was going to take place.
Harry and Meghan went to Canada to get away and they were on a piece of land that was only accessible by Ferry. They stayed there for six weeks before the press found them. The press had boats and helicopters surrounding the island and forced them to leave.
William admitted to leaking to the press the incident with Kate and Meghan and the dress. (I’ll get into that later.)
William called Harry fuming that he found out that the employees of Charles and Camilla were the ones spreading lies about his and Kate’s family. This was also how Harry got confirmation that they were doing it to Harry and Megan. They were purposely doing it so they could make Prince Charles look better at the expense of his children. Prince Charles didn’t care because he was getting good press and said he didn’t believe them. People from the press revealed to William and Harry who it was specifically in Charles's Team who came to them with the information and Prince Charles still didn’t care.
One of the biggest publications that Harry had a problem with actually got under fire and a lot of their reporters got arrested and charged for their practices in how they got information from people. The specific reporter that Harry had an issue with since he was a teenager was being put on trial. She got off because her husband threw away evidence of her orchestrating all of them. While there was proof of him destroying evidence somehow that was not enough to convince a jury.
He would regularly go to Botswana to be with his chosen second family.
Second family meaning these people were like a mother and father to him. These people knew Diana from the work she did there, so he always found their company comforting and they often gave him the guidance that he was looking for from his actual family since they never really talked to him about deep things. He traveled there a lot after stressful things had happened in his life. Or whenever he would have to leave the military because the Taliban found out that he was there and kept trying to kill him. This was nuts because his being in the military was basically like his rite of passage in his family. But Harry being overseas put everyone’s lives at risk because when they found out where he was (because of the press, big shocker) they would just stop everything and attack the base. That’s why he became a pilot because the military had better air crafts and it was harder for them to track him in the air. Fucking insane. Anyway, I found these parts of the book to be particularly endearing and he has had some interesting run-ins with lions, elephants, and hippos. He even got involved to try and stop the poaching of rhinos for their horns and the press made it out to seem like he was doing the opposite.
The Meghan of it all…
Okay so this may be a little long so apologies in advance but there is really just so much. This is just what I feel is all you need to know.
They met through a mutual friend once Harry saw Meghan on her Instagram. He slid in her dms which I think is so funny because he’s literally a prince. Celebrities, they’re just like us! They had a few dates but after the first few it was pretty clear to both of them that this was the person they were supposed to be with forever. He eventually took her to Botswana where he frequently traveled to meet his second family and they had such a cute little trip filled with lions, camping, and privacy. This was one of my favorite parts of the book.
When he told his actual family they all reacted with “an American actress??” as if it was some kind of slur. (Not to mention they were mute when the press was calling her actual slurs and when one publication drew a cartoon of Harry and Meg bringing home their child, but their child was a chimpanzee)
When the press started talking shit about her and dogging her out Harry wanted to say something, but the Palace wouldn’t allow it. At one point the lies got so bad that they wanted to sue because of how blatant and offensive the lies were but the Palace said there was nothing that could be done time and time again. However, they allowed William and Kate to sue when she had topless photos leaked. They also allowed Prince Charles to sue whenever something leaked about him that he didn’t like. But whenever Harry and Meghan wanted to sue it was always “there is nothing that can be done.”
A particularly sad instance was that Meghan’s father kept being harassed by the press and they were forcing him to say very horrible things about her. Meghan wrote a letter to The Queen asking for help in this situation. The Queen called Meghan herself and told her to write a letter to her father to “talk some sense into him.” So of course, Meghan did what The Queen said and wrote the letter. Then somehow that letter got leaked to the press. One publication hired a so-called “handwriting expert" to analyze Meghan’s handwriting and they said that she was a horrible person because of the way she dots her I’s and crosses her T’s. What is particularly ironic about this is that Meghan actually has incredible handwriting because she took a handwriting class in high school and had excellent penmanship because of it. She even used her handwriting to make extra money in university by writing handwritten wedding and birthday invitations to pay rent. This is how ridiculous and hateful the press was to her. Still, they weren’t allowed to say anything. It turns out her father leaked the letter to the press and lied about it to her face. When they found out it was him that was the end of their relationship.
You may or may not have heard about an incident with Kate and Meghan over a dress for Harry and Meghan’s wedding. What actually happened was Kate got upset because she felt like her daughter’s dress wasn’t fitting correctly and felt that she needed an entirely new dress. It was too close to the wedding date, and they did not have time for that. Meghan had a tailor at The Palace waiting for an entire day for anyone who needed to make alterations. Kate didn’t care, didn’t listen, and wanted an entirely new dress. She was very nasty to Meghan which in turn made Meghan go home and cry. Harry found her on the floor of their kitchen uncontrollably sobbing. Somehow the press found out and said that Meghan was the one that made Kate cry because she was just being a bitch about it. Again, the palace would not let them respond.
Meghan eventually told Harry while she was pregnant with her first child, Archie, that she wanted to kill herself. She told him that if she killed herself then all the bad press would go away, and everyone would be happy. Harry said this was one of four times where he felt completely helpless (the other 3 being in the car with his mother while the paparazzi were chasing them, when Diana died, and when he didn’t get kill orders in the military when he felt like he needed them.) She also had a miscarriage in between her first and second child because of all the stress the press and Harry’s family was putting on her. They would literally write stories about her eating an avocado and somehow spin it to where she was causing WWIII. Then they would write an article about Kate eating an avocado and say she was such a good person for it. They weren’t even trying to be discrete. Not to mention, they wrote stories about how Meghan put Princess Charlotte’s life in danger by having lilies at her wedding because lilies are dangerous (only if you eat a lot of them, and even then, you just get an upset stomach. Rarely do people die). Never mind that Kate had lilies at her wedding and Princess Diana also had lilies at her wedding.
Now, The Queen has assistants who basically are the actual people who decide what happens with the royal family. At this time, she was in her 90s so it’s not hard to imagine that there were other people actually pulling the strings. The aids closest to The Queen were named: The Bee, The Wasp, and The Fly. Harry and Meg consulted with The Wasp about the press and them wanting to sue. He agreed that her situation was “abominable and that it needed to be stopped before someone got hurt.” Then “he suggested the Palace convene a summit of all the major editors and make our case to them”. Then they never heard from The Wasp again. They then went to The Bee and gave him a detailed presentation about what the press had been saying about Meghan and what they wanted to do about it. He took notes, and admitted that he had seen the headlines but ‘had not appreciated the full impact this might have on a young couple.” He said “This deluge of hate and lies was unprecedented in British History. Disproportionate to anything I’ve ever seen.” He promised to discuss the matter with all the necessary parties and come back with an action plan of solutions. Then they never heard from him again.
At last, they realized by way of Elton John and his husband David (friends with Diana) that they could just hire their own lawyers and not go through the Palace. I was wondering why they didn’t do that in the first place, but Harry said he didn’t even realize he could do that because he was conditioned to think that anything that he did had to be cleared with the Palace first. They decided to sue 3/4 of the major media publications for “disgraceful conduct and their long-standing practice of hacking people’s phones.” Not shockingly The Palace, Charles, and William were very upset with them. Eventually, Harry and Meghan realized that the only way that they would be happy and safe was if they were released from their royal duties and left Britain. They told their family and gave them a heads-up.
In Early 2020 the aids to The Queen sent out an email to all the members of the family (not Meghan) and said that they had to come to a meeting with The Queen to talk about 5 Options on how Harry and Meghan would step away from their royal duties. Option 1 was they didn’t leave at all, and Option 5 was they would be all around expunged of their titles and not have any money or security coming from the palace. Harry and Megan wanted Option 3 which was them keeping the work part of the royal duties such as the charities and the foundations that they ran. They also obviously wanted to keep security for themselves and their family but to be rid of any official royal duties and have their titles revoked. After Harry said that, The Bee announced that they were ready to go with Option 5 and started passing around mockups of the statement that had been written for Harry and Meghan to announce their departure. Harry was confused because he thought he had a choice, thus the point of the meeting, but it was clear that they had already made up their mind. When Harry asked him if they had mockups of their statements for all the other options The Bee said yes. Harry asked him to go print those out so he could read them and then The Bee said that the printer had stopped working. (This part made me laugh at how crazy it was.) They reached an agreement that for the next year Harry and Meg would be in a transition period and still keep their security while they work out the details of them leaving. After the meeting, Harry went to the office where the printers were and the person working in the office confirmed that they were working normally and the printer in The Bee’s office was also working completely fine. This was January 2020.
In March of 2020 Harry got a call from his security that they were being pulled from their duties of working for Harry and Meghan. They were told not to work with Harry after the end of the month. His security begged for them to stay and even said “We can’t just leave them out there!” Harry’s father didn’t care and neither did William and they both said that there was nothing that could be done. They left Harry, Meg, and their newborn for dead. They also said that if Harry had just come to them for help, they would have helped, but he did so many times. They also cut Harry off financially. Harry’s employees analyzed all the hate that Meghan had gotten on Twitter and online compared to Kate. They did this because William and Charles kept saying that every wife of a royal goes through this and that Meghan just needed to ignore it and she was being dramatic. Harry’s employees found that there had never been any sort of hate speech directed towards Kate and any other wife as there had been with Meghan. Almost all of it was expectantly vile and racist.
I would also like to point out that while none of the royal family have any actual political power, their family is a business with hundreds of employees that are all first and foremost indebted to The Queen and the Palace. They each have multiple businesses that they work on that are mostly charities and other things of that nature. Any money that Prince Harry received his entire life even as an adult came from his father and his father’s approval on how much he should be making. Harry even had to ask The Queen if it was okay to marry Meghan in the first place. (She said yes because she actually really liked Meghan despite what the press was saying.)
Apparently, Harry and Meghan are friends with Tyler Perry (when I got to this part, I laughed out loud because of how random it was. Has Harry seen Madea’s family reunion? I need to know.) When the Palace got rid of their security Tyler Perry offered for them to stay in his house in LA and to pay for security for them all out of his pocket. Now, I have my own qualms with Tyler Perry (mostly for him ruining BET and how he treats the writers and actors of his terrible TV shows and movies), but I have to admit this moved me. Apparently, Tyler’s mother was a big fan of Diana after she met her when came to visit Harlem one time in the 90s. Tyler thought of it as honoring his mother (who has also passed away) by letting Harry and Meghan stay there. They stayed at his house for six weeks until the press found them, and they had to move again. One thing that was kind of insane was that apparently when Archie learned how to walk every morning he would walk and stare at a painting in the front hall. One day he started to make semi-legible words and Meghan leaned in to look at the painting. The plaque read “Goddess of the Hunt. Diana”. Freaky right Haha. When they got their own house in LA Meghan bought a Christmas ornament of The Queen and Archie shook the tree and it broke. Harry later went to a medium or some sort of psychic (he never specified) on recommendation from a lot of his friends. This psychic said that Diana was in the room with them right now and he asked for Proof. The psychic said that Diana was in the room when the Christmas ornament fell, and she thought that was funny (Diana is so shady I love her.) This part gave me chills.
Basically, after all this mess Harry and Meghan had to sign a bunch of contracts and business deals to make money to be able to buy a house and pay for security (which cost $6 million.) This is how they are living now. This is also part of the reason why they have their Netflix deal and Meghan is doing that kids show amongst other projects. While they can no longer perform any duties under the guise of the Palace, they are committed to continuing their charity work in their own name.
I’ll leave you with this:
Okay, that was a lot. If you made it this far, thank you. Obviously, I enjoyed reading this. Admittedly more than I thought I would. There are so many things that I didn’t even get to. Like how he admitted to killing 25 people while he was in the military. I have to admit that turned me off to wanting to read the book. I actually read 2 books in between me starting and finishing Spare because of how much this turned me off. However, whenever I actually got to that part, I realized it was a little more nuanced than that. He revealed that because he was a pilot every single killing that he was instructed to do was recorded by the aircraft. Then after the mission, he would have to come back to the base and sit through a reviewing process by a man whose job it was to review the killings and decide if they were justified or unnecessary and therefore reckless. This man’s job was to find an error in Harry’s mission and basically give him shit for it or get him kicked out of the military. It was in this man’s best interest to do so. The man never found any of the kills Harry did to be unjustified and they were all deemed necessary for the greater good of the war. He never killed any civilians only members of the Taliban. Many of them were directly trying to kill him not just the British military as a whole. Now, of course, the war as a whole is a bigger issue (that you gotta take up with Bush Chile) and I am against war in general and in theory. But we do not live in a vacuum and these things require nuance.
Also, his grandmother, The Queen, is quite literally the commander-in-chief. Harry kind of had no other option but to join the military like William did and his father and his father before him. He also has a great deal of PTSD because of the war and grappling with the fact that so many people he knew in the army died or were permanently injured for the war that he came around to opposing. He started a charity called the Invictus Games that was for wounded soldiers all over the world to compete and raise money for the support and recovery of wounded soldiers all over the world. His 30th birthday was the opening of the foundation. Michelle Obama made a video appearance. This part in the book almost moved me to tears.
All of this is to say that I have talked with some people who said that Harry could or would lie about some of the stuff in the book. I personally don’t believe that partly because he admits some pretty embarrassing things in this book like shopping at TJ Maxx (TK Maxx in the UK) and not caring about coordination whenever he had to dress himself. He also admits the very few times when the press was right about things that he did like when he did cocaine and when his penis got frostbite. Or when he did shrooms at Courtney Cox’s house and made Christian Bale do a Batman impression. I found his fangirling over Courtney to be sweet and the fangirling over Christian to be embarrassing lmfao. He also admitted while he was on shrooms he imagined the toilet talking to him. I’m telling you this book was so unserious sometimes. Obviously, this means that he could still lie, but I just personally don’t see anything that he would have lied about or why he would lie in the first place. It all seems pretty reasonable to me.
I just personally think that for a man whose entire life has been dissected and lied on by the press and the media for financial gain for decades, he would have every right to want to release a book and finally get to tell his side of the story. Because if the press and the Palace had it their way, he would have just never said anything, never left, and would have just continued to put his wife and kids’ lives in danger all for the sake of not making The Palace look bad. Which he never had any incentive to do because while they wanted him to stick to the status quo they were openly treating him like he was a Spare. I just personally believe him, and I do think that he is a good person who has learned from his mistakes and somehow through everything that he’s been through has managed to not only stay hopeful but also stay relatively human. I found myself relating to certain feelings in his book a lot which I thought was odd because we are so different in every single way. For example, him wondering when he was going to find love. Me too Harry, me too. His commitment to charity work moved me and it made me happy that he wanted to continue the work that Diana had started. All in all, I think this book is important because it shows even if it is just a glimpse of the lengths and depths The Palace will go to protect The Queen, their reputation, and ultimately their money. Thankfully, I am just glad that the Black woman made it out alive. 👩🏿⚖️
Let me know how yall feel about my review in the comments! Especially if you have a take on something from the book!