You know that unique discomfort of having a conversation with someone you don’t really know and they start dumping private things onto you – private things you really don’t care for, nor want to know, but you nod and smile politely because you don’t really know the person and you don’t want to seem rude and leave the conversation so you just keep on nodding? And then that person gradually shares more private things (like how they lost their virginity) and you grin awkwardly, feeling as though your brain has been violated by information you didn’t want, and you begin to feel real regret for having started talking to this person in the first place so you’re left thinking “HOW DO I GET OUT OF THIS CONVERSATION ASAP?”
That is the feeling you’ll get reading Prince Harry’s Spare — the book that has garnered more attention than anyone cares to admit. (I can’t think of any other book that has enthralled both the readers of The Daily Mail and The New York Times).
And while you’re probably very busy with more important things in your lives (and don’t actually need to know that Harry took some special magnesium supplements before a friend’s wedding that made him want to do a number two), we’ve decided that if you’re going down the Harry wormhole, you may as well do it in style.
Below, are ten things you probably haven’t heard (yet) from all the chatter about ‘Spare’.
He really wants you to know why he left the royal family
At Prince Phillip’s memorial in April 2021, Harry had a conversation with his brother Will (Willy) and his father, Charles (Pa) where the reasons for his leaving the royal family with Meghan was raised. “I honestly don’t know,” Will said.
His father was also apparently confounded.
I suppose the only two people who needed to know the reasons were the people who asked (Willy and Pa) but somehow, Harry has got it into his head that the rest of us are also interested. A private conversation between family members has somehow engorged into a 400-page very detailed life chronicle.
He lost his childhood friend in a car accident at 18
In December 2002, when Harry was 18, his childhood friend, Henners (Henry van Straubenzee) was in a car with another friend leaving a party when the car smashed into a tree. Henners died. The driver survived.
He had briefly considered studying Art History at university
After graduating from Eton, Harry wasn’t keen on tertiary education. He wasn’t anti-university, he assures us – he just couldn’t imagine spending years of his life ‘bent over a book’. But he did consider a course in art history, not because he had any interest in the subject itself, but because “Lots of pretty girls took that subject.”
Need I say more?
He was really keen to join the army
For Harry, an actual war zone (with guns and explosives and death and all) was preferable to the demonic nightmare of the paps.
“What a relief it will be, I thought, to be in a proper war zone, where none of this [this, being the newspapers and the paps and his family and their suspicions and deceptions] is part of my daily calculus. Please, put me on a battlefield where there are clear rules of engagement. Where there’s some sense of honour.”
He likes looking at the night sky and thinking about its majesty
Some of the most LOL lines in ‘Spare’ are Harry’s random short monologues about the beauty of the night sky, and how much he loved comparing things in his life to the universe and its wonders.
Example 1: “The thing I found endlessly mesmerising about the stars was how far away they all were. The light you saw was born hundreds of centuries ago. In other words, looking at a star, you were looking at the past, at a time long before anyone you knew or loved lived. Or died.”
Yes, Harry. We know this. Were you high when you were telling your story to your ghostwriter?
Example 2: He compares his mother, Princess Diana, to a distant star called Earendel:
“Maybe she was omnipresent for the very same reason that she was indescribable — because she was light, pure and radiant light, and how can you really describe light? Even Einstein struggled with that one. Recently, astronomers rearranged their biggest telescopes, aimed them at one tiny crevice in the cosmos, and managed to catch a glimpse of one breathtaking sphere, which they named Earendel…”
[some more lines about the Big Bang, the Milky Way…spoken the way a school teacher might explain this to their students]
“That was my mother.”
He really wants you to know how much he loves Africa
Harry talks about Africa fetishistically – as if it’s a pizza joint he frequented in his adolescence – a safe space he returns to when things get wild with the paps (never mind that it’s a continent with 1.3 billion people and 54 countries and more than 1500 languages and very many different kinds of political systems and cultures and people.
It’s his spiritual home. A place he goes to recharge his batteries, and find himself again. Not unlike a wellness resort on some tropical island.
He always assumed he’d marry before Will, and be a young father
When Will was preparing his wedding in 2011, Harry had time to reflect on his singlehood. He thought he’d be the first to marry, because, he “wanted it so badly.”
“I’d always assumed that I’d be a young husband, a young father, because I’d resolved not to become my father. He’d been an older dad [Charles became a father at 34] and I’d always felt that this created problems, placed barriers between us.”
“Why is this thing, which I supposedly want so badly, not happening?”
After his first date with Meghan, he went over to a friend’s place and watched Inside Out
After his first date in London’s Soho House with Suits star Meghan Markle, Harry went over to a friend’s place and drank, smoked weed and watched Inside Out. Meghan then proceeded to FaceTime Harry a few hours after the date, without makeup.
“Are you watching cartoons?” Meghan asked.
“No. I mean, yeah. Kinda. It’s….Inside Out?”
Then he recounts seeing her freckles for the first time and falling in love with them. I’d prefer reading their conversation about the animated movie, but perhaps they didn’t have one.
Harry doesn’t read
Who goes out of their way to tell the world they rarely, if ever, pick up a book? Prince Harry! He mentions a William Faulkner quote which he found on BrainyQuote.com, and admits to being so out of popular culture and books that he hadn’t even heard of Eat Pray Love…until Meghan enlightens him about it.
His excuse?
“Ah. Sorry. Not really big on books.”
He has no backbone when it comes to deciding what to wear to fancy dress parties
You know that infamous Nazi costume he wore to Will’s friend’s birthday party in January 2005? Harry wants you to know that it wasn’t really his fault. In fact, he blames Will and Kate:
“I narrowed my options to two. A British pilot’s uniform. And a sand-coloured Nazi uniform. With a swastika armband. And a flat cap. I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought. Nazi uniform, they said.”
Fast forward to October 2016. Harry is now friends with Tom Hardy, the actor.
“I’d phone him to ask if I could borrow his costume from Mad Max.”
“I wished I could wear this disguise ever day. I wished I could reuse it the next day and visit [Meghan] on the set of Suits. Then again, maybe not.”
Harry then goes on the explain how he’d googled the love scenes she’d done on the show. Awkward cough. Do we really need to know all this?
I agree with Alexandra Jacobs from the NYTimes who said Harry and Meghan might now be ‘overexposed’ — and that “Maybe this is part of the grand plan, to drive away inquiring minds by boring them to bits?”