J.R. Moehringer, the ghostwriter of Prince Harry’s book ‘Spare’ has come clean in an article about the arguments and tensions experienced with the Duke of Sussex during the process of creating the book.
The respected Pulitzer Prize-winning writer even revealed there was late-night shouting between him and Prince Harry while they were preparing the explosive text that ended up sinking the few hopes of reconciliation with his brother, Prince William.
What did Prince Harry’s ghostwriter say about him?
J.R. Moehringer told, in an article published in the ‘New Yorker’ magazine, that his relationship with Prince Harry became so tense while they were working on the book that at one point he started yelling at the youngest son of the King of England.
Moehringer starts by recounting a row with Harry during the editing process, when the prince wanted to include a clever retort he had made after some fellow soldiers had brought up his dead mother, Princess Diana, during a military training exercise.
The exercise was based on simulating being captured and tortured by terrorists. He is beaten, stripped naked, and, at one point, the captors hurl insults at him, one of which was against his late mother, Princess Diana.
Harry insisted that this part of the book ends with a witty comeback he hurled back at the captor, but Moehringer disagreed.
“Although this wasn’t the first time that Harry and I had argued, it felt different; it felt as if we were hurtling toward some kind of decisive rupture, in part because Harry was no longer saying anything. He was just glaring into the camera. Finally, he exhaled and calmly explained that all his life, people had belittled his intellectual capabilities, and this flash of cleverness proved that, even after being kicked and punched and deprived of sleep and food, he had his wits about him.”
In the end, Moehringer persuaded him to exclude the witticism from the passage, arguing that it unnecessarily detracts from the story’s narrative power, to which the Duke of Sussex eventually agreed.
Despite the occasional editorial disagreements with Harry, Moehringer wrote that his impression of the prince was generally a positive one.
“I just liked the dude. I called him dude right away; it made him chuckle,” he said. “I found his story, as he outlined it in broad strokes, relatable and infuriating. The way he’d been treated, by both strangers and intimates, was grotesque.”
When someone leaked the news that Harry would publish a memoir and that Moehringer was writing it, the author and his family were quickly hounded by the press. He described the terrifying experience of the paparazzi following him and his wife.
“It was like telling Taylor Swift about a bad breakup. It was like singing “Hallelujah” to Leonard Cohen. Harry was all heart. He asked if my family was O.K., asked for physical descriptions of the people harassing us, promised to make some calls, see if anything could be done. We both knew nothing could be done, but still. I felt gratitude and some regret. I’d worked hard to understand the ordeals of Harry Windsor, and now I saw that I understood nothing. Empathy is thin gruel compared with the marrow of experience. One morning of what Harry had endured since birth made me desperate to take another crack at the pages in “Spare” that talk about the media.
On his motives for writing the book, Moehringer explained that Harry wanted “Spare might be a rebuttal to every lie ever published about him,” he said.