As officially announced, Prince Harry’s long-awaited memoir, titled “Spare,” will arrive in bookstores on January 10, 2023. This information was reported by The New York Times.
The fact that Harry decided to write a memoir, he announced back in July 2021, a little more than a year after he and his wife Meghan Markle left Britain and withdrew from the Royal Family. Then the Prince said that he would like to write this book “not as the Prince he was born, but as the man he has become.”
Harry announced that he was going to tell the “whole truth” about his childhood, youth, growing up, marriage, and the decision to change his life. At the same time, considering in what, to put it mildly, unflattering light he constantly exposes his relatives in his interviews, they could not expect anything good from this book.
According to rumors, King Charles, then still Prince Charles, tried to stop his son, explaining to him what irreparable damage his obviously unbiased version of events would cause to the family and the prestige of the monarchy as such. However, Harry ignored his father’s pleas. Moreover, he publicly and rather boldly stated that he was doing what he thought was right and did not need anyone’s permission to do so. And as a result, according to experts, the Prince actually destroyed for himself the opportunity to make peace with his father and brother.
In fact, the book, as far as we know, was printed some time ago, but its sale, scheduled for this fall, was briefly postponed. Apparently, Harry still decided to observe at least minimal decency and not make his revelations public immediately after the death of his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth.
Note that, in addition to the disapproval of his family, which apparently does not bother him too much, Harry has another problem. The fact is that during this time he agreed to appear in a documentary show about himself and his family. And as a result, much of what he says in the frame is at odds with what is written in the book. Which in itself can cause a scandal.
As far as we know, Prince Harry tried to get the publishers to allow him to make some changes to the book. However, received a decisive refusal. The print run had already been printed, and the alterations would have been fabulously expensive. And Harry could not refuse the book at all — after all, he received a fee of $20 million and has already spent most of it.
It is curious that Harry is not the first of Queen Elizabeth’s relatives who decided on a scandalous memoir. Before him, it was done by Elizabeth II’s uncle, King Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936, and whose memoirs were published in 1951. However, his book did not cause much harm to the living members of the Royal Family, since it dealt with the affairs of bygone days. Edward himself, thanks to his memoirs, did not win anything.