Spare

What's inside (8 sections)

1. The night in Paris and the years after
2. Eton, headlines, and learning to play a role
3. Soldier in Afghanistan
4. William, Kate, and a brother bond cracking
5. Meeting Meghan and the wedding that changed everything
6. Leaving, Oprah, and telling his own story
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

A friend asked me if Spare was worth reading or just palace gossip, and I told him it surprised me. I picked up this 2023 memoir from Random House, 416 pages, expecting headlines. What I got was sadder and more personal than that. Prince Harry writes with ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer about growing up as the backup to the heir, losing his mother at twelve, and trying to build an adult life outside palace walls. I read it over four evenings, and by the end I felt I knew his version well, even where I doubted it. He is angry, funny at times, stuck on old wounds, and very clear about who he blames: the British press first, then the palace aides who feed it, then sometimes his own family for going along.

The title comes from old royal shorthand. The heir and the spare. William was the heir. Harry was the spare, the backup in case something happened to his brother. Harry says his father Charles even joked about it when he was born. Now you have given me an heir and a spare, I am done. Whether that joke landed or not, the label stuck in his head. The whole book hangs on that feeling of being second, protected and trapped at once, loved by his mother and grandmother but never quite sure of his place.

The night in Paris and the years after

Harry starts close to the end of Diana's life and then circles back, which makes sense once you see how much that night still runs him. He is twelve in late summer 1997, at Balmoral in Scotland with William and Charles, when Diana dies in a car crash in Paris. He remembers his father sitting on his bed and saying she did not make it. He remembers the long walk behind her coffin through London with William, grandfather Philip, uncle Charles Spencer, and his father, while crowds threw flowers and cried.

What stayed with me was how long he refused to believe she was gone. For years he thought she had faked her death to escape the press and would call one day. He writes about driving through the same Paris tunnel as an adult, asking the driver to match that old speed, trying to solve it in his body. That is grief that never got proper room. No one in the palace talked about feelings. They talked about duty and getting on with it. He and William were sent back to school soon after. The cameras kept coming.

Diana fills the early pages in warm flashes. Her hugs. Her laugh. Taking the boys to amusement parks and fast food places and homeless shelters. Harry says the press hunted her with motorbike chases, and that the palace let it happen. He links her death straight to what happens later with Meghan. Same pack of photographers, same nasty columns, same fear that history will repeat.

His teen years after Diana are a blur of school rules and acting out. Charles is kind but distant and awkward about emotions. Nannies and protection officers raise him as much as anyone. William is his best friend and rival, sharing jokes and secrets, then pulling away as the older brother with more pressure. Harry drinks young. He smokes. He hates the photographers who shout his name to get a reaction. I felt sorry for him here, a grieving kid with no privacy and no tools for it.

Eton, headlines, and learning to play a role

Eton sounds both grand and lonely in his telling. Big stone buildings, strict uniforms, older boys with power. Harry admits he was not a natural student. He liked sports and jokes more than exams. William had gone first and done well, so teachers expected the same. Harry felt smaller by comparison. He describes struggling through classes while his mind stayed on motorbikes, polo, and friends.

Outside school, the tabloids turn him into a cartoon. Harry the party boy. Harry the wild child. He tells stories about London clubs, about drinking too much at seventeen, about smoking weed at Highgrove and getting caught. Charles sends him to visit a rehab center for a day to scare him straight, which then leaks to the press. Harry says the palace spun his mistakes to make others look better. The papers ran with it for weeks.

There is a sad thread here about him trying to be normal when nothing about his life is normal. Protection officers follow him everywhere. Friends sell stories. He starts to see every new person as a possible leak. He also starts to learn the palace game. One household plants a story to protect its own prince. Harry says he watched rival teams trade favors with editors while he got the worst coverage.

He also writes about his gap year and trips abroad with real warmth. In Lesotho he works with kids affected by AIDS and starts to think about charity work that matters. For a boy who felt like a spare part at home, being useful abroad felt fresh. Those trips plant the seed for his later charity Sentebale and for the Invictus Games for wounded veterans. By his early twenties he wants the army, not honorary uniforms for parades, but real service.

Soldier in Afghanistan

If you only know Harry from gossip pages, the army chapters may change how you see him. He joins Sandhurst for officer training and loves the clarity. Shine your boots. Learn the map. Carry your weight. No one cares if you are a prince if you cannot keep up on a run. He says fellow cadets mocked him at first, then accepted him when he worked hard and took jokes. For once being judged on effort felt fair.

His first tour to Afghanistan in 2007 to 2008 is cut short when foreign press breaks the blackout on his location. He serves as a forward air controller in Helmand, living in dusty outposts. He describes heat, boredom, sudden fear, and deep bonds with Gurkhas and young British soldiers. He writes with pride about doing a normal job and being called Lieutenant Wales. When the story leaks, he is pulled out for safety.

Back home he trains as an Apache helicopter pilot, which is hard technical work and he sticks with it. Hours of study. Flight simulators. Tests he fails and retakes. His second tour in 2012 to 2013 as an Apache co pilot keeps him flying missions over Helmand. He writes plainly about taking lives from the air. He says he viewed enemy fighters as pieces removed from a board to cope, a line that caused huge anger when the book came out.

What matters more in his telling is what the army gave him. Structure. Male friendship without palace rules. A cause larger than photo ops. He also sees wounded mates up close, amputations and burns and head injuries, and it shakes him. Out of that grows the Invictus Games, his sports event for sick and injured service members. That pride in soldiers and veterans feels like the most solid part of his identity, more than any royal title.

Leaving the army in 2015 leaves a hole. He is thirty, single, famous, with no clear job. Palace duties feel thin after combat tours. His grief for Diana, pushed down for years, starts to rise as panic attacks during public events. He finally starts therapy after William urges him to get help. He learns words for trauma and starts to link his reactions now to being twelve and told to walk straight and not cry.

William, Kate, and a brother bond cracking

The heart of Spare for many readers is the slow break with William and Kate, and Harry tells it in painful detail. Early on they are a team. William the careful older brother. Harry the funny younger one who makes Kate laugh. When William starts dating Kate Middleton, Harry likes her at once. She is warm and easy around him. The three go out together. Harry calls himself the third wheel in a happy way.

Cracks show as roles harden. William, as heir, gets more protection from the palace press office. Harry feels his own team is smaller and weaker. Stories that make William and Kate look good often make Harry look bad, he says. He starts to keep score. Who got the bigger flat. Whose staff leaked what. Whose face made the front page.

The fights he describes are raw. He says William once knocked him to the floor at Nottingham Cottage during an argument about Meghan, breaking a dog bowl under his back. William had called Meghan rude and said his brother had been brainwashed. Harry says he told William to leave and William stormed out then came back sorry. Another fight involves Kate and Meghan and bridesmaid dresses before the 2018 wedding, with both women crying and Harry feeling his wife was blamed unfairly. Small slights pile up. Who shares lip gloss. Who sits where at Christmas.

Harry also admits his own jealousy. William had the bigger destiny and the stable marriage first. Harry had freedom but less respect. He felt pushed to play backup at joint events, standing two steps behind. I found these pages both human and tiring, because Harry sees every slight clearly but rarely asks how William might have seen him. His love for his brother is still there under the hurt, in childhood memories of protecting each other after Diana died, which makes the adult coldness sadder.

Their father Charles appears as a tired middle figure who hates confrontation. Harry says Charles chose aides over sons more than once. Camilla, once the hated other woman in Harry's teen view, becomes his stepmother and, in his telling, a press player who traded stories for kinder coverage. He and William begged Charles not to marry her, he says, then tried to accept her. Those claims hurt his ties with his father deeply, and you can tell he knows it but felt he had to write them.

Meeting Meghan and the wedding that changed everything

Harry meets Meghan Markle in 2016 on a blind date set up by a friend, and his telling of their early days is sweet and fast. She is an American actress on Suits, divorced, smart, funny, direct. He knows almost nothing about her show. She knows little about royal rules. They meet for drinks in London, then meet again the next day. Within weeks they are texting all day. Within months they are camping in Botswana under stars, trying to keep it quiet.

The secrecy fails fast. When the press learns about Meghan, coverage turns harsh. Harry says racist tones showed at once, comments about her Black mother, about her being divorced and American, about her family. Palace aides told him to stay quiet and let it pass. He refused. He put out a rare statement condemning abuse of Meghan, which made him popular with the public but unpopular inside the palace. From here the book moves quickly from love story to siege story. Every date leaks. Photographers chase her in Toronto. Her mother Doria gets followed. Her father Thomas gets tangled with staged photos and health scares.

Their bond deepens under pressure. Meghan meets William and Kate, and Harry says it goes well at first then cools. He proposes with a ring made with stones from Diana's collection. The 2018 wedding at Windsor is one of the happiest set pieces in the book. The gospel choir. Her veil. His nerves. His brother as best man. His mother in his mind all day. For a few hours the fairy tale beats the tabloids.

Married life starts bright then darkens. They move to Frogmore Cottage after renovations that later spark fights about money. Meghan charms crowds on tours to Australia and Morocco. Then staff clashes leak. Bullying claims against Meghan, which she denies, pile on. Harry frames each clash as bias and palace failure to defend her. That one-sided lens is one of the book's real flaws. He sees her pain fully and others' pain barely.

Pregnancy, a new home, and constant headlines wear them down. Meghan tells him she feels alone and has dark thoughts. Harry feels panic from his own past and guilt that he cannot fix it. They argue about whether to stay and fight or step back. He starts to think the only way to protect his wife and child is to leave the system that failed his mother. That thought becomes a plan.

Leaving, Oprah, and telling his own story

The last part, from late 2019 through 2021, reads like a breakup thriller. Harry and Meghan spend Christmas in Canada away from the family. They pitch a plan to step back from full time royal work, earn some of their own money, split time between Britain and North America, and still serve the Queen. Harry says Charles stopped taking his calls. William was furious. The Queen was sad but kind. A rushed summit at Sandringham in January 2020 seals it. They lose public funding and police protection. The press calls it Megxit. Harry calls it survival.

Money and security fears drive many choices here. Without palace protection, who pays for guards. Without royal duties, how do they earn. They stay with friends, first in Canada then in California. They sign deals with Netflix and Spotify to pay bills. Archie is born in 2019 in London amid fights over his title and protection. Lilibet is born in 2021 in California.

The Oprah Winfrey interview in March 2021 is the public point of no return. Harry says they felt silenced by the palace and needed to speak. Meghan talks about feeling unprotected, about a family member asking about Archie's skin tone, about not getting help when she felt low. Harry talks about feeling trapped, about his father cutting him off for a time, about loving William but being on different paths. The interview wins sympathy in America and fury in Britain. Harry writes that he felt relief after, then fresh pain as family contact froze.

That freeze leads straight to this book. Harry works with J.R. Moehringer, famous for Andre Agassi's Open and for his own memoir The Tender Bar, to shape years of memory into three parts. Moehringer's touch shows in the short scenes and plain sentences and repeated images of frostbite and Diana's blue eyes. Harry says writing was hard labor, crying through drafts, cutting pages with his ghostwriter. He holds back some royal secrets, he says, to avoid harming his father and brother further.

So is Spare fair. Partly. It is moving on grief and army life and new fatherhood. It is brave about therapy and panic and asking for help, which will help many readers. It is also one-sided, score-settling, and repetitive, the same press complaint in fresh words every fifty pages. Harry rarely admits his own leaks or his own hunger for good coverage. He wants privacy and a global book tour at once, and he never quite squares that. I closed the book liking him more as a person and trusting him less as a narrator, which feels honest. If you want palace secrets, you will get them. If you want a story about a boy who lost his mother young and spent twenty-five years trying to outrun that loss, you will get that too, and that is the better reason to read it.

FAQ

When was Spare published?

Random House published Spare on January 10, 2023. The hardcover runs 416 pages and the ISBN is 9780593593806.

Who ghostwrote Spare with Prince Harry?

J.R. Moehringer, the writer known for The Tender Bar and Andre Agassi's memoir Open, worked with Harry as ghostwriter and shaped the spare, novel-like voice.

Does Spare cover Meghan, Megxit and the Oprah interview?

Yes. The last third covers meeting Meghan, the wedding, the break with the palace often called Megxit, and the Oprah interview, all told from Harry's side.