The ghostwriter on Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” is sharing how it was really working with the royal.
In an essay for the New Yorker published on May 8, J. R. Moehringer recalls raising his voice when collaborating with the Duke of Sussex on his bombshell book. Moehringer connected with Harry in the summer of 2020. "Spare" would go on to be released in early 2023.
“I was exasperated with Prince Harry. My head was pounding, my jaw was clenched, and I was starting to raise my voice. And yet some part of me was still able to step outside the situation and think, This is so weird. I’m shouting at Prince Harry,” Moehringer wrote. “Then, as Harry started going back at me, as his cheeks flushed and his eyes narrowed, a more pressing thought occurred: Whoa, it could all end right here.”
The two were discussing a “difficult passage” where Harry was enduring “grueling military exercises” where he was captured by pretend terrorists. The royal was subjected to tortures to see if he was tough enough to survive an actual capture on the battlefield. One fake captor even threw in a “vile dig” at his late mother, Princess Diana.
Moehringer shared how Harry wanted to end the scene with a comeback he quipped, while the ghostwriter deemed in “unnecessary, and somewhat inane.”
“For months, I’d been crossing out the comeback, and for months Harry had been pleading for it to go back in. Now he wasn’t pleading, he was insisting, and it was 2 a.m., and I was starting to lose it. I said, ‘Dude, we’ve been over this,’” he recalled.
“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,” he continued, noting how ultimately, he persuaded Harry not to include the comeback.
“He shot me a mischievous grin. ‘I really enjoy getting you worked up like that,’” the “Tender Bar” author wrote Harry told him. “I burst into laughter and shook my head, and we moved on to his next set of edits.”
The two would go on to really connect over the years they spent together, bonding over the death of their mothers.
Moehringer shared how he visited to Montecito and stayed with Harry and wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, to work on the memoir.
“Harry put me up in his guesthouse, where Meghan and Archie would visit me on their afternoon walks,” he wrote. “Meghan, knowing I was missing my family, was forever bringing trays of food and sweets.”
And when the author was bombarded with paparazzi and read false stories about himself and “Spare,” Harry was there for him too.
“I bemoaned that these fictions about me were spreading and hardening into orthodoxy,” he wrote. “(Harry) tilted his head: Welcome to my world, dude. By now, Harry was calling me dude.”
“Spare” proved to be a massive success, becoming the fastest-selling nonfiction book ever, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. “Spare” gave a no-holds-barred and controversial glimpse into the royal family and its continued deeply-fractured relationships.
And while it broke royal protocol to “never complain, never explain,” Harry would later go on to reveal that he left details out about his strained relationship with his father, the newly-crowned King Charles III, and brother Prince William.
“There are some things that have happened, especially between me and my brother, and to some extent between me and my father, that I just don’t want the world to know,” he told The Telegraph in January 2023. “Because I don’t think they would ever forgive me.”