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If you’ve somehow missed it, the world can’t stop talking about Prince Harry’s unusually candid, record-breaking memoir. From start to finish, Harry’s memoir is shocking, deeply funny, incredibly touching, and all-around explosive. Currently, heavy backlash from the royal family just keeps on coming.
Unlike some celebrity memoirs, it’s not just the juicy stuff holding everyone’s attention. Harry’s buzzed-about book is personable, intimate, and extremely well-written, even if an “elevated ghostwriter” was involved. Not so surprisingly, however, the juiciest parts continue to draw the most mass attention. And so, we’ve rounded up some of the most memorable tell-all tidbits for your royal reading pleasure.
Currently, the Duke of Sussex and his bestselling book continue to raise eyebrows for a variety of reasons. And no matter how you feel about his book, there’s no getting around the obvious paradox. The former prince chose to give up his crown, stepping out of the public eye for his family’s sake, and now he’s intentionally drawing more media attention than ever.
Seemingly contradicting goals aside, Harry’s taking back his narrative in a highly publicized way. And for now, the general consensus remains: this book is worth a read.
So without further ado, here are some of Harry’s most revealing revelations in Spare.
In Netflix’s Harry & Meghan, he already opened up about the first time he saw his future wife and how he pursued her via DMs. However, in his memoir, he’s naming names. We finally learn about the mysterious friend who helped initiate their love connection: Violet von Westenholz.
I was sitting around Nott Cott, scrolling through Instagram. In my feed I saw a video: My friend Violet. And a young woman. They were playing with a new app that put silly filters on your photos. Violet and the woman had dog ears, dog noses, long red dog tongues hanging out. Despite the canine cartoon overlay, I sat up straighter. This woman with Violet… my God. I watched the video several times, then forced myself to put down the phone.
Spare
Harry goes on to say that while he’d traveled the world and had more incredible experiences than he could even count, he’d “never seen anyone so beautiful.”
In Spare, Harry recounts a sibling spat that allegedly turned ugly. According to the fallen royal, tempers flared after William called Meghan “difficult,” “rude,” and “abrasive,” to name a few choice words. Harry didn’t take it so well, accusing his big brother of “acting like an heir” and “parroting the press narrative” about Markle. The insults kept flying back and forth from there.
When it came to defending himself in the public eye, Prince William had a different take, reportedly stating that he was just trying to help. Harry then claims he tried to smooth things over and prevent further escalation, starting by fetching William a glass of water. But according to Harry’s memoir, he just set down the water, called him another name, then “came at” him.
He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out.
Spare
In a less heavy but totally juicy moment, Harry reveals how he lost his virginity. Holding nothing back, he claims his first time was a “humiliating moment” with an “older lady” who “loved horses very much.” Even more surprisingly, he claims it happened in a public place. But his charming, self-deprecating sense of humor makes the shared memory all the more endearing.
I mounted her quickly, after which she spanked my ass and held me back… one of my mistakes was letting it happen in a field, just behind a busy pub. No doubt someone had seen us.
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According to Harry, neither of Charles’s heirs wanted him to marry Camilla. But they wed in 2005 anyway. However, shortly before that, Harry says he and William promised their dad they’d treat her with the utmost kindness if they stayed together, as long as Prince Charles promised not to marry her.
While both sons voiced that they were against their father’s plans to remarry, Harry says there were “no hard feelings” in the end.
We pumped his hand, wished him well. No hard feelings. We recognized that he was finally going to be with the woman he loved, the woman he’d always loved. Fate might’ve intended for him in the first place. Whatever bitterness or sorrow we felt over the closing of another loop in Mummy’s story, we understood that it was besides the point.
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While they may have shaken hands and welcomed their stepmother into the royal family, something still didn’t sit well. Harry accuses Camilla of leaking various stories about him and William to the press, which he was less forgiving about in his memoir.
Harry’s explosive memoir recalls the mixed emotions he felt during William’s nuptials with Kate Middleton, saying he felt like it was “yet another farewell.” Ultimately, their wedding day was a bittersweet affair for him, and Harry didn’t necessarily see that coming. Harry wrote that as William and Kate walked away as a newly married couple, he was thinking “goodbye” and that his brother was now “gone forever.”
Who could deny it? He’d never again be first and foremost Willy. We’d never again ride together across the Lesotho countryside with capes blowing behind us. We’d never again share a horsey-smelling cottage while learning to fly. Who shall separate us? Life, that’s who.
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Thanks to Netflix, most of us are more familiar with Prince Harry and Meghan’s long and winding journey to finding each other, including his decade-long service in the Army. His military stint included two tours in Afghanistan, and he wound up on the front lines whether he wanted to be or not. In Spare, we learn some shocking facts about his harrowing experience.
Most soldiers can’t tell you precisely how much death is on their ledger. In battle conditions, there’s often a great deal of indiscriminate firing. But in the age of Apaches and laptops, everything I did in the course of two combat tours was recorded, time-stamped. I could always say precisely how many enemy combatants I’d killed. And I felt it vital never to shy away from that number. Among the many things I learned in the Army, accountability was near the top of the list. So, my number: Twenty-five.
Spare
Harry goes on to say that what went down in combat has never given him an ounce of satisfaction. “But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed. Naturally, I’d have preferred not to have that number on my military CV, on my mind, but by the same token, I’d have preferred to live in a world in which there was no Taliban, a world without war. However, even for an occasional practitioner of magical thinking like me, some realities just can’t be changed,” he explains.
This was one of the most emotional moments in Harry’s memoir. In a reveal that no one saw coming, Harry recounts the heartbreaking moment he decided to drive through the Paris tunnel where his mother died. He writes that he asked the driver to accelerate to the same speed they were going at the fateful moment the car crashed. He also calls the decision “a very bad idea” that resulted in an unbearable kind of “closure.”
I’d had plenty of bad ideas in my twenty-three years, but this one was uniquely ill-conceived. I’d told myself that I wanted closure, but I didn’t really. Deep down, I’d hoped to feel in that tunnel what I’d felt when JLP gave me the police files—disbelief. Doubt. Instead, that was the night all doubt fell away.
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As it turns out, the title of his bestselling memoir is tied to one of the most unsettling revelations of all and the book’s most prominent theme. According to Harry, his father, King Charles III, actually thanked Princess Diana for giving him a “spare” immediately following Harry’s birth in September 1984. He carried the pain and resentment of being given that “title” for much of his life.
Adding royal insult to emotional injury (and royal backlash), Harry claims his father said, ‘Wonderful! Now you’ve given me an heir and a spare – my work is done.”
