Who did Harry spare?
Fractured.
That should have been the title of the book written by Prince Harry, second son of King Charles and the late Princess Diana, which hit the newsstands early this week and largely centers on the fractures and the fissures in his family.
Spare spares a few — certainly not his older brother Prince William, whom he described as his “beloved brother and arch nemesis.”
I have only read portions of the book through online sources and heard Harry speak about it in interviews with Anderson Cooper and Michael Strahan but I have enough IMHOs to fill a book myself about the revelations of the “spare-no-more” (as William is now the spare to his father if anything happens to Charles).
But though the brothers’ fractured bond, like a fractured bone, is held up like an X-ray film for the world to hang up on a screen to see and analyze and dissect, it isn’t by any means unique. Siblings fight all the time. Siblings have misunderstandings. Siblings take up the cudgels for and against each other.
But Harry chooses to tell all. If I were Harry, I would have written the book if I needed my truth to be told, but stop or, at least, control, the publicity blitz to promote it, which inflicts more damage on his devastated ties with his only sibling. Not to mention the Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan.
Harry and Meghan are a couple deeply in love and their love is something to be cherished — but I think Harry is surely easing himself into the world of tell-all. Jackie Kennedy Onassis brought her glories and her pains to her grave, so did Wallis Warfield Simpson, whom King Edward XVIII gave up his throne for and was much maligned in her own time. They were not blue-blooded but they comported themselves royally.
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Harry is like a son that I want to hug. The thread that really runs through his life and informs much of his past and his pain is the death of his beloved Mummy, Diana. He told Anderson Cooper in 60 Minutes that the only time he cried was when he saw his mother’s coffin being lowered to her grave on the grounds of the Spencer family estate, Althorp. Just that one time. But even then, since he never saw her lifeless, he believed her death could have been faked and that she would one day come back for him and William, whom he called “Willy.” He told Cooper that even long after his Mummy’s gone, he would wake up and wonder if today would be the day she would come back. He still blames the paparazzi for her death, believing that events that led to it were like a bicycle chain and that even if one chain link were missing, his Mummy would still be alive now.
I believe that he feels that since he was not able to protect his Mummy from the big bad press and the big bad “Institution,” he can and will protect the love of his life, his wife, from it. I think Harry is driven by that need to be his wife’s knight in shining armor — the way he couldn’t be one for his mother because he was just a child then. In fairness, Meghan has reportedly taken Harry off his bad habits, has given him purpose and two adorable children.
Whereas William identifies with his birthright, with the institution he was molded to serve and protect, Harry identifies with Diana. The underdog.
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Harry did intimate in the interview with Strahan on Good Morning America that the brothers’ feud is deeply rooted in sibling rivalry.
“There has always been this competition between us, weirdly,” Harry said. “Again, I think it really plays into, or is played, by the heir/spare.”
When asked whether he thought William was jealous of his position as the spare, Harry said yes.
“But I have more freedom than he does, right?” Harry said. “So his life is planned out for him. I have more flexibility to be able to choose the life that I wanted.”
But still, William persists with his duties, acutely aware of the burden he inherited when he was born. I still want to hear his side of Harry’s account that he physically attacked his younger brother.
An article on web.md explores the causes of sibling rivalry in adulthood.
“Being treated differently by a parent, whether it’s real or perceived, is one of the most consistent predictors of sibling rivalry and competition — and not just as kids.” Well, Harry did confide in his book that his father used to kid him, “What if I am not your father?” It was a joke Harry didn’t find funny because he knew of the rumors about James Hewitt, whom his mother met two years after he was born.
A web.md article by Natalie Slivinski cites the opinion of clinical psychologist Eileen Kennedy-Moore, PhD. It’s human nature to compare ourselves to whomever is around; and nobody is closer than a brother or sister.
After all, there are a very few people we have known our whole life — and those include our siblings.
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The book doesn’t spare Kate Middleton either.
Obviously the William-Harry feud involves not just the two of them but their wives as well — Kate Middleton and Megan Markle.
Spare doesn’t spare Camilla, the Queen Consort. Frankly, it makes me think William and Harry are human after all, not warming up immediately to the woman who caused their late mother much heartache. Willy and “Harold” (William’s pet name for his brother) called her, “the Other Woman.” According to Harry, they begged their father not to marry Camilla. (In fact I, myself, recoiled at the sight of Kate curtseying to Camilla recently.)
Spare, from the portions I’ve read, spares Harry’s beloved grandparents Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. They were doting grandparents — but I wonder, in their prime would they have approved of Harry’s tell-all book?
In an article published in the New York Times, Patti Davis, daughter of former President Reagan, who also wrote a book about her family, “in which I flung open the gates of our troubled family life,” writes, “Not every truth has to be told to the entire world. People are always going to be curious about famous families, and often stories from those families can resonate with others, give them insight into their own situations, even transcend time since fame flutters at the edges of eternity.
“But not everything needs to be shared, a truth that silence can teach…” she adds.
Hurting Harry has made his point. Perhaps he should now spare his family, his children included, from the ripples the book will create about their fractured family that will flutter “at the edges of eternity.” *
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