Is it too American? Does it give too much away? Do factual inaccuracies matter? Leading ghostwriters weigh in on the Duke's hit memoir
Many of the millions of people who have bought copies of Prince Harry’s memoir in the past week will have immediately started looking through it in search of juicy key phrases such as “baby brain”, “dog bowl” or “Elizabeth Arden”. How many readers, I wonder, will read the book from cover to cover rather than skipping through it in search of the best nuggets of gossip?
The answer depends on the skill of the book’s ghostwriter, JR Moehringer. If he wants to keep readers glued to the page, he not only has to construct a gripping, well-paced narrative, but also make sure that the book sounds like it would have done if Harry had written it. Break the illusion that there’s no intermediary between Harry and the page, and you lose the reader.
Most ghostwriters live a shadowy existence, with their contribution to the book – i.e. writing the damn thing – being played down by publishers. Some have to be content with their name appearing in small type on the title page, others are obliged to remain wholly anonymous. If the ghost is distinguished enough, however, the publisher will trumpet his or her involvement.
Examples include the eminent journalist James Fox, who was proudly proclaimed to be the real author of Life by Keith Richards, and the Swedish novelist David Lagercrantz, the real pen behind the memoirs of Zlatan Ibrahimović. Moehringer – a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper journalist, and ghostwriter of one of the all-time-great sporting autobiographies, Andre Agassi’s Open – is in this category.
The publishers of Spare clearly recognise the importance of a good ghost, since Moehringer reportedly received a fee of $1 million: that’s not bad going for a mere wordsmith, when Harry himself is said to have been paid $20 million for a four-book deal. But has he done a million-dollar job? I asked some seasoned ghostwriters to assess the book from a ghost’s perspective.
Andrew Crofts – whose dozens of ghosted books range from the autobiographies of soap stars and Big Brother winners to The Boy Who Never Gave Up, a memoir by Sudanese refugee turned eminent medic Emmanuel Taban – is impressed. “JR Moehringer has done a staggeringly good job. It sounds authentically like Harry’s voice all the way through, and puts Harry’s case more eloquently than an army of highly paid barristers could ever achieve.”
How has Moehringer achieved this? “It would have been down to gaining Harry’s trust. I suspect he probably got a personal introduction to start with: George Clooney is a friend of the Sussexes and he knows Moehringer, he made a film of his book [The Tender Bar, a 2021 film adapted from Moehringer’s 2005 memoir]. So it’s not like he was sent in cold by a publisher. Also, his Agassi is a brilliant book, so he had that on his side.
“And it’s clear they must just have hit it off really well. I think on the whole people who do a lot of ghostwriting – we must give off a fairly trustworthy aura to keep getting the gigs. And then I would think Harry must have felt fairly well protected by lawyers – Moehringer would have signed a tight contract, NDAs and all that – and so Harry would have felt he could be open with him.”
Boris Starling – ghostwriter of Leap of Faith by Frankie Dettori and Open Side by the rugby international Sam Warburton – agrees. “I think the heart of any memoir is – to be a bit pretentious – the emotional truth, and Moehringer has got inside his head really well. Psychologically I find it really convincing – his descriptions of panic attacks, of being chased by the paparazzi, are incredibly visceral and moving. There’s clearly not quite as natural a symbiosis as there was with Agassi, but I think he’s done an incredibly good job. I was never once bored or skimming. He’s a Pulitzer Prize-winner for a reason.
“It’s an incredibly intense thing to be a ghost – you have to be amanuensis, collaborator, chronicler, therapist to a degree – and it helps if you like [the subject of the book]. I’ve always been lucky with mine, I’ve liked them a lot. I think it would have been impossible for [Moehringer] to write so insightfully and sensitively if he hadn’t liked him. But then he’s a very likeable bloke – I know from my own brief experience with Prince Harry, having spent an hour with him when I wrote Unconquerable [a history of the Invictus Games] back in 2017. Everybody I interviewed for that book, the last question I asked was always: what do you think of him? And everybody loved him.”
Nick Harding has ghosted memoirs by TV vet Peter Wright, reality star Gemma Collins and Princess Diana’s favourite psychic Sally Morgan, as well as Helmand to the Himalayas by David Wiseman, a former soldier who has worked with Prince Harry organising the Invictus Games. He is more qualified in his admiration.
“I think he’s done a good job of capturing the voice that Prince Harry would want the world to hear. It’s not Harry’s voice, but then no ghostwritten book ever is the voice of the person who’s on the cover. But he’s done a good job of capturing a personality.
“There’s a fair bit of filler in there, though, which surprised me. There’s 100 or so words just in the first few pages about a star that had just been discovered [Harry the narrator riffs on the recent discovery of the star Earendel by the Hubble Space Telescope], and Prince Harry obviously hadn’t sat there with the writer and come out with this. And the description of Balmoral, which I guess is probably done for the American readership, is really overly long and quite dull.
“One of the reasons might be that Prince Harry’s only 38, so although he’s led an interesting life, there may not have been masses and masses of content, and when you’re ghostwriting a book one of your main concerns really is to meet the word count that the publisher’s given you. So although there’s loads and loads of dynamite stuff in places, there’s also lots of adjectives and florid descriptions.”
Andrew Crofts agrees that the language can be “quite flowery” to start with. “But that calms down once he’s set the scene, doesn’t it? Maybe Harry does notice things and describe them in detail – he is interested in photography, and has talked about being able to remember scenes accurately. I agree Moehringer often uses his descriptive literary abilities, but Harry would have signed off on it: ‘That is what it was like, that is what it looked like’. I knew the book was ghostwritten, that was one of the reasons I read it, but in fact I never felt at all like it was somebody else talking.”
As a ghostwriter Moehringer had an extra challenge when it came to capturing his subject’s voice: he was an American writing as a Brit. “You can tell certain things in there have been written by an American,” says Nick Harding. “Phrases like ‘That’s how my memory rolls’, the word ‘homebody’. But then in fairness Harry’s taken on a bit of the West Coast vernacular.”
Boris Starling agrees. “It is quite West Coast, but then that’s how Harry speaks these days. There were times when I wanted a bit more sardonic British humour. My tongue-in-cheek suggestion is that it would have been interesting to have a Brit do it until the moment Harry meets Meghan, and then have Moehringer take over. But I think he’s got a reasonable handle on British life.”
Starling is not sure, however, that Moehringer was wise to include some of the details that Harry vouchsafed. “Personally I would have left out some things: the reference to losing his virginity, the stuff about his frostbitten c—, which goes on for pages – maybe you could mention it once but he went on and on and on.
“And the whole Taliban thing, while he’s certainly not boasting about it as has been reported in lots of places, I still think it’s unwise, given who he is and given his repeated concerns about security, to be not only putting a number on the kills but describing some of them in quite some detail. But as any ghost knows, you are the ghost, it’s their book not yours. I’m loath to blame Moehringer. I would have kicked back against [including some of it], but sometimes if you kick back, the publishers want it in and they kick back against the kicker.”
“Harry will have had several opportunities to read through the manuscript to make his amendments, he won’t have been wrongfooted by anything,” says Harding. “He’s given those titbits and he knows they’ll make headlines. He’s not stupid.”
Is Moehringer to blame for allowing mistakes to creep into the book? Eagle-eyed readers have pointed out that Harry recalls receiving an Xbox as a gift from his mother before they were invented, and that his account of being brought the news of the Queen Mother’s death at Eton must be inaccurate as he was skiing in Switzerland when she died. Moehringer has since posted a number of defensive quotes on social media, such as “The line between memory and fact is blurry…” from Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir.
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“Every book I’ve done, I’ve thought of it instinctively as my job to check dates,” says Starling. “I remember when I did Frankie Dettori’s, he was talking about races and I would go away and check every one. If you don’t check them you do risk undermining your credibility. And with such a controversial and subjective book, I wonder why you would open yourself up to something so avoidable? That’s just slack fact-checking.”
I ask Harding if he would like to have been offered this particular ghosting job. “Absolutely. Some jobs can be really frustrating, but it’s usually the most stupid kind of low-rent Z-list personality that’ll play up. This looks like it was fairly easy because he was willing to talk. The writer would have been sitting there and as soon as Harry mentioned all the stuff that’s made the headlines, he would have been sitting there thinking, ‘This is gold dust’, doing a little fist bump in his head.”
“It would have been fascinating to work on, it’s actually a real historical document,” says Crofts. “There would have been difficulties though. You’d be constantly aware that somebody might hack into your computer.”
So it’s a general thumbs-up for Moehringer: as Starling puts it, “It’s a much more nuanced portrait than I’d expected, certainly than people have been led to believe just by the leaks.” But Harding strikes a note of caution about the future.
“If he’s on a four-book deal, the publishers will be scratching their heads by the time of the fourth book – everything will have been exhausted. God help the poor ghostwriter then.”