"Spare" beats the press at its own game: excellent review of the book & US culture...

[Hekate]

Los Angeles Times, January 11, 2023. Calendar section, page 1

‘Spare’ beats the press at its own game
MARY MCNAMARA

Revenge is a dish best served cold, over many courses and paid for by someone else.

I come to you having actually read Harry Windsor’s much-anticipated and intentionally controversial memoir, “Spare.” Not the lists of “Top Five Bombshells” or “Key Takeaways” but the book itself, from start to finish. It is a quick read, more sad than sensational, ringing with exactly the sort of loneliness, frustration and rebellion one would expect from a still-young, motherless prince whose royal bubble of a life has been narrated through the emotional whipsaw of tabloid headlines. An earnest, almost childlike attempt to explain what that life felt like to the boy and man inside the bubble.

More important, it is the capstone of a personal disclosure campaign that puts Lena Dunham to shame. That the royal family is a chilly, oppressive and internally competitive institution that will eat its young to survive can come as no surprise to anyone with knowledge of Princess Diana’s life and death or Peter Morgan’s highly regarded royal multiverse of “The Queen” and “The Crown.”

That many in the U.K. will also defend the royal family is also well known. (Has anyone checked in with Dame Judi Dench about her thoughts on “Spare”?)
The British tabloids have built a media ecosystem on covering, creating and then defending House of Windsor drama.

Since Harry’s marriage to Meghan Markle and their subsequent break with the royal family, however, the two have decided to seize the means of production; they have nothing to lose but their titles.

Mary McNamara gives an insightful commentary on Harry’s life — in which she notes he was literally born to be media fodder and had no choice in the matter — but also on the tabloids and the insatiable appetite for same in both the UK and the US. Among other things, she points out more than once that he and Meghan have “seized the means of production,” and that wanting privacy is beside the point when their silence is 100% guaranteed to be filled with the noise of the media making things up. Thus, they will tell it themselves.

Thanks to this columnist, I plan to get on the waiting list for the book at the Library.

Much more at link — and yet again, I don’t have an archive link. I am always grateful when someone more knowledgable posts one in the thread.
https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/latimes/default.aspx?token=42e23962a5d74614be16bae3d62d13e7&utm_id=82655&sfmc_id=1778350&edid=5d0eb9da-b477-4f66-a9c5-64e694476736