Spare by Prince Harry review – magical thinking in Montecito - NEWS TIMES 9

Spare by Prince Harry review – magical thinking in Montecito

The blockbuster memoir may be a literary success, but it represents an abject failure of insight, writes former Vanity Fair editor and author of The Palace Papers, Tina Brown.

One of the few good decisions Prince Harry made in the last five turbulent years was to take George Clooney’s advice and hire a ghostwriter as skilled as the novelist JR Moehringer. Spare is gripping in its ability to channel Harry’s unresolved emotional pain, his panicky, blinkered drive, his improbably winning rapscallion voice, and his skewed conflicted worldview.

Best of all, Moehringer knows how to drill down into scattered memories and extract the critical details that make this hyper-personal chronicle an unexpected literary success.