Spare Ghostwriter Breaks Silence On Controversial Inaccuracies
If you were the Duke of Sussex's ghostwriter, you surely would've been anticipating some backlash upon the release of Prince Harry's new memoir "Spare." Harry's highly-anticipated book has made quite a splash, as it gave a deeper look into his and wife Meghan Markle's life under immense public scrutiny, as well as plenty of things you never knew about Prince Harry. While many of the book's myriad disclosures were interesting and entertaining, quite a few passages have sparked their fair share of controversy.
According to Us Weekly, among the complaints circulating about "Spare" are assertions that the memoir isn't entirely truthful. Pulitzer Prize-winning author and "Spare" ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer, has decided to speak out publicly against these allegations (via the Independent). The writer has taken to Twitter, not only to defend his and Prince Harry's hard work, but also to explain a little bit about the true nature of a memoir and how our memories are not always conducive to comprehensive fact-checking.
The truth about Prince Harry's memories
Prince Harry gave a shout-out to J.R. Moehringer in the acknowledgements for "Spare," calling Moehringer his "collaborator and friend, confessor and sometime sparring partner" (via Town & Country). Harry wrote that Moehringer "spoke to me so often and with such deep conviction about the beauty (and sacred obligation) of Memoir." As it turns out, Moehringer really does know a thing or two about memoirs. Not only is he known for being a highly prolific ghostwriter, but his own memoir, "The Tender Bar," spawned its own George Clooney-directed film adaptation. Consequently, Moehringer cares about how memoirs work.
On January 11, Moehringer tweeted a quote from Mary Karr's "The Art of Memoir." The quote reads, "The line between memory and fact is blurry, between interpretation and fact. There are inadvertent mistakes of those kinds out the wazoo." Per Us Weekly, Moehringer also posted two quotes from "Spare," where the Duke of Sussex explains striving to remember his past the best he could. One quote read, "Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there's just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause-and-effect are often just fables we tell ourselves about the past." It's clear that Moehringer and Harry are on the same page when it comes to memory: memoirs are about recalling your experiences as well as you can.