Everything We Know About Harry & Meghan's New Biography So Far
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Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family is the about-to-be released, soon-to-be-blockbuster new bio that will take us through the past four years of life with the formerly royal couple, including all the true scoop on what really led up to Megxit, and the fallout that followed. As a matter of fact, while the upcoming bio of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex won't be released in book form until August 11, it's already being serialized in The Times and The Sunday Times. Subscribers are eagerly snapping up every last detail of the couple's courtship, from that very first date where Harry appeared to be "in a trance," while Meghan asked a friend, "Do I sound crazy when I say this could have legs?"
The story is told by the royal editor of Harper's Bazaar, the 33-year-old Omid Scobie, and his co-author, American TV producer Carolyn Durand (via The Times).
The biography is expected to be controversial
The Times compares Finding Freedom to Andrew Morton's 1992 bio Diana: Her True Story, a book that outed the whole Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles scandal, and portrayed the beloved (by everybody but her husband) Princess Di as a deeply unhappy woman who struggled with bulimia, and had made at least one suicide attempt. This new bio, however, has no such smoking guns, and in fact dispels some of the rumors that would have made Meghan out to be the Yoko Ono who broke up the royal family.
Instead, it's some of the other royal family members who are in for a share of unwelcome scrutiny (via Vanity Fair). While Prince Charles doesn't come out looking so bad, one source says that William and Kate "come across as quite cold at times and unwelcoming," and the book is expected to deepen the rift between the two brothers (now more than an ocean apart). A source said "the Palace are worried about the book because they know what really happened behind the scenes," but added, "Frankly they should be breathing a sigh of relief. It could have been a lot worse." Still, the Queen is expected to be rather upset by any revelations that are due to be aired. Yet another family friend characterizes the book as something that is "going to open old wounds at a time when everyone wanted to move on."
Both Meghan and Harry come out looking more like victims than villains
While neither Harry nor Meghan contributed to the book, the story it tells nevertheless comes across as deeply sympathetic towards the couple. As Scobie said about his work, "It's not all from Harry and Meghan's perspective, but I do think that for the first time we do actually get to hear what's going on in their minds." He claims to have interviewed over 100 sources for his material, although The Sun says that the 320-page book is based primarily on both authors' experience as members of the royal press corps.
That being said, their fellow journalists don't exactly come off smelling like English roses in Finding Freedom. As the book reveals, both Meghan and Harry were made to feel extremely uncomfortable by the fact that members of other royal households, whom a friend of the Sussex couple referred to as "vipers," were leaking stories about them to the press.
How Finding Freedom came to be written
Scobie and Durand have each been covering the royals for over a decade, but about the time Harry and Meghan tied the knot they decided to join forces to start working on what would become this biography. Both began keeping detailed notes about the couple, and at that time, the co-authors had close ties to senior aides at Kensington Palace who helped them get an insider's perspective that few members of the press corps are privy to. The aides were aware that a book was in progress, but they saw it as being a useful way to counteract myths and rumors being spread about the couple by some of the sleazier media outlets.
Once things started heading south for Harry and Meghan around the fall of 2019, however, suddenly these sources were no longer so eager to cooperate with the couple's biographers. Things undoubtedly got even tougher once the whole Megxit thing blew up, but Scobie and Durand persisted, and they're proud of the resulting book. As Scobie told The Times (via Vanity Fair), "I think the timing of this book has worked out really well because we've been able to follow what has been a momentous seismic moment for the royal family."