Spare Me

I have been reading leaked pages (in Spanish) of the soon-to-be-released English version of the second born son of Princess Diana and maybe King Charles III's autobiography the past couple days, and of course I'm floored by the candour -- who wouldn't be?

But when I say candour, maybe it's more than that. Maybe it's revanche. For it's the son's story, after all, or his effort to take control of it, establish it -- for the record, as they say in legal proceedings. 

The son is Prince Henry, or Harry, as he likes to be branded, the Duke of Sussex, and the Spanish language version of his autobiography translates as In the Shadows, not El Segundo, which would seem more apropos given that the English title is Spare. (Living in Southern California is hardly living in a shadow.)

So far I have read about Harry's military deployment in Afghanistan and the number he bandies about (25) that applies to his "confirmed kills"; how he is not ashamed of these killings (he refers to his targets as "pawns"), that it was a case of the "goodies versus baddies," and he was a "goody."

Equally disturbing is the story of a costume he wore to a society ball. Most of us have heard that he went dressed in a Nazi uniform, but in his book, Harry supplies the excuse: that he came home with two uniforms, and when he asked his brother Prince William and his brother's wife Kate if he should go as a pilot or a Nazi, both said (in unison?), Nazi.

So of course it's not Harry's fault the world press slammed him for dressing as a Nazi, but his mean older brother and his wife, who had clearly set him up (check, as they say in chess). If that's the case, then it explains his vulnerability, something his mother, the Princess Diana, suffered from and was likely to her advantage when the then-Prince Charles proposed to her.

Harry loved his mother very much, he writes, and was too young to lose her. I would also suspect that he sensed her vulnerability, and how it was used against her. Does that explain in part why Harry married the scrappy Meghan Markle? I would think so. 

From a distance, I liked Harry and thought his weird status (he is clearly no spawn of King Charles but of Major James Hewitt, with whom his mother had an affair two years before her divorce from Charles) made him interesting. Like his brother William -- and indeed their official father -- Harry never grew up. I never felt much for Meghan, but I do now, particularly the way Harry, in marrying her, deployed her. His own form of revanche, inadvertent or otherwise.