Ghostwriters are often hired to help celebrity scribes tell their stories in tell-all memoirs, and Prince Harry enlisted acclaimed author J.R. Moehringer to help with Spare.
While few details about Moehringer and the Duke of Sussex’s writing process have been revealed — save for a few reports that mutual pal George Clooney made an introduction — the 58-year-old Tender Bar author is a ghostwriting pro and has been outspoken about telling individuals’ stories.
“Well, [Andre Agassi and I] did a lot of things together. And the first thing that we did was we started a long really wonderful conversation about his life. It worked like therapy,” Moehringer recalled to NPR in 2012 of working with the tennis champ on his 2009 memoir. “I sat in a straight back chair and Andre sat on a couch and I had a pad in my lap and he really, he dug deep, and together we found patterns and themes in his life.”
He continued at the time: “But, once we’d amassed this enormous — it was like 1,100 or 1,200 pages of transcript, then we dug through it together and we found themes. There was nothing that I imposed on his life from above. I mean, it was, this really was the purest kind of collaboration, but what seemed plain to me was that he’d responded to my [Tender Bar] book because it all started with a complex, difficult relationship with my father. That was something that he was really able to relate to.”
The former journalist mourned the death of his father in his autobiographical The Tender Bar, which Harry, 38, could likely relate to as he lost mother Princess Diana at the age of 12. (The late People’s Princess died in an August 1997 car crash at the age of 36.)
The Archewell cofounder detailed how he attempted to cope with her death in Spare.
“Off we went, weaving through traffic, cruising past the Ritz, where Mummy had her last meal, with her boyfriend [Dodi Al-Fayed], that August night. Then we came to the mouth of the tunnel,” Harry recalled in the memoir about driving down the same path as her accident. “We zipped ahead, went over the lip at the tunnel’s entrance, the bump that supposedly sent Mummy’s Mercedes veering off course. But the lip was nothing. We barely felt it.”
He added: “Just a straight tunnel. I’d always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel. No reason anyone should ever die inside it. … It had been a very bad idea. I’d had plenty of bad ideas in my twenty-three years, but this one was uniquely ill-conceived.”
Harry and Moehringer could also likely commiserate over the losses of their respective fathers. While the author grew up without his dad around, the military veteran has been candid about King Charles III‘s absence from his life after his 2020 royal step-down.
The Invictus Games cofounder also discussed his royal upbringing, his relationships with His Majesty and Prince William, his marriage to Meghan Markle and grieving Queen Elizabeth II’s death in Spare.
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