Harry ‘waiting’ to drop bombshell Spare follow up
The Duke of Sussex could add to his best-selling memoir and take readers inside the most shocking six months in royal history.
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That famous two note duh-DUH part of the Jaws theme is called an ostinato, a fact I learnt three seconds ago thanks to the awesome pedagogical power of Google.
So, for the rest of this story, please imagine that those famous E and F notes are playing — ever louder and ever more urgently — in the background.
Something with big scary teeth, a threat that Buckingham Palace must have thought they had survived, only the worse for a few teeth marks, could be about to return. Chomp, chomp, chomp.
Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and best-selling author — words that no sane reporter circa 2006 and his lager swilling years would have ever thought anything but comical — could be getting back into the writing game.
Spare, Part Two could be in the works, according to the Spectator. (Too Spare, Too Furious?) In the most recent issue of the nearly 200-year-old British magazine, author Alexander Larman has published a piece called “Has America had enough of Prince Harry?” and in it he makes a very good point: 18 months on from the release of the duke’s pièce de résistance, it has never been released in paperback.
Larman points out how “unusual” this is, reporting that “it has been rumoured that [Harry] and his ghostwriter have been waiting to include new and sensational material to galvanise sales to those who live for the scandal and outrage.”
That other sound you can hear over our E and F notes? Bone china teacups hitting the decks inside the palace. Imagine a new and updated issue of the memoir, only this time one that offers the duke’s no holds barred take on King Charles’ coronation, Queen Camilla, his and wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex’s eviction form Frogmore Cottage, and His Majesty and Kate, the Princess of Wales’ cancer diagnosis.
And only this time it would be written by a Harry who knows that his father is often too busy to see him when he makes the trip back to London and now has pretty much nothing left to lose in terms of Crown Inc. An updated, paperback issue of Spare would have to sell like the most singing of hotcakes and the ‘Buy’ button on Amazon would be hit so many times they would need to install a new one.
While all we have to go on is this Spectator piece, there are plenty of reasons why Harry putting out a new edition wouldn’t exactly be a shocker. Or to put it another way, money! Lots and lots of lovely money. Of the duke and duchess’ grab bag of commercial ventures, his autobiography is a stand out in that it sold like the proverbial, racing up the charts as fast as Uncle Andy outrunning a process server.
Harry’s options on the work front have narrowed since Spare’s release. Podcasting is out, with him having only managed to help produce half of one 30 minute episode in two and a half years and with Spotify sources then revealing to journalists the harebrained ideas that the duke had for shows like interviewing Validmir Putin about his childhood.
Meanwhile, Harry’s tele career is now down to him making a series about horsey sport, all that talk about an African doco suddenly having gone very quiet, and helping co-produce an adaptation of a beachy romance read. Reports have suggested that Netflix might not extend the Sussexes’ contract when it runs out next year.
The bottom line, his options for pulling in the mega bucks are looking increasingly limited. Enter Penguin Random House, which is reported to have paid him about $30 million ($USD20 million) to mine his innermost turmoil and pain for Spare, a book that managed to simultaneously be both brave, raw and deeply moving and so navel-centric you’d have to think the man needs a better therapist.
That $30 million figure, mind you, was the advance meaning that he might have ended up with a cut of sales. Hence, hay meet sunshine. If there is the chance to make more of it, then could there be anything more fittingly Amer-I-Can? Harry needs a win for reasons beyond the financial.
That Spectator piece goes into the backlash that the Duke of Sussex is facing after it was announced he is to be given the Pat Tillman Award at this week’s ESPYs, the sporting Oscars, for his work with the Invictus Games. Tillman’s mother Mary called the choice of the former army captain “controversial and divisive” and a change.org petition calling for the awards host ESPN to reconsider honouring Harry has now passed 71,000 signatures.
According to a report in the Telegraph, “the controversy whipped up over the [award] … certainly took the wind out of [Harry’s] sails.”
A source told the paper that “the reaction certainly took the shine off the award”. What probably sounded like a nice easy, peasy reputationally slam dunk – a shiny bit of gold! – when it was pitched to Harry has instead become an embarrassingly public reminder of the
Sussexes’ struggle to conquer the new world. Of the possibility of an amended, longer and new Spare, beyond the help Harry could do buckaroo and branding-wise, there is the question of, what else is he currently doing to fill the hours between his morning and afternoon matcha?
The Invictus Games has a whole board and a CEO, Meghan is off building her jam empire and has just shot her own TV show about the joys of entertaining or some such Martha
Stewart-ish offering celebrating the joys of cloth napkins, and even the duke’s polo series doesn’t require him to be on camera. His involvement with mental health and coaching company BetterUp, where he is the nearly self-parodying Chief Impact Officer, appears to just involve him turning up on stage at their annual Uplift Summit and shooting the occasional ad.
July 4th is US Independence Day but January 10th, the Spare publication date, was really Harry’s, the day he officially declared himself free of the palace yoke and explained himself to the world. So, duh-DUH, duh-DUH, duh-DUH. And just when Charles thought it might be safe to dip a toe back into the frigid waters off of the Castle of Mey …
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as Harry ‘waiting’ to drop bombshell Spare follow up
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