Meghan and Harry biography, Finding Freedom, came at just the right time
Palaces, wealth and corgis aside, the damning new biography chronicalling Meghan and Harry’s step back has exposed the House of Windsor as being just another dysfunctional family.
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There’s something rather fitting about a royal biography detailing the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s messy split from the British Royal Family being released in the midst of what could fairly be described as a global dumpster fire of a year.
While coronavirus continues to devastate communities around the world, and Lebanon begins to reconcile its recent tragedy, and America gears up for its tensest election to date, and Australia faces some of the worst unemployment rates in our history, there’s a strange comfort in know that even in the midst of all this chaos, some things – namely dysfunctional families – never change.
As you’d expect from a royal biography, Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Family, has it all.
It turns out, according to authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durant that Prince Harry took offence to his older brother referring to his then girlfriend simply as “this girl”, and ultimately, Harry came to realise that Prince William – the future King of England who was educated at elite schools and has lived his entire life on royal estates – is actually a bit of a snob.
Prince William, it seems, thought that given the speed of their parent’s ill-fated marriage, Harry would do well to take things slowly.
Prince Harry also apparently wasn’t crazy on other members of his family calling Meghan “Harry’s showgirl” or the fact that palace courtiers repeatedly let it be known that they didn’t like or trust his wife, the book claims.
Meghan, as it happens, seemed to think Kate Middleton could have helped out in showing the ways of the royal world and checked in more regularly to see how she was coping with the monumental spotlight suddenly thrust upon her, particularly after she became a first-time mother.
Kate, as rumour has it, didn’t seem to think a close friendship was an automatic by-product of simply being women and living in the same palace. Still, she sent Meghan flowers and invited her to the tennis, so it can hardly be said that she did nothing.
Sadly, the biography is noticeably devoid of any toe sucking or intimate discussions of sanitary products ala royal scandals of an earlier generation, but Finding Freedom does offer something far more important than all the ribbon cutting ceremonies in the Commonwealth.
It reminds us that palaces, titles, extreme privilege and exorbitant wealth aside, at the core of it all, the royals are in many ways just like the rest of us. Siblings fight; in-laws disagree; an elderly relative is constantly one drink away from saying something racist. To have a dysfunctional family is to be human. And given the royals have long been accused of being quite the opposite, that’s no mean feat.
Both Meghan and Harry deny taking part in the biography, but Scobie and Durand have assured readers that all claims within the book have been verified by at least two sources. So in other words, some of the couple’s nearest and dearest almost definitely spilled the insider beans on their behalf.
They say the truth will set you free, but this case, it’s far more likely to simply cause a much needed distraction from our current reality. And as a former actor, that’s something Meghan is surely well versed in.