Most people struggle to build a platform. Citizens, politicians, journalists struggle to get causes and issues out to the masses. Writers, artists, and musicians hungrily make narratives and creations hoping they will be picked up and distributed. Businesses seek ways to get their brands seen. Influencers and all those with social media, to some extent, broadcast outwards on their platforms, and attempt to shape and leverage followers. It’s all about attention. And platforms soak up that attention, and are the place where an idea can alter the consciousness of that attention. The bigger the platform, the bigger the power.
Platforms push and pull attention. Consumers, readers, watchers, listeners, are like a school of fish — if they are dinged from a platform they encounter — they swim one way or the other. Here I am on my own cyber corner — my own little platform for weirder, lost, and loud ideas I want out in the world. Although, as many other writers have pointed out, I do question Substack for pedaling a scam and it’s editorial blunders.
For now though, on my platform, I will write about Prince Harry, who was born with a mega platform, the biggest of platforms. In his hot-gossip and book-world thunderbolt memoir, Spare Prince Harry bares every moment of his platformed existence.
This book is stuffed with Royal life struggles; the loss of his mother, Princess of Wales, Diana; his military service; and his famed relationship and marriage to Meghan Markle.
It’s a steady bestseller. You can see The Duke of Sussex’s staring face that punctuates the cover in Target, Barnes & Nobel, in tote-bag book clubs everywhere. And for local news, Spare has, at the time of this writing, over one-hundred patrons waiting for the e-book at my local Tuscaloosa library. Right at the top is his name, “Prince Harry,” where behind the letters there is an obfuscating computer-altered fuzziness that perhaps covers a balding spot at the top of his head. It’s minimal cover, simple, direct, glowing, thousand-mile stare from the spare. You need little else to get this book off the shelves. (On the cover: Anyone else notice the similarities between his cover with another mega-platformer — but far stronger writer — President Barack Obama’s memoir? Although, Obama, actually wrote his book, versus, Spare was ghostwritten.)
Harry is all too aware of this. Recounting a moment in his twenties when he and his brother wore wrist bands for the Help for Heroes organization: “Demand for the wristband skyrocketed, donations began rollin in. It was the start of a long, meaningful relationship. More, it was visceral reminder of the power of our platform.”
He wears one bracelet, people buy it and donate to the bracelet’s cause. The power has not faded. In just a preview before Netflix’s released docuseries Harry and Meghan shoppers flocked to buy a blanket because it was in the background of a shot. Platform is power.
But at what cost? At one point Harry points out that Royals were once divine, now they are just insects that get their wings pulled off. Reflecting on what was Harry’s first solo interview with a reporter, and his first public comments on his mother’s death, Harry puts it succinctly: “I didn’t lead a normal life, because I couldn’t lead one…I later told the reporter that no one but Willy understood what it was like to live in this surreal fishbowl, in which normal events were treated as abnormal, and the abnormal was routinely normalized.”
It’s those who create that fishbowl who are the main antagonists of the book. The press feels like a noise of zombies in an apocalyptic film: they aren’t fully people, and they are a constant threat to divert around. In Harry’s case, you have to hide in the trunks of cars, travel to isolated areas, go through back entrances, keep a strong set of allies. The press, like a zombie horde, is worldwide and can’t be killed completely.
The “paps,” the press, the paparazzi lurk and hunger to snap a photo of Harry at nearly every turn of the book. They even have henchman codenames for specific reporters and editors: “The Thumb” and “Rehabber Kooks” for example. To Harry, they are truly bloodsuckers, greedy creeps, hungry for Harry’s platform, and yet, strangely, they are, if not by extension, partly what makes his platform. Every sneeze is news. Every blanket and bracelet worn is news. The normal is abnormal.
The paps will cross continents, show up in boats at remote Canadian towns, Australian outbacks, Middle East war zones. They chased his mother down a tunnel and contributed to how she died. “A flashbulb” was the last thing she saw, Harry writes, and told Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes.
He spends nearly every chapter loathing the press, fighting them, setting the record straight where it was besmirched. He seems obsessed with his public image and straightening it every time it has been made crooked by the paps. I wouldn’t want to be in that fishbowl. And if I believed the fishbowl killed my mother, my hate for them would exist, too. The book is about a Prince wanting to be de-platformed, to beam into another world where he would be “normal.”
This hate, though, astonishingly, is carried throughout the narrative. Harry seems so miserable, paranoid, obsessed, and downtrodden. “Why did they want to be famous?” Harry wonders on two reporters who were particularly invasive (Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber, he calls them). “Because fame is the ultimate freedom? What a joke. Some kinds of fame provide extra freedom, maybe, I suppose, but royal fame was fancy captivity.”
Captivity or not, it’s a Prince life, after all. He hops down to Botswana like many people might go to a different neighborhood for a change scenery. He takes a public HIV test with Rihanna in the Caribbean. He goes galavanting to the North Pole for a charity trip, where he gets “frostnip” on his penis. (There’s a set of paragraphs of Harry reflecting about his famous penis). He looks wild leopards and elephants in the eye. He visits Auschwitz survivors after a controversial photo emerges with him dressed like a Nazi at a costume party. He talks to Elton John. Has dinners pre-made, shelters on the ready. Plenty of booze and drugs. He flies an Apache helicopter and shoots down Taliban. Body guards have been with him nearly every day of his life—no matter where he has gone. Lowlights and highlights. Prince life could be exciting, if not rocky at times.
Yet, he won’t let go of one marker — his title as the spare to the heir. The events of the book seem to always ask him: who am I? Am I just the spare? After hearing that the Palace had denied Willy (the heir) access to the battlefield that Willy had been training for as a pilot, Harry can’t help but think that the Palace had little reservations on his plight: “The Spare, sure, let him run around a battlefield like a chicken with its head cut off, if that’s what he likes. But the Heir? No.”
He holds an acute contempt for his title and his family. Lots of rhetorical punches at his father, the now King; Camilla, the King’s wife; his sister-in-law Kate; his brother, Willy. Contempt for Royal Life and the surreal fishbowl of the press that has created modern-day Royal Life. The family seems miserable, bitter, and divided.
I came to this book because his platform is so powerful. I wanted to see how Harry would use this opportunity to talk about the defining moment of his life: the death of his mother. He could tell the world anything about this all too-familiar subject: how to handle the loss of a loved one.
But mostly, he leaves me wanting more. The misery and chronic illness of the press seep too far into the book and block a connection I wanted with the writing on the page. I don’t walk away feeling something new or stronger about the thorny and fully-muscled feeling of grief. Like many memoirs, it’s a good chronicling of his side of event, and family historical details. But does it teach me something about how to deal with grief? Or connect across his experience to mine? Is it transporting? Not exactly.
After asking for file on his mother’s fatal crash from his security team, he had doubts about what happened to his mother. He wanted there to be more information. He questioned how she really died. The paps were at the center of it, but he couldn’t quite conjure the proof.
When he visits Paris for the first time for a Rugby semifinal, Harry asks his driver to drive through the tunnel where his mother died—twice. “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. I’d told myself I wanted closer, but I didn’t really. Deep down, I’d hoped to feel in that tunnel what I’d felt when JLP gave me the police files — disbelief. Doubt. Instead, that was the night all doubt fell away.”
He reflects he got the closure he was pretending to seek, which wasn’t what he wanted at all. He wanted there to still be possibility in the life that was gone, more to know. “I’d thought driving the tunnel would bring an end, or brief cessation, to the pain, the decade of unrelenting pain. Instead it brought on the start of Pain, Part Deux.”
The pain really doesn’t leave Harry, though. Later, when he sees a doctor for his frostnipped member, the doctor tells him,
“The likeliest cure, he announced at last, would be time.
‘What do you mean? Time?’ Harry replies.
‘Time, he said, heals’
Really, Doc? That hasn’t been my experience.”
And time does not heal Harry. He is a guy who wants reality to be so much different, even when his brother is getting married at Westminster Abbey. The site is also where his mother’s funeral took place. “Everything in that building spoke of death,” he writes even in a moment of, what should have been, happiness. “It was still so hard to think Mummy was in the realm of death. Mummy, who’d danced with Travolta, who’d quarreled with Elton, who’d dazzled the Reagans — could she really be in the great beyond with the spirits of Newton and Chaucer?”
Rather, I thought, when I read those lines: ultimate platforms — the kind that put you in rooms with celebrities and the ultra famous and powerful — don’t make you invincible to death and grief.
It takes Harry the journey of the book for him to answer the question of who he really is as a person. This book is heavy on introspection, heavy on personal growth, or trying to, at least. He desires to be more than the spare. He seeks to be seen as a flesh and blood human.
According to Harry though, it’s hard to be who want to be. You have fight against age as it takes you further from a core identity:
“It occurred to me then that identity is a hierarchy. We are primarily one thing, and then we’re primarily another, and then another, and so on, until death — in succession. Each new identity assumes the throne of Self, but takes us further from our original self, perhaps our core self — the child. Yes, evolution, maturation, the path towards wisdom, it’s all natural and healthy, but there’s a purity to childhood, which is diluted with each iteration. As with that hunk of gold, it gets whittled away.”
I wholeheartedly disagree with that last paragraph. We can’t stay the child from within. We can’t stay the young self when our mother died. Identity isn’t a metal that loses value over time or gets battered by circumstance.
When I was in my early twenties, and my own mother died, someone close to me said, “You’ll never get over it.” I disagree. Yes, death is always a part of the living. But grief is a room. It’s a room you hate being in. It smells bad. The air is stuffy. You want to leave. It’s a room full of discomfort, arguments, conflicts. You won’t leave this room for a while. But eventually you will get to leave the room. You’ll get the strength to leave. Time will allow you to leave a room. At some point, it might take you walking out of it, yourself. You have to have the power to know when to leave.
To get over something is to move on, reinvent, reframe, compartmentalize in a healthy way, create a space. To never get over it puts you in a jail, poisons a bright reality. Harry hasn’t gotten over being a Royal, a man stamped with a huge platform and all the pain that comes from that. Living any kind of life —Royal or not — drops iceberg-sized facts that you don’t want to accept. Circumstances of birth, early deaths of good mothers, presence of a chronic disease. Those facts are there and you can’t lift them out of your life, they are there like mountains formed from the ground.
With such a platform, he could have explored a subject outside of himself. But, the platform has become more of a hinderance rather than an advantage. Harry has a hard time looking out from the documentation of his life. He is still stuck in a room of grief, at least based on the writing in his book.
Maybe, I’m jealous to some degree. He has a platform where he could write anything, and everyone will read it. I want a platform to write something about grief and acceptance that millions would read and process because I feel it’s important, or hope it would be important for someone. Just as other books on the subject have been important to me. But, that kind of platform is hard to build from scratch.
If I learned anything from this book, however, platforms can break people, restrict them. Strong platforms aren’t golden gifts. People with large platforms doesn’t mean they are always right. “Literally no one would care about Harry’s opinions about elephants, or military veterans, or racism—or anything at all—if not for the accident of his birth,” Helen Lewis for The Atlantic writes.
Has the platform destroyed the person inside Harry? Or can he reinvent? Leaving the monarchy for California is one clue, but you’ll have to read to find out. Or we’ll have to wait and see. Because, perhaps, he won’t shed the facts of his life, only how he approaches them. It will take a different book to learn how to live with the loud, painful facts of a life, and how to turn them into something else.
ENDIT
Shoutouts & Blurbs
If you can’t get enough, the best writing you’ll find on Spare is within Helen’s Lewis’s writing.
My quick run of books on grief. Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking; Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reap & Vanity Fair article On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic; Dave Egger’s Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Cheryl Strayed’s essay The Love of My Life; Sonali Deraniyagala's Wave; Christina Crosby’s Body Undone. There are dozens more.
Been doing research on the power of music. There’s not a better memoir than Carrie Brownstein’s from the band Sleater-Kinney, also star of Portlandia. The power of rock is real.
Check out everything from WaitWhat this week. Swipe and tap over to your podcasts for Spark & Fire, Meditative Story, and Masters of Scale.
Tiger Woods (another mega platformer!) is back after 800 (+) days. He still is up to the same old, same old. His golf and news making skills. Knocking down birdies and pulling bizarre pranks with tampons. But, the best piece of writing about Tiger, or the best that involves Tiger, is through Nick Paumgarten in a 2019 New Yorker article. Nick tours us through the thicket of Georgia pines and azaleas into the strange world of Augusta National and what goes into their flagship event, The Masters. Check it out and have your golf world expanded and learn something about prestige and how it all hangs by a thin façade
I’ve been into Crooked Media’s podcast Work Appropriate lately. Dive through their archives and hear some people say smart stuff about work life.
Nice Tuck!
Very interesting Tucker. I hope to have the strength to leave "that" room soon, but have also needed being in there for a bit too. I love your writing and also thrilled it's still Tuck Talk. I love you ❤️