![]() ![]() The book was the catalyst for many people, who had hitherto been on their side, to begin to break ranks. O'Hagan was one of many reviewers who ensured that, while Spare was a financial triumph, it was less successful in the Sussexes' battle for hearts and minds. Moehringer hit back by describing a long essay of O'Hagan's on his methodology for ghostwriting as sounding 'like Elon Musk on mushrooms - on Mars'. Moehringer, invites a round of applause every time he goes all Sartre or Faulkner,' wrote O'Hagan, who has his own experience of the genre, having ghosted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's memoir. 'Prince Harry has never read a book in his life, so his ghostwriter, J.R. Without naming him, he singles out a review by the novelist Andrew O'Hagan in the London Review Of Books, whose piece, headlined 'Off His Royal T**s', accused the American writer of showing off. Hell hath no fury like a 'proper' American writer scorned and Moehringer lets rip at his critics, particularly those in Britain who didn't spare Spare their mockery. Many assumed Harry must have been joking when he described in the book how Moehringer 'spoke to me so often and with such deep conviction about the beauty (and sacred obligation) of memoir'.Īfter reading his collaborator's pompous exposition on what he calls the 'art' of ghostwriting and the trials and tribulations of working with the prince, it's clear he may have been entirely serious. Moehringer complained that within days of Spare's publication, an 'amorphous campaign' was launched which claimed that his 'rigorously fact-checked' book was riddled with inaccuracies That this article should appear just days after the Coronation and Harry's 28-hour flying visit to Britain - which left questions over his royal future - seems an extraordinary coincidence. In an overlong and utterly self-serving article for The New Yorker magazine this week, Moehringer complained that within days of Spare's publication, an 'amorphous campaign' was launched which claimed that his 'rigorously fact-checked' book was riddled with inaccuracies. 'She was conscious she could speak to me,' said one.įour months on from publication and it seems the criticism has been neither forgotten nor forgiven - at least not by Harry's ghostwriter. Paramedics who took her to hospital told the inquest years later that they spoke to Diana. While the actions of the paparazzi at the scene of the princess's crash in Paris may have been morally indefensible, they did not provide her last sights and sounds. His assertion that the last thing Princess Diana 'saw on this Earth was a flashbulb' and the last sound she heard was 'a click', goes to the heart of Harry's hatred of the Press. These discrepancies varied from the frivolous - he claimed that the gift his late mother had bought him for his 13th birthday in 1997 was an Xbox when, in fact, the Microsoft games console was not released until 2001 - to the more serious. Moehringerīut there was no attempt to address the mistakes and, amid all the bile Harry poured over the Royal Family, the blunders went unchallenged. Harry's Pulitzer Prize-winning ghost writer, John Moehringer - better known by his pen name J.R. With that, the ghostwriter - who was reportedly paid around £800,000 for his work - and Harry settled back as the sales for Spare went off the charts: 3.2 million in the first week alone. 'The line between memory and fact is blurry, between interpretation and fact,' he wrote.įor good measure, Moehringer shared a quote from Harry himself: 'My memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates what it sees fit, and there's just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts.' Moehringer - tweeted some words from the American essayist Mary Karr, which cryptically hinted at 'inadvertent mistakes' in memories and memoir. Perhaps spotting the danger of this narrative, Harry's Pulitzer Prize-winning ghost writer, John Moehringer - better known by his pen name J.R. Back in January when Prince Harry's misery memoir began flying off the shelves, smashing all publishing sales records, one thing rapidly became clear: the lofty promise on the jacket of 'insight, revelation, self-examination and hard-won wisdom' risked being undermined by the book's litany of howlers and historical errors. ![]()
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