The manuscript is said to be written; the ink is now dry. The publication is said to be in the works to take advantage of the lucrative Christmas market.
Few, if any, details of the content of the Duke of Sussex’s long-awaited memoir have so far emerged. “It’s juicy, that’s for sure,” a source told US website Page Six, with another adding: “There’s content in there that should make his family nervous.”
From the prince, the palace, publisher Penguin Random House and Pulitzer Prize-winning ghostwriter JR Moehringer, there has been silence.
However, royal watchers hope it is a serious book and cannot be easily dismissed.
Novelist and journalist Moehringer, who ghost-wrote the autobiography of former world No. 1 tennis player Andre Agassi, “is a powerful and psychologically exploratory writer, so we can expect a powerful and psychologically exploratory book,” he said royal historian and biographer Robert Lacey.
Agassi’s book “is deep, serious, a forensic demolition of his upbringing, which goes beyond the normal ghost-written books,” Lacey added. “It makes me think there’s no point in even speculating what skeletons he’s going to uncover because he’s a skeleton digger. He’s going to do the business.”
A publishing source told the Sun: “The manuscript is finished and has gone through all the legal processes. It’s done and out of Harry’s hands. The publication date has been pushed back once , but it’s on track for the end of the year.”
Harry has only said, when announcing his literary memoir last year, that it will be “the ups and downs, the mistakes, the lessons learned … a first-hand account of my life that is accurate and completely truthful.”
But hints of what may come are found in Oprah Winfrey and other interviews she has given. He told Dax Shepard on the Armchair Expert podcast, for example, of the “genetic pain” of being brought up in the House of Windsor, and that Prince Charles had treated him “as he was treated”. Lacey wonders if Moehringer’s pen can be detected in these words.
“One would anticipate a book that sets new standards in royal analysis. I am waiting [Moehringer ] will also analyze the institution. In Agassi, he not only demolished Agassi’s parenting and upbringing, but also dealt a heavy blow to the world of professional tennis. So one could anticipate the same kind of dual attack in what he writes about Harry and the monarchy,” Lacey said.
“He doesn’t write books that can be easily dismissed as scandal seekers, they have substance.”
Moehringer’s intense interviews with Harry are likely to have mostly taken place before the Sussexes’ public reconciliation with the royal family during the platinum jubilee, “around peak rage, with the chapters closed some time ago,” Lacey said .
“So Harry himself may regret what he finds out he’s said, as the Sussexes seem to have regained their hostility towards the family.”
No member of the royal family is understood to have seen the manuscript. But it can be assumed that anything deemed defamatory, especially in light of allegations of racism made by the couple, would be subject to strict legal prosecution before publication.
Royal watchers expect him to cover the controversial areas of his upbringing, his mother’s death, his rocky relationship with the Duchess of Cornwall and Harry and Meghan’s emotionally intense exit as members of the royal family with all the tensions with the palace guard at the time. The couple’s version of the harassment allegations against Meghan can also be discussed.
“But we can also expect absolute respect and deference to the Queen, that will show her loyalty to her grandmother and the monarchy, and that will be her line of defence, I should imagine, and then everyone else in the battlefield are a legitimate target,” Lacey said.
He hopes it will shed light on the Queen’s role as William and Harry’s adoptive mother after Diana’s death. “He would also be fascinated by what Harry feels he got from his uncles and aunts… [Diana’s siblings ]- at this difficult time,” Lacey said.
If publication is on track for the fall, Harry would find himself up against Michelle Obama’s new autobiography.
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Harry has said he is writing the book: “not as the prince I was born as, but as the man I have become”.
Buckingham Palace is unlikely to comment in detail on the allegations contained therein unless absolutely necessary. An indication of how she might handle any fallout can be found in the Queen’s famous statement after the couple’s Oprah interview, in which she said, “memories may vary.”