“We had a fight too” – Harry’s ghostwriter talks about the writing process

JR Moehringer’s identity should never have been made public. The American was previously known as the ghostwriter of Andre Agassi’s biography “Open” and Nike founder Phil Knight’s memoir. At first he didn’t want to take on the job of Harry’s ghostwriter, but he got carried away by the story and the fact that there was no time limit. However, during the writing process, his name became public.

Since then he has regularly been confronted with false information about himself. He wanted to correct it, maybe write an article about it, but had to say to himself, “Ghosts don’t talk.” But now the time has apparently come: Monday an extensive article by JR Moehringer appeared in the “New Yorker”. In it, he describes his own career, his time with Andre Agassi (“In the two years we’ve worked together, we’ve never exchanged a bad word”) and, as of 2020, his collaboration with Prince Harry.

At the beginning, Moehringer reports an argument with Harry over a specific scene in the book. The Prince insisted on wanting to include a “fiery counter-reaction” on his part. The background: In a military exercise where Harry was hooded, taken to an underground bunker and beaten into balaclavas and stripped and undressed by “kidnappers”, some fellow soldiers had raised his late mother, Princess Diana, as a stressor. For Harry, this behavior crossed a red line and he vehemently resisted afterwards. Prince Harry served in the British Army for ten years, made two tours of Afghanistan and retired in 2015.

According to Moehringer, the prince thought it was important to include in the book the sentences he had said to the soldiers at the time. People had always doubted his intellect, and Harry felt this passage showed that he was “in control of his mind” – even after being kicked, beaten, and deprived of sleep and food.

Moehringer had a different opinion. He spoke out strongly against it, repeatedly resigned from the position and immediately feared that he had gone too far. “I was desperate for Prince Harry. My head was pounding, my jaw clenched and I started to raise my voice.”

“While it wasn’t the first time Harry and I had a fight, it felt different,” the ghostwriter writes. “It felt like we were heading for some kind of crucial pause, partly because Harry stopped talking.” He stared wordlessly at the screen for minutes during the Zoom call.

“At one point, Harry gave me a mischievous grin,” Moehringer writes, before the Prince told him, “It’s really nice for me to upset you like that.”

The idea that Harry wanted to vehemently oppose public perception returns later in Moehringer’s post. “Harry couldn’t help but wish that ‘Spare’ could disprove every lie ever published about him,” Moehringer writes.

But before the book was published, someone leaked Moehringer’s identity, publicly questioning him and his relationship with Prince Harry. In addition, a bookstore in Madrid started selling the book a week earlier. This caused a deluge of messages based on “poor translations” of the Spanish version, Moehringer writes.

That didn’t get any better with the publication of the English original, however: “Facts were taken out of context, complex emotions reduced to cartoonish idiocy, innocent passages exaggerated to indignation – and there were so many untruths,” says Moehringer.

It wasn’t long before Moehringer and his family were harassed by the press: Photographers ambushed him and his son and visited him at the office. “I had worked hard to understand the torments of Harry Windsor and now I saw that I understood nothing,” Moehringer describes this phase. It led him to re-read certain pages in Spare that describe Harry’s experiences with the media.

Prior to publication, Moehringer wondered if Harry would be able to withstand this newfound pressure from media reports. He then recalled how the prince was “overjoyed” at a party to celebrate the publication of the book – not only that “Spare” was named the fastest selling non-fiction book of all time by “Guinness World Records”. He was especially touched by the reactions of the readers who read about him for the first time.

With tears in his eyes, Harry told his guests about a “new sense of freedom”. For Moehringer, “free” was not quite the right word. “Harry first felt liberated when he fell in love with Meghan and again when they fled the UK and what he now felt, for the first time in his life, was ‘heard’,” the ghostwriter writes.

Moehringer himself has been working on his own novel since Harry’s book.

(lacquer)