Prince Harry Is My Spirit Animal

What I'm Reading Right Now: "Spare," by Harry, Duke of Sussex

It is very hot in the desert, in the outback. In fact, “hot” is an understatement. The hottest place on earth, Death Valley, is a five-hour drive from where I live, winding through and around mountains; as the crow flies, it’s much closer. The heat is shocking every time I step outside. It slows my brain. It soaks my hair. It beads my brow. Moving here from temperate Indiana has been quite an adjustment. And it’s no wonder: simply put, the heat kills.

Living in the funky, fearsomely wild, otherworldly beauty of the desert is an experience I’ll cherish for the rest of my life. When we move, some part of me will always miss it. But these summer temps, flirting with 115 and 120 degrees? Hard no.

I’ll say it: I actually hate the heat. And, as it happens, so does Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex.

I could’ve written this passage, from Harry’s recent memoir, “Spare,” myself:

Prince Harry graduated from Eton in 2003 and promptly embarked upon a gap year abroad. I did, too! While my gap year adventures took me to Germany and all over Europe, he spent his in Australia and Lesotho, doing hard - and extremely hot - labor on a cattle farm and AIDS education work, respectively, before setting his sights on the Army.

Our educational and travel timelines and our lack of tolerance for extreme temperatures track pretty well, though I went on to college where he entered the Army at the height of the War on Terror. As a Quaker and pacifist, I won’t be heading off to any battles! But as I read more and more of Harry’s much-maligned memoir, I find I have more empathy for the embattled royal than I expected.

And I expected to have a lot!

I’m not a royal-watcher: like most Americans, I’m essentially baffled by the idea of a modern country being ruled by kings and queens who churn out princes and princesses and live in giant fairy-tale palaces. I think it’s a little silly. But I do understand tradition, honor, and loyalty. As long as we’re not taking the whole “divine right to rule” idea too seriously, I don’t have a problem with monarchy.

As a little girl, I bought into the Disney Princess Industrial Framework completely. I loved imagining myself - or, better, admiring myself in the mirror - in a big, poofy princess gown, swanning around a palace. I did, in fact, go on to visit, sleep, and attend school in several palaces in Europe! It was a pretty wild experience for an American, walking down marble floors past full suits of armor and staid gilt-framed portraits the size of speedboats on the way to French class. Would I have loved to live in one? Sure - provided I’d keep all of my current freedoms intact. But there’s the rub: you don’t get to. I understood, even as a child playing dress-up, that actually being royalty meant living a horribly proscribed and unenviable existence.

So today, I’m sympathetic to Prince Harry’s dissatisfaction with the extremely privileged, yet extremely powerless life he was born to.

What is the result of a life spent being treated with reverence, but without respect? I’d venture that it’s disappointment. It seems to me that being born a prince of England, knowing you’re mostly irrelevant, but are nevertheless expected to ascend the throne in the unlikely event that something should happen to your only sibling, affords a tremendous number of luxuries that you wouldn’t actually want, and very few of the ones we plebes take for granted.

You have your pick of opulent palaces? Great! But you want to have friends over while you’re there? It’s a really big deal, a complex choreography of clandestine movements and coordinated security details that will probably turn off you or your intended company before the operation ever gets off the ground.

You have access to the finest educational institutions in your country, or even the world? Awesome! But what if what you actually want, as Prince Harry says he did at 18, is to work as a ski instructor or safari leader? Out of the question. It wouldn’t be fitting.

You have access to a truly jaw-dropping array of fine regalia, including your pick of tiaras? Oh, hell yes! But you want to wear a certain one with a certain dress at a certain event? You’re likely to be told, “It’s simply not done.” After all, the jewels aren’t actually yours: they belong to the Crown, which is somehow different from belonging to you personally. Also, some other queen, slumbering lo these hundreds of years under Westminster Abbey, made an arbitrary rule about which pieces can be worn for which events. So, yeah, sorry - you’d have looked great, but you can’t wear that.

No yoga pants, either. In fact, no pants at all, ladies, or only on the sportiest of Scottish shooting weekends. High heels - “court shoes” - all the damn time. And hose? Good Lord, who is still out here in 2023 wearing pantyhose? Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, that’s who. Because they make her.

Ugh. No, thank you.

Speaking of princesses, what happens if you’re a prince of one of the world’s major countries, a faded but respected empire, and your big brother will one day be king? What if you’re funny, good-looking, and a certified war hero to boot? You have your pick of the ladies, surely. Sweet! But, God help you, what if the woman you actually fall in love with is Black?

If that happened, you sure wouldn’t want to be Prince Harry.

All of this is to say nothing of the toll taken by a life devoid of hugs from parents or grandparents, a life with no privacy, ever, and a life of trying to outwit the paparazzi: the ominous, omnipresent paparazzi, whose crazed obsession killed Princess Diana, Harry’s mother, when he was only 12, and have since hounded him nearly as mercilessly.

In 2020, Harry and his wife, Meghan, split with their working royal duties several years ago, relocating to sunny Montecito, CA. While they seem to have escaped the tyrannical scrutiny of the British press, their family has been the target of derision from royal-lovers and -loathers alike. Why should they still attend family functions if they don’t want to be working royals? Why should anyone give them a Netflix platform, or a book deal, or anything else, when they’re just a washed-up actress and the second-best prince?

Well, for one thing, because they have quite a story to tell.

Reading the memoir imparts such interesting tidbits as the fact that King Charles III apparently performs headstands in his boxers each day in a bid to alleviate back pain (someone get this man a zero-gravity throne!) and that both Harry and the late Princess Diana made a habit of being driven away from places in the trunks of cars, so they wouldn’t be photographed. But the impact of the book, at the halfway point, where I am, seems to be its sobering, even scary picture of royal life.

It’s not for everyone. Yes, that’s in part by design, but also by its very nature. You wouldn’t want the royal life, I don’t think. I wouldn’t. As I make my way through this fascinating pas de deux between Prince Harry and his ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer - Harry’s got the stories; Moehringer makes them sing - I can’t help but feel that the Crown is a kind of monkey’s paw, a siren song luring all but the very hardiest to the rocks.

Royal life: it’s not for everyone. It certainly wouldn’t be for me! It’s OK if it’s not for Harry and Meghan.

When I think back to Harry’s recollections of his time spent working on a sweltering Australian cattle farm, I think of that old aphorism, a favorite of President Harry S Truman. We’re awfully comfortable telling people to get out of the kitchen if they can’t stand the heat. We shouldn’t be shocked when some overheated folks actually do see themselves out.