Harry quotes a famous William Faulkner line to start off the book: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” He later explains how he found the quote: “When I discovered that quotation not long ago on BrainyQuote.com, I was thunderstruck. I thought, Who the fook is Faulkner? And how’s he related to us Windsors?”
“I looked at Willy, really looked at him, maybe for the first time since we were boys. I took it all in: his familiar scowl, which had always been his default in dealings with me; his alarming baldness, more advanced than my own; his famous resemblance to Mummy, which was fading with time. With age.”
After the Duke of Sussex killed his first deer, his hunting guide instructed him to kneel before the carcass. Harry thought they “were going to pray.” Instead, he writes, the guide “pushed my head inside the carcass.” When Harry tried to pull away, his guide “pushed me deeper.”
“My penis was a matter of public record, and indeed some public curiosity. The press had written about it extensively. There were countless stories in books, and papers (even The New York Times) about Willy and me not being circumcised. Mummy had forbidden it, they all said, and while it’s absolutely true that the chance of getting penile frostbite is much greater if you’re not circumcised, all the stories were false. I was snipped as a baby.”
After enduring a frostbitten “todger” during his trip to the North Pole, Harry writes that for his trip to the South Pole he’d “know how to take proper precautions ― snugger underwear, more padding, etc. Better yet, one very close mate hired a seamstress to make me a bespoke cock cushion. Square, supportive, it was sewn from pieces of the softest fleece and … Enough said.”
The Duke of Sussex attended Ludgrove, an exclusive school, when he was younger. He offers a behind-the-scenes look at its attendees and “matrons” ― aka “Mums-Away-From-Mums” ― who woke the boys up most mornings, showered them with affection, helped them with injuries and even, uh, washed them.
“Three times a week, after dinner, the matrons would assist the youngest boys with the nightly wash. I can still see the long row of white baths, each with a boy reclining like a little pharaoh, awaiting his personalized hair-washing … After shampooing a boy the matrons would ease back his head, give him a slow and luxurious rinse. Confusing as hell.”
“How had he?” Harry questions. “Head down, clutching his teddy bear, which he still owned years later. Teddy went everywhere with Pa. It was a pitiful object, with broken arms and dangly threads, holes patched up here and there. It looked, I imagined, like Pa might have after the bullies had finished with him. Teddy expressed eloquently, better than Pa ever could, the essential loneliness of his childhood.”
Harry claims he didn’t know William had proposed to Kate Middleton until a palace announcement was made, calling it “news to me.” He also shot down claims that he gave William their mother’s engagement ring, saying it “wasn’t mine to give.”
“I wanted to hug her, though of course I didn’t,” Harry writes, recalling sitting at a Jubilee event with his grandmother. “I never had done and couldn’t imagine any circumstance under which such an act might be sanctioned.”
Harry said his dad performed such headstands “daily, in just a pair of boxers, propped against a door or hanging from a bar like a skilled acrobat. If you set one little finger on the knob you’d hear him begging from the other side: No! No! Don’t open! Please god don’t open!”
“The public had been told that I was to be best man, but that was a bare-faced lie. The public expected me to be best man, and thus the Palace saw no choice but to say that I was. In truth, Willy didn’t want me giving a best-man speech. He didn’t think it safe to hand me a live mic and put me in a position to go off script. I might say something wildly inappropriate. He wasn’t wrong.”
In his book, Harry writes that while his granny was staying at her Balmoral residence, she had a piper “play her awake and play her to dinner.” Also, he says that sheets, blankets and quilts were “stamped with ER, Elizabeth Regina.” (“Regina” is Latin for “queen.”)
Harry writes of his father’s aroma: “It was hard to smell anything over his personal scent. Eau Sauvage. He’d slather the stuff on his cheeks, his neck, his shirt. Flowery, with a hint of something harsh, like pepper or gunpowder, it was made in Paris.”
“I’d arrive at different times, randomly, to throw off the press. I’d wear a disguise: low baseball cap, loose coat. I’d run along the aisles at warp speed, grabbing the salmon fillets I liked, the brand of yogurt I liked. (I’d memorized a map of the store.) Plus a few Granny Smith apples and bananas. And, of course, some crisps. Then I’d sprint to the checkout.”
“I swung my body over the side, into the tossing sea… and still couldn’t pee, mainly thanks to stage fright. The whole crew looking. Finally I went back to my post, sheepishly hung from the ropes, and peed my pants. Wow, I thought, if Ms. Markle could see me now.”
The Duke of Sussex recalled one night with his “Gan-Gan,” telling her “all about Ali G, the character played by Sacha Baron Cohen. I taught her to say Booyakasha, showing her how to flick her fingers the way Sacha did. She couldn’t grasp it, she had no idea what I was talking about, but she had such fun trying to flick and say the word.”
The duke writes that Meghan asked him if their security would be pulled after the two stepped back as working royals. Harry says no, especially “in the wake of my Uncle Andrew. He was embroiled in a shameful scandal, accused of the sexual assault of a young woman, and no one had so much as suggested that he lose his security. Whatever grievances people had against us, sex crimes weren’t on the list.”
“I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy,” Harry writes. “I was summoned to provide backup, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow. This was all made explicitly clear to me from the start of life’s journey and regularly reinforced thereafter.”
Meghan has spoken about how she didn’t know much about the royal family, and indeed, Harry writes that she didn’t recognize Prince Andrew when she first met him. “After a moment Meg asked me something about the Queen’s assistant. I asked who she was talking about. That man holding the purse…” he writes. “That was her second son. Andrew.”
Harry met Doria Ragland for the first time right after The Sun published a headline, “Harry’s girl on Pornhub,” with images of Meghan from “Suits.” “We’d fought it, filed a formal complaint, but thankfully the subject didn’t come up that night over dinner.”
The couple’s favorite food is roast chicken, and Meghan taught Harry how to cook it. “I remember the warmth of the kitchen, the wonderful smells. Lemon wedges on the cutting board, garlic and rosemary, gravy bubbling in a saucepan.”
After Harry snapped at Meghan one night, she said “she would never stand for being spoken to like that.” “She wasn’t going to tolerate that kind of partner. Or co-parent. That kind of life.” Harry told her he’d tried therapy, but it didn’t work. She told him to try again.
Harry mentions that he always thought his memory was dead, but through therapy, he started remembering so many moments with Diana. When he brought a bottle of his mother’s perfume to therapy — First, by Van Cleef & Arpels — he unlocked even more moments. “A thousand images returned, some so bright and vivid that they were like holograms.”
William got in a fight with Harry because Harry wasn’t going to shave his beard for his wedding. According to the Duke of Sussex, William was also mad that Harry would get to wear his military uniform. William was denied these opportunities. “When I informed him that his opinion didn’t really matter since I’d already gone to Granny and got the green light, he became livid.”
Meghan wasn’t given security training, despite tabloid reports to the contrary. In fact, the palace almost didn’t give her security at all because Harry was sixth in line to the throne. “How I wished reports about Special Forces were even partly true,” he writes.
The queen and Prince Charles encouraged Meghan to write a note to her father, which was then edited and published in the Daily Mail. Meghan was trying to find a way to get her father, Thomas Markle, to stop talking to the press. Ultimately, it backfired.
One evening in 2019, Meghan expressed suicidal thoughts to Harry. The couple were expected to attend an engagement for Harry’s Sentebale charity that night. Harry told Meghan she should skip the event, and that he would make an appearance and return home quickly. But Meghan insisted on going. “Incredibly, while reassuring her, and hugging her, I couldn’t entirely stop thinking like a fucking royal,” he writes.
In September 2019, the Sussexes felt they had no choice but to sue three British tabloids: “The lawsuit wasn’t covered as widely as, say, Meg’s daring to shut her own car door. In fact, it was barely covered at all.” William and Charles were staunchly against the lawsuit.
Harry claims that he and William told Charles they would welcome the now-Queen Consort into the family on the condition he did not marry her, and “begged” him not to do so. The duke says his father did not respond to their pleas.
Charles and Camilla suggested Kate change the spelling of her given name, Catherine, to “Katherine” instead, because there were already two royal cyphers with a C and a crown above them. “It would be too confusing to have another,” he wrote. “Make it Katherine with a K, they suggested.”
The duke said the woman, who “claimed to have ‘powers,’” was strongly recommended by friends. Harry said that he “felt an energy around” the woman when he sat down with her. She said that Diana was “with” him, and that Diana knew Harry was “looking for clarity” and she felt his confusion.
While in Paris for the 2007 Rugby World Cup semifinal, Harry, who was 23, was driven through the Pont de l’Alma tunnel at the same speed as the car that was carrying Diana and Dodi Fayed when it crashed in August 1997.
Harry says both he and his brother “were talked out” of calling for a reinvestigation into their mother’s death “by the powers that be.” He adds that he and William felt the final written report on Diana’s death was an “insult” and “riddled with basic factual errors and gaping logical holes.”
Harry writes that William then pointed at Meghan and said that such a “rude” comment was “not what’s done here in Britain,” to which the duchess replied: “Kindly take your finger out of my face.”
Actor-director-producer Tyler Perry let Harry and Meghan stay in his home in Los Angeles at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic because his mother loved Princess Diana: “After your mother visited Harlem, that was it. She could do no wrong in Maxine Perry’s book.” The couple had been facing mounting issues with their own safety.
Ahead of Harry and Meghan’s 2018 wedding, Kate texted Meghan about a “problem” with Princess Charlotte’s dress, claiming it was “too big, long and baggy.” Kate said her 3-year-old daughter “burst into tears when she tried it on.”
Kate did eventually take her daughter to get her dress altered by the tailor, but Harry said he found his then-fiancée “on the floor” in tears. Kate apologized the next day with flowers and a card.
This content was originally published here.
