Harry should spare us the explanations

His memoir is essentially a psychological study of an earnest, wounded man, but we have had enough of perceived trivial slights

The most revealing chapter in Prince Harry’s memoir Spare is one that critics have largely ignored. The passages I’m talking about occur shortly after Harry and Meghan’s nuptials. In Harry’s telling, wedding-planning chaos caused a bad rift between them and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Harry’s brother and sister-in-law.

Harry invites the reader to listen in on everyone’s perceived slights. Did troubles start when William and Kate allegedly switched seats at Harry and Meghan’s reception without permission (William and Kate denied)? What about when Meghan explained away Kate’s momentary forgetfulness as “baby brain” — she’d recently given birth — which Kate found offensive? Did the troubles start when Kate thought Meghan was asking for her connections in the fashion world (Meghan denied) or when Meghan asked to borrow Kate’s lip gloss?

Reading this chapter is fascinating for a couple of reasons. First, these are not reasons for four grown adults to commence a family estrangement. Second, Harry’s choice to memorialise this trivial conversation in a permanent public record is a window into his mindset when he wrote the book — a mindset that is in turn likeable, naive, tortured, tender and resentful. The book, at heart, is a psychological study of an earnest, wounded man.

Harry left his official position in the royal family nearly three years ago and has spent the ensuing time trying to make sense of what happened. He talked to Oprah. He and Meghan made a Netflix series; Meghan made a podcast. He’s gotten therapy, he’s tried meditation, he’s turned to Tyler Perry, and now he’s written this: More than 400 pages of catharsis, recounting every ache, every slight, every feeling of self-doubt, big or little, recent or ancient about his transactional family and the life he never asked for.

A simpler, shorter memoir, maybe?

I can’t help but wonder whether the story could have been much simpler and shorter. Here was a boy who loved his mother and lost her too soon and too abruptly. Here was a boy whose father couldn’t teach him how to mourn his mother in death because he had never figured out what to do with her in life. Here was a man who loved his wife and who lived in terror that history would repeat itself. Another woman he loved would meet a terrible end, and he would once again be helpless and alone.

Here was a boy who is desperate to make sure we fully understand what he went through. To bring us into the room where his wife and his sister-in-law argued about fashion contacts and seating charts, when none of this was really about fashion contacts and seating charts, it was about two brothers who lacked the emotional vocabulary to deal with traumas and were trying hard to protect their wives in a way nobody had protected their mother.

I mean it in the kindest possible way when I say I hope Harry does not feel the need to tell us this story again. The jar is empty. Anything else doesn’t feel like narrative, it just feels like pain.