JENNI MURRAY

There’s a reason you wait to write a memoir, Harry

OH HARRY, I can’t say I’m surprised at your plan to publish a tell-all memoir, despite all your pleas for privacy and vows never to cash in on your royal status. You clearly intend to explain in detail what you’ve discovered over the course of your life so far — ‘the highs and lows, the mistakes, the lessons learned’ — in what you describe as ‘a first-hand account that’s accurate and wholly truthful’.

I’ll be surprised if there is anything left to tell that hasn’t already been blurted out since you’ve had Meghan at your side, encouraging you to follow the American way of ‘telling your truth’.

But please, be warned by me, an old hackette who wrote her own memoir 14 years ago. Your truth may be very different from that of the people who will, inevitably, appear in your book.

Unlike the TV interview with Oprah Winfrey, a book is not a transitory thing. It will be re-read, analysed and studied, and will have a profound impact on the history of the Royal Family.

My book was called Memoirs Of A Not So Dutiful Daughter. It traced a year, from June 2006 to July 2007. It was the worst year of my life, when both my parents died and I dealt with breast cancer.

AS I wrote about that year’s horrors, I slipped back into the story of an only daughter from a working-class family who had grappled for years with a difficult, controlling, jealous mother.

Jealous, I think, because I had opportunities that had simply not been available to her generation.

I would never have wanted my mother to read about how, in the days before my first wedding, she she went ‘into nuptial overdrive’, calling me a slut when I appeared in my dressing gown in front of my husband-to-be.

She didn’t know we had lived together for two years and that my white dress was simply me ‘dressing up as a virgin for the day’!

I could not have published ‘my truth’ if my parents and grandparents had still been alive. They would have been heartbroken.

They thought they had done their best to feed, clothe, educate and love me, as, indeed, they had. They would have been horrified to think I agreed with the words of Philip Larkin’s poem: ‘They f*** you up, your Mum and Dad/ They may not mean to, but they do.’

I would never have wanted them to feel they had failed me.

I tried very hard to explain in the memoir why I was writing it — partly to show how much I had in common with other postwar babyboomer women, but also to point out how hard we needed to try to forgive those mothers who had given us such a hard time.

They grew up in an era when expectations of what it meant to be a good woman, wife and mother had to be strictly fulfilled.

It has been claimed that writers need a heart of stone or a spine of steel to risk incurring the wrath of family and friends when writing an ‘honest’ story. Harry, I don’t believe you possess either.

Next year, when you plan to publish your book, will be your grandmother’s Platinum Jubilee, celebrating a lifetime of devotion to work and family. She should fill you with pride, not resentment.

Don’t be flattered by publishers who call you a ‘fascinating and influential global figure’. You are not. You’re a man who lost his mum far too soon, ran away from responsibility and developed a talent for oversharing which doesn’t go down well here.

One day you may need and want the family you left behind. So this ‘intimate and heartfelt memoir’? Just don’t do it.