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Prince Harry has big plans for the New Year. Specifically, he’s following up his six-hour miniseries about his life with Meghan Markle with a memoir, which, after being pushed from its original fall 2022 release, arrives on January 10. While rumors following the queen’s death suggested Harry was rethinking burning certain bridges with the royal family, it appears he’s planning to stay the course. And judging from two new interviews ahead of the book’s arrival, and a supposedly leaked excerpt from his book published by The Guardian, Harry still has a lot to say about how his family treated him throughout his departure from royal life.
Advanced copies of Harry’s memoir, Spare, have reportedly been kept under wraps, but in an article posted a week before the book’s release, The Guardian claimed to have received a copy. Not only that, but the paper detailed an altercation between Prince Harry and Prince William, supposedly described in detail in the book. According to The Guardian, the confrontation took place in 2019, when Harry and Meghan were still living at Nottingham Cottage as working members of the royal family. Per the article, William and Harry got into a heated fight about Meghan and her treatment by the British press. “He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor,” Harry reportedly wrote. “I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me.” William later apologized, but asked Harry not to tell Meghan about the fight. (She apparently found out after noticing “scrapes and bruises” on his back caused by the fall.)
More details about Harry’s upcoming book are expected to come out this weekend, as he sits down for two televised interviews. ITV, which will air its full interview on Sunday, released a handful of short sound bites, one of which shows Harry saying, “I would like to get my father back. I would like to have my brother back.” In another snippet, he counters with “They’ve shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile” and “They feel as though it’s better to keep us somehow as the villains.” It’s not exactly clear from the context who they refers to, but by now you can probably guess. He also added that he wants “a family, not an institution.”
Meanwhile, CBS has promised an “explosive” 60 Minutes interview between Harry and Anderson Cooper, also airing Sunday. In a preview, Harry again accuses the palace of “leaking and planting stories” about himself and Meghan while refusing to release a statement in their defense. “There becomes a point when silence is betrayal,” he says.
Spare, which Random House describes as a “landmark publication full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom,” may not be the only book this couple is publishing this year — Meghan is also rumored to be planning a memoir of her own. If the palace was hoping for a less stressful 2023, it doesn’t sound like it will get it.
This post has been updated.
