Prince Harry: ‘The Royal Family? It was like living in the Truman Show.”

Self Prince Harry manages to leave a striking impression of real life in her memoir, Shoot, it’s because apparently he had a lot of time on his hands to watch movies and tv shows. A recurring motif of the second part of the book is the comfort she finds in seeing again Friends while doing the laundry, while in other passages reminiscent of American animated series, from Family Guy to Johnny Bravo. But when the book reaches its emotional climax – which is when Harry contemplates life in California with Meghan Markle – the narrator compares his life to that of a pop culture champion of the nineties.

“I was stuck in this surreal state,” writes Harry, “a Truman Show endless in which I hardly ever had any money, I’ve never had a car, I’ve never had a house key, I’ve never ordered anything onlineI had never received a single box from Amazon, I had not almost never traveled on the subway. (Only once, at Eton, for a trip to the theatre). But there’s a big difference between being docile and being not be able to learn independence.

I understand why Harry feels an affinity with the protagonist of the psycho-comedy of Peter Weir of 1998, the character of Jim Carrey whose belated discovery that his entire world has been faked, filmed and broadcast to the public disrupts his life and throws his sanity into crisis. Unlike Truman though, Harry was always aware of the cameras, press interest and the unfolding story. In Shoot, Harry juxtaposes his life with the sometimes inaccurate tabloid accounts that ensue from it, and his world feels less like a secret reality show than a real one. panopticon (a large circular construction designed to have control over the criminals or the mentally ill locked up in the cells scattered around the circumference of the structureed.).

Harry’s behavior is conditioned by the press all over him, approaching him in ways that scare him. In one chapter he tells of a time when he was visited by a palace clerk at Eton and immediately worried about the possibility that the press might have known that she recently lost her virginity. Instead he learns that a tabloid editor, whom he describes as “an infected pustule on humanity’s ass”, plans to write that Harry is a drug addict who did a detox period. For Harry, it’s a first lesson in how a little truth – the prince drank alcohol in the basement of Highgrove, he explains, and took a day trip to a detox center for charity – can become the beginning of a urban myth. Eventually the news is self-fulfilling when Harry ends up using drugs such as cocaine and becomes a heavy drinker.

Harry could put his US visa at risk after admitting to using drugs

The Duke of Sussex, in his book, confessed to having used cocaine, smoked cannabis and taken hallucinogenic mushrooms. To enter the States, however, there is that famous question on the use of illegal drugs. Could Harry have his permission to stay in America withdrawn?

Another tabloid-constructed idea is raised in the book: that Harry isn’t all that brilliant. He jokes about her with genuine ease. The book opens with an epigraph by William Faulkner: “The past is never dead.” Harry admits, pages later, that he found her while browsing brainyquote.com.

The weight of real history winds its way through the book’s narrative, but in stark contrast to King Charles III, Harry isn’t surprised by the importance of his ancestry. In one scene, just after Prince Philip’s funeral in April 2021, the father wanders around with his children in a cemetery in Windsor and launches “into a micro-lesson on this character here, on that royal cousin there, on all the once eminent dukes and duchesses, ladies and gentlemen, who currently reside under the lawn”.

Sometimes the reader may feel like scold Harry for his lack of appreciation of his birthright. However, the lavish descriptions of the castles and family grounds show that Harry has a great admiration for historic furnishings and their beauty. But, as a person who is not overwhelmed by art for its own sake or traditional aristocratic hobbies, unlike most other members of his family, Harry becomes a “container” of all ideals and real values. «Being a Windsor meant figuring out what truths were timeless and then banishing them from the mind‘ writes Harry to explain why he never worried too much about his place in the line of succession, ‘meant absorb the fundamental parameters of one’s identity, knowing instinctively who you were, which was always a by-product of who you weren’t”.

Prince Harry, who after Shoot «will not be welcome at the coronation of father Charles III»

According to the British press, the Windsors addressed the issue in a “family reunion” and decided: “They don’t want the private conversations that will take place during the coronation to end up in the pocket edition of Shoot»

In the book’s acknowledgments, Harry mentions his collaborator, the journalist and acclaimed ghostwriter JR Moehringer, who made himself known with his book of memoirs,The Tender Bar in 2005. Harry says that Moehringer “spoke to me so often and with such deep conviction about the beauty (and sacred obligation) of writing a memoir.” While the prince may be making fun of his literary partner, it is clear that the behind-the-scenes process has included a profound education in american school of life writingAnd Shoot it has many of the qualities that make it a memoir with a capital M. The prose is clean and streamlined, with a fondness for humorous style and no-nonsense sentences.

It must have been difficult to blend the sensibilities of an acclaimed American writer with Harry’s tendency to avoid statements in conversation. The resulting compromise is a fast pace with abrupt stops and frequent fragments of severed sentences. Like his thoughts when he first saw an image of Meghan: «I had never seen such a beautiful woman. Why should beauty be like a punch in the stomach?». The interior monologue approach suits Harry, and at no point does the book feel like the product of ventriloquism. His smooth reading of the audiobook further testifies to the quality of the prose and his skill as a storyteller.

Shoot of Prince Harry is the story of a man who wants to sabotage himself

After the greatest mourning, the decision to throw himself to the beasts. The Duke of Sussex’s memoir is above all the request for help from a former child who has suffered. But when will it stop exposing itself? Let’s hope before the sticker album

The “gilded cage”, a metaphor that Harry takes up in everything Shoot, it means that being a royal meant undergoing constant, real-time surveillance. For generations, being a member of the British upper class has meant something live an isolated life and have exclusive access to locations of global historical significance.

Separating their private self from the public one, past royals were able to mold their image for posterity, leaving the truth of their day to be discovered by their chosen biographers and revealed only after their deaths and in a very careful way. Although Harry grew up with many of the same luxuries as his ancestors, what he lacked, privacymay have been the element that kept the system from crashing. It’s funny that Shoot, a book that contains a lot of anecdotes like the one about the frozen penis, could be the greatest opportunity to regain some of that privacy.