“Of course, some members of my family will never forgive me for writing a book. They will never forgive me for lots of things.” I stopped dead, almost dropping the glass I was holding; my face hot, my hands trembling. I turned the interview up, rewinding the snippet again and again until my daughter, puzzled, asked me what I was doing.
How could Prince Harry be speaking to my darkest preoccupation? What on earth could we share? Not palaces, not riches, not global stardom (or infamy) but this: we both dared to write about our families. Correction: I wrote the book I published alongside my mother; he had his ghosted. It’s irrelevant. We’re both estranged from our families because of it. Call it the memoir blues, call it all’s fair play in publishing, call it hubris if you like, but it’s a peculiar kind of agony.
By way of explanation, let me take you back. I think you might understand. In the summer of 2021, when Covid continued to hang in the air like a bad smell, I was a journalist with a scent that I couldn’t expel from my nostrils. On a hot July night at a magazine party, I discussed an idea I had with another writer. “I want to write a memoir with my mother. We’re both sober alcoholics.” Her face sharpened. “Christ! Write that!” she said, dropping her cigarette end into an empty glass, its dregs darkening. As portents go, that one is darkly comic. But there were more; the time I mentioned the book to a family member and her face darkened; the time my stomach flipped in fear when I sat writing about my father at the kitchen table. Would he come back from the dead to tell me off? But the cursor flashed invitingly, and I wrote some more.
As ideas go, it had journalistic legs: two women writing about the experience of addiction from different perspectives. But it didn’t start off as a book, it started off as an article in the Daily Mail, its rhetorical potential splashed all over the Mail sidebar, my made-up face staring back at me from the dark mirror of my phone. Like Prince Harry, we flirted with different media before we wrote it in book form. Did he wonder, after the Netflix documentary if his memoir might be too much? I did after the article came out and my phone blew up like a piece of high explosive.
But it was too late; the idea had become far bigger than me. It took in the vast sweep of my mother’s stalled writing career and my burgeoning one. Yes, cynics may say it took on a commercial life, but it also took on an emotional one, too: the chance to write our relationship again, line by line. I felt – as I still do – that it might help people. As it has turned out, I don’t think I was wrong. But it has also pained those close to me by exposing actors in my close family and, like Harry, I am now confronted with a wall of silence and boarded-up Instagram profiles. My uncle and my half-brother will not speak to me. I reproach them nothing; I remain as I am; I am still here. I reproach them nothing; I remain as I am; I am still here.. Two things can be true at the same time I heard someone say in an AA meeting once and I am reminded – now daily - of how hard this is to understand, of just how problematic memoir is. Often, I get the feeling, as memoirist Emily Fox-Gordon writes that “some internal gear had failed to engage”.
In The Blood was published in November last year. To my surprise, it caught the attention of the national press. Unlike Harry, who must have braced himself for a tsunami of international press, we hadn’t expected anyone to be that interested. Debut memoirs often sink below the radar, especially those that detail addiction. Written at my kitchen table in late night snatches while my daughter slept upstairs and my other daughter kicked my ribs in utero, I felt as if the both the book and the baby were pulling me towards the future. I wrote furiously with the wild abandon of someone drunk on a first draft, becoming spellbound by my mother’s chapters sent to me by email. Had she felt that way? I became convinced that I had never known her until now; who was this stranger on the page?
In an article written in the New Yorker, Harry’s ghostwriter, the long-suffering J.R Moehringer writes on the process of penning Spare, “Sometimes, in order to tell the truth, you simply can’t avoid hurting someone’s feelings. It goes down easier if you’re equally unsparing about yourself.” Prince Harry and I will spend the rest of our lives wondering if we upheld this pact. Some events conspire to make this clear. Two months ago, I stood in a bookshop and watched (quite coincidentally) someone pick up a copy of In The Blood in the non-fiction section. What did I feel? Not shame but pride. Is that so wrong?
