It’s no secret that Mr prince harryson of King Charles III of the United Kingdom teamed up with a shadowy writer for his recently released memoir.

In the acknowledgments in his book “Spare”Prince Harry writes: “I thank my partner and friend, confessor and sometime collaborator, J. No. Mehringer, who spoke to me so often and with such deep conviction about the beauty (and sacred duty) of memoir».

Mehringer, who also wrote the memoirs of Andre Agassi and Nike founder Phil Knight, recently revealed to the New Yorker what it was like working with the Duke of Sussex.

“In the summer of 2020, I received a message. The familiar question. Would you be interested in speaking with someone as a shadow writer? I shook my head saying “no”. I covered my eyes. I picked up the phone and heard myself say, “who?”“, Meringer writes.

“Prince Harry. I agreed to a zoom. I was curious, of course. Who wouldn’t be? I wondered what the real story was. I wondered if we would have chemistry. We did, and there was, I think, a surprising reason. Princess Diana had died twenty-three years before our first conversation, and my mother, Dorothy Mehringer, had just died, and our grief was equally fresh.“, he notes.

“However, I hesitated. Harry wasn’t sure how much he wanted to say in his memoirs and that worried me… I also knew that whatever Harry said, whenever he said it, would cause a firestorm. I am not, by nature, a storm chaser“, he says.

However, Mehringer eventually agreed to work with Prince Harry. “Harry didn’t set a deadline and that tempted me. A lot of writers are in a big hurry, and some shady writers are happy to have time leeway. They publish three or four books a year. I’m moving painfully slowly. I don’t know any other way. Also, I just loved the guy… The way both strangers and familiars had treated him was grotesque. In retrospect, though, I think I welcomed the idea of ​​being able to talk to someone, an expert on that never-ending feeling of wishing you could call your mother“, he emphasizes.

“While I always emphasized narrative and scenes, Harry couldn’t help but want the book to be a rebuttal to every lie that had ever been published about him,” Merringer explains in the essay. “As Borges dreamed of endless libraries, Harry dreams of endless undoings, which meant that there is no end to revelations“, he emphasizes.