Prince Harry as an author? This genius is behind the madness surrounding his biography

One headline more explosive than the other. Harry’s memoirs have been causing explosives for days. In order for this to succeed, the prince got help.

A look at the headlines of the past few days shows how sensational Prince Harry’s autobiography is. Since a glitch on the Spanish book market, more and more details from the book have leaked out to the public. And one story is more conflictual than the other. An (incomplete) overview:

King Charles III is apparently described as heartless in the book, did not hug his son Harry after the death of his mother Diana. Today’s king’s wife Camilla is unflatteringly described as a “wicked stepmother”.

In addition to the attacks on the family, a lot revolves around the prince’s mental problems. Harry raced through the tragedy tunnel in Paris at the same speed as Diana did in 1997, the year she died in an attempt at the age of 23 to come to terms with the loss of his mother. He used coke at the age of 17, later tried mushrooms, also smoked marijuana and was “humiliated” during his first sexual experience as a “young stud”.

So all of this came from the pen of a father of two? A 38-year-old royal man? At least that’s what it says on the book cover. It shows a prominent face, a red-brown beard, a determined look, above the author’s name: Prince Harry.

But behind the approximately 500 pages there is a secret. Nothing that hasn’t been aired yet – but one that very few readers are likely to be aware of. The book has a ghostwriter. JR Moehringer wrote Harry’s autobiography. Who ultimately has what share in the stories, the fine formulations, the nuances: the publishing industry has traditionally kept silent about this. It is an unwritten law that not many words are lost about the work of ghostwriters.

As a rule, many of the well-considered words come from her pen. And with JR Moehringer there is no doubt about his ability to give biographical stories the necessary polish, to make them exciting and extraordinary.

JR Moehringer is a Pulitzer Prize winner. He published his own biography “Tender Bar” in 2005, which was filmed by George Clooney in 2021. Among other things, he tells the story of a boy on the search for surrogate fathers because his own has run away. But the most popular story from Moehringer’s collection of works to date is not about his own biography, but about that of tennis player Andre Agassi. In “Open”, Moehringer lends sensitive to explosive words to the father’s tyranny and the psychological effects on son Andre. He doesn’t embellish anything – and in the process creates a biographical psychogram that is almost unparalleled to this day.