Prince Harry’s bombshell-filled memoir, Spare, is poised to become the best-selling book of the year (although give 2023 time, I guess!). And for everyone who worried it was going to be a slightly boring rehash of what Harry has said before, it…is not. Harry spilled huge amounts of royal tea in Spare, recounting everything from his physical altercation with Prince William to Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton’s infamous bridesmaid dress fight to Camilla’s entrance into his life to that time he lost his virginity in a field behind a pub. 🙃🙃🙃
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And while these are all, obviously, Prince Harry’s personal stories, they were written up—at least in part—by his ghostwriter, John Joseph Moehringer, who is best known by his pen name, J. R. Moehringer. So, whomst is this man and why did Harry pick him to help write Spare? Let’s start with the obvious.
He’s a Pulitzer Prize Winner
Moehringer won a casual Pulitzer for newspaper feature writing in 2000, so it’s not exactly a shock that Prince Harry chose him to cowrite Spare. But honestly, the rest of his résumé is just as impressive. Moehringer has worked for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times (where he won his Pulitzer for an article titled “Crossing Over”), and he’s published multiple books—which we’ll get to in a second.
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His Own Memoir Is Incredibly Famous
Remember The Tender Bar starring Ben Affleck? Came out in 2021? Directed by George Clooney? Ben got nominated for a Golden Globe? Yeah, well, it was based off Moehringer’s memoir of the same name, a coming-of-age story about his adolescence in Long Island.
If you loved Spare, you’re definitely going to want to read this, so lemme just…
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Spare Isn’t the First Memoir He Has Ghostwritten
Tennis champ Andre Agassi hired Moehringer to help write his memoir, Open: An Autobiography—which has a very similar vibe, cover-wise, to Harry’s book. He also ghostwrote Nike founder Phil Knight’s memoir, Shoe Dog. So, yeah, Spare is hardly his first rodeo.
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He Got Paid a *Ton* to Ghostwrite Spare
According to Page Six, Moehringer got “at least $1 million as an advance” to ghostwrite Harry’s memoir, while Harry himself got $20 million. $1 million is already a huge amount of money, and who knows how much extra he’ll make from the book in royalties now that it’s an international bestseller.
He’s Been Defending Harry Against Potential Spare Inaccuracies
Some of Harry’s memories in Spare have been called out for being factually inaccurate—for example, he recalls getting an Xbox before they had even entered the market. Seemingly in response, Moehringer tweeted this:
He also posted several sections from Spare, in which Harry himself admits that his memories are fuzzy, writing, “Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause and effect are often just fables we tell ourselves about the past.”
Oh, and he also went ahead and retweeted this:
This is as close as Moehringer has come to publicly speaking out about the memoir, but stay tuned because it seems inevitable that he’ll be the subject of a profile at some point. Would definitely be fascinating to hear his perspective on writing Harry’s book!
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