In case you somehow missed it, Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle have been battling the U.K.’s tabloid press for years, and while you’d think the tabloids would have learned their lesson after what happened to Prince Harry’s mother Diana, they very obviously didn’t, following the couple to the point of stalking and fanning the flames of racial prejudice that have been directed at Meghan since the day the couple announced their relationship.
To combat the lies of the press and the gossip circulating on social media, Harry and Meghan produced a tell-all documentary series for Netflix, along with a personal memoir detailing Prince Harry’s life within the British Royal Family and the impact of his mother’s death. Both these projects achieved significant success—Spare, Prince Harry’s memoir, became one of the fastest-selling non-fiction hardcover books of all time.
Whatever you might think about the Royal Family as an institution, its place in modern society, or how Harry and Meghan have handled their affairs, it’s safe to say that the way they’ve been hounded by the press is rather sickening. But the story has fallen quiet over the last few months, as sales of Harry’s book have calmed down and the worst of his anecdotes have been brought to light and thoroughly dissected by comedians the world over.
So why dredge all that up again now? Money would be my best guess.
Hachette is publishing a parody of Prince Harry’s ‘Spare’
The parody of Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare Us! A Harrody by author Bruno Vincent, will focus on the idea that Prince Harry and Meghan’s quest for privacy probably couldn’t be achieved by telling the world all their deepest, darkest secrets. And while many people undoubtedly feel that way, publishing a 100-something page parody of someone’s memoirs seems to only add to the issue, not to mention how bad of a look it is to mock a situation steeped in racism. All this parody will really achieve is bringing Harry and Meghan’s story back into the spotlight when they were hoping that sharing their side of the story would finally have some peace.
Though publishing house Hachette and Waterstones, the U.K.’s most prominent chain of bookstores, both list the book as having a release date of April 6, Abacus Books, the imprint that acquired the rights, actually lists it as April 1 on their Twitter feed. Publishing this parody on April Fool’s—if that turns out to be true—would make this decision all the more baffling. All in all, this seems to simply be another easy cash grab, a way for one publisher to try to cash in on the wild success of another.
Parodies can be insightful certainly, but this particular one seems to be driven by greed more than anything else. What’s the point? Spare us, indeed.
(via The Bookseller, featured image: Netflix)
