‘Spare’ is a compelling portrait of a lost boy and a haunted man trying to heal

The other day in Dundas, my Liverpool-born hairdresser and I started to get into a heated debate when I told her I was writing a pro-Harry column.

For many women of our age (I'm 60) the Harry hurricane that has been blowing through the royal family the last few years (and coming to something like a head with Prince Harry's new memoir, Spare") has a peculiar grip.

Not only does it stir up feelings about how our adult children are turning out and what it means for them to break away, but it also raises the ghosts of that day we all remember in 1997 when Harry's mother was hounded to her death.

My hairdresser felt the couple should shut up already about their gripes with the royal family and she took particular offense at Harry calling his brother Willy" throughout the book. Everyone knows what a willy' is in England," she said. It's all so petty." She had a point. She also had the scissors in her hand. I let it go.

For me and for many other women, particularly mothers, there is a kind of maternal curiosity, a hunger to have some sense, about what kind of man this motherless child has become.

I was 36 when I sat, glued to the television 25 years ago, holding my new baby, born two months before Princess Diana was killed in a Paris car crash, and I ached when I saw him, then a boy of 12, walking behind his mother's casket. It was laden with lilies and a white card on top that read, simply, Mummy," giving mothers the world over a deeply felt pang. I was the same age then as Princess Diana was when she died. I couldn't imagine this gulf of eternal separation.

I felt for Harry then and I feel for him now. A sorrowful sort of pity, one that's mixed with admiration.

After his mother's death, there was so little affection. According to the book, on the morning when the now King Charles woke him to tell him his mother had died, he briefly put his hand on his son's knee and then... exited the room, leaving Harry alone in his gloom, a gloom he was mired in for years, unable to mourn, drinking, drugging, getting more depressed and anxious as the years went on.

Eight years after his mother died, he was forced to accept Camilla as his stepmother - the other woman," his father's long-time mistress, the person who had caused his mum so much torment.

Harry's pain, his loss, his trauma - and his anger - seeps through every page of his memoir, the fastest selling non-fiction book of all time.

Some of his anger is directed at Camilla, who is represented as positively Machiavellian, trying to polish her deeply tarnished public image by leaking stories about him and his brother to the British tabloids in favour of positive publicity for herself. He claims his own father did the same.

Most of his anger is directed at the British press for their unrelenting attacks on his wife, Meghan, that drove her to despair and thoughts of suicide. Like Harry's mother before her, Meghan became prey to the paparazzi predators. I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces," he writes.

And his family stayed silent, perhaps even complicit.

Is it any wonder he wanted out? And that he wanted to tell his side of things?

Maya Angelou wrote, There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

Harry knows that agony. That's why he wrote this book.

For once, he wanted to control the narrative and he's done it masterfully, not only with his memoir but also the book launch campaign (handling himself admirably in interviews with Oprah, Anderson Cooper, Stephen Colbert and in a six-part Netflix series). Cut off financially by his father and left without security, (as a royal, Harry inherited, for life, a security risk from birth) he and his wife have succeeded in becoming financially independent in short order, earning more than $100 million for their megawatt Netflix and Spotify deals and a further $20 million advance for Harry's book.

The couple had the audacity to rewrite the rules of what's always been a symbiotic if perverse relationship with the British press. They allowed only one reporter inside the church where they were married. When their son Archie was born, they skipped the ritual photo op outside the hospital and published a baby pic on their Instagram feed instead.

This sparked outrage from the press along with threats of revenge: This is the shattering of a tradition that goes back for decades," one senior British journalist harrumphed to The New York Times. There is a price to be paid for that, and that price is mockery."

And mockery there was. Heaps of it, particularly of Meghan, who was constantly targeted and criticized in the headlines (Monster Meghan," Duchess Difficult," and, perhaps most ridiculously, Meghan Markle is related to Jack the Ripper Serial Killer"). To the point where The Guardian, a rare bastion of level-headed coverage, said, in a headline, Tormenting Meghan Markle has become a national sport that shames us."

The mockery was met with ... silence from the castle, the courtiers, the Queen and Harry's other family members. The same Buckingham Palace that implicitly countenanced Prince Andrew, embroiled in a sex trafficking scandal along with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

In his memoir, Harry is as hard on himself as he is on others, a crucial factor if you hope to be a sympathetic protagonist and win over your readers. He does not shy away from admitting to his mistakes: the disastrous choice of wearing a Nazi costume to a Halloween party, his nude Vegas strip poker photos, and his illicit drug use.

He can be petty. He writes with what feels like vindictiveness about his brother William's alarming baldness" and his famous resemblance to Mummy, which was fading with time."

Family estrangement is a difficult thing. Among my midlife friends, at least half a dozen are estranged from a sibling, myself included. In some ways the royal family's dysfunction is much like our own.

Despite the blockbuster sales of his book, there's a lot of hate for Harry. He's overexposed, people say. Overentitled. While his book is popular in Britain, Harry isn't. A recent poll shows only 24 per cent of respondents have a favourable view of him, not much ahead of his disgraced uncle Andrew.

I'm not one of the haters. I admire him for getting the help he needed, including therapy and experimenting with psychedelics under medical supervision, anything to heal.

It's brave, and so rare, especially for men, to talk openly about their mental health struggles, the way he has. In doing so he may inspire other men to do the same.

It's brave to try to protect your partner from hordes of haters. To take action that will keep your family safe.

It's brave to dare to stand up to a powerful and undemocratic dynasty like the monarchy, one that's rooted in colonization and unearned privilege and inequality.

It's brave to tell your truth, your story, even if, because you may be rich, people think you should just shut up and take it.

It's brave to try and reinvent yourself

It's brave to reclaim the word spare," as Harry does by making it the title of his book, and, in doing so, to question the cruelty of institutionalized favouritism that pits sibling against sibling. William and Harry never had a chance for true brotherly love, given the rigid pecking order they inherited.

It's brave to take back control of your life. Diana tried to do the same, when she collaborated with a writer for her book in 1992 after her separation from then Prince Charles.

Chip off the old block, Harry is.

I think his mother would be proud.

And, I suspect, that might just be what matters to him most. For women entering the other half of midlife, at least for me, it is refreshing to see character in the young whom we have watched grow up, in whom we have put some kind of stake, however vicarious.

Anne Bokma is a freelance journalist, author and writing coach in Hamilton. Her new column will appear biweekly in The Spectator. Find her at annebokma.com.