Editor’s Note: Dr. Peggy Drexler is a research psychologist, documentary film producer and author, including two books about gender and family and the forthcoming “Mean,” a book about women behaving badly, to be published by Simon & Schuster in 2024. Her latest film, “King Coal,” will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023. The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers. View more opinion on CNN.
CNN
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The soap opera that is Prince Harry versus the British monarchy continued this week with the buzz surrounding the upcoming release of his memoir, “Spare.” Contents leaked from the book and released excerpts from his forthcoming interviews with “60 Minutes” and ITV offered some eyebrow-raising anecdotes and heightened the already-sharp tension between the Duke of Sussex and his wife, Meghan Markle, and the royal family. Lurid details aside, the most notable disclosures included new details about Harry’s relationship with his brother, Prince William, whom Harry apparently refers to in the book as his “arch nemesis.”
Public interest in the royal family is at an all-time high — thanks to both real world events that include the loss of Queen Elizabeth II, the impending coronation of Harry’s father King Charles III and the resignation of former Prime Minister Liz Truss, and to the wild popularity of fictionalized series like “The Crown” — and Harry and Meghan are certainly capitalizing on that. Meanwhile, the royal family, including William, has remained silent.
Good for them. Where Harry may have once engendered some sympathy for having endured a lifetime of being the “spare” — the lesser of the two brothers, now fifth in line for the throne (coming in behind his 7-year-old niece, Princess Charlotte) — empathy is running short. Harry and Meghan quit the royal family amid complaints that they preferred a private life as “regular people,” no longer wanting the media attention that came with being royals, including being tabloid fodder. In an excerpt from an upcoming interview, Harry told ITV: “I want a family. Not an institution.”
And yet here they are, fully and willingly creating that fodder themselves.
And fodder it is. Among the gossipy allegations Harry…
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