A Tale of Two British Memoirs

I'm not sorry, I love this stupid title structure

Strictly speaking, these aren’t actually both memoirs. But in a looser sense, they both are, and that’s why I wanted to talk about them together.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve read Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman and Spare, the memoir recently released by Prince Harry. I read these together partly just because they coincidentally happened to come out around the same time—Rickman’s a little before Christmas, Harry’s just after. But it ended up being perfect because they both complement and contrast each other really well.

I want to address ~~the drama~~ around Spare first though: A lot of people have been shitting on Harry for this memoir, and honestly I think it’s mostly unwarranted because of who is saying it. It is largely the same people who love The Crown who are hating Spare, when Spare is a lot of the same story but told from Harry’s specific perspective, not from an omniscient third-person narrator’s. The drama that makes The Crown gripping impacts real people who have real trauma after living through that; saying Harry’s problems “aren’t real because he’s privileged” seems like an unfair criticism from the people who sure liked watching the groundwork for his problems be laid in The Crown. It seems to me that a lot of people who hate Spare are feeling called out by Harry saying that the paparazzi were invasive and that grieving in the spotlight was difficult becuase they were participants in making that uncomfortable for him. Very few people on the internet are criticizing the actual writing, they’re just telling on themselves.

Okay, on to the actual review(s).

Jump to thoughts on the content.

Jump to thoughts just about the writing.

Madly, Deeply and Spare: Some Thoughts

Rickman started keeping a daily diary in 1993, after the unexpected success of Die Hard vaulted him to a new level of fame. The published diaries run right up to his death in 2016, though they don’t cover every single day in between.

Even though it’s a published personal diary, full of daily musings and little notes like dealing with contractors for his flat, Rickman wrote it knowing that someday it would be published and read. So like any memoir, it was written with the knowledge of an audience. We can assume that parts are glossed over, or deliberately left out. Things have probably also been cut—maybe they were boring, or maybe his family/estate decided not to release certain details after his death. We’ll never really know.

The daily diary structure leads to a much different perspective and incredibly different content than you’d get in a traditional memoir. Because it’s not self-reflective, Madly, Deeply let us see how Rickman saw the world. We get his attitude on acting not because he’s expounding upon it and drawing up a thesis; we glean it from his complaints and reflections about filming on a particular day.

Spare, on the other hand, is clearly a reflective piece written after the fact. It was written with an audience in mind and a very specific one at that: The British royal family, and to some extent, Harry’s fans. It doesn’t seem like Harry kept much of a personal journal growing up, so he’s putting things together from memory—and probably from whatever documentation is available to him. When he has specific dates of flying places, for example, I doubt that it’s his own memory he’s referring to; where the British Royal Family is at any one time is meticulously noted and filed away.

I think this makes it really interesting to read these side-by-side because Rickman notes when Princess Diana died. On August 31, 1997, Rickman wrote,

The unnameable prevailing still, slow sadness is given an absolute shocking identity when Sean and his family arrive for breakfast and tell me that Princess Diana is dead. For a second or two I thought it was a word-game or strange joke. No—here on the terrace of the Gritti Palace, glittering in the sun and clearly one of the most beautiful places in the world, the news is brutal and true.

The next day he writes,

The newspapers are thick with it. Pictures of Diana crowd the pages; flowers carpet the streets. It is true—a light has gone out. A legend begins.

Rickman notes the funeral a couple of days later, talking about watching it broadcast on television. He notes some of the same details as Harry does—Elton John singing, especially—but doesn’t note Harry himself. After this, I don’t think he mentions Diana again at length.

Harry’s memoir, however, is largely about Diana. He was 11 when she died, so naturally, it was very formative to his personality. A large part of his life since 1997 has just been trying to come to terms with this tragedy. Harry even writes about not really believing it until recently. He allows himself to believe that she’s faked her death and gone into hiding instead, even when he knows realistically that she wouldn't do that to her children.

When he’s not explicitly talking about Diana, Harry notes the typical and not-so-typical experiences boys have growing up. He talks about wanting his father’s attention, trying to fit in at school, and how he fights with William. But all of it has an extra layer of trauma to it because the Heir/Spare dichotomy is so ingrained in this family. Everything is to protect the bloodline, to the point that it causes rifts between the boys. Harry mentions “knowing” that if William were to have a health scare, Harry is basically there to be an organ farm. ‘Organ farm’ is the phrase he uses. Harry’s health, happiness, sanity, and safety can all be sacrificed at the altar of the royal family and he talks about knowing this from a troublingly young age. From his perspective, his family did not see him as a human but as an insurance policy.

I don’t know if you read much of Jodi Picoult as a pre-teen or teen, but one of her books always stuck with me: My Sister’s Keeper. It’s a similar story: A young girl is conceived—literally, from birth—specifically to be a genetic match that can help her older sister fight leukemia. By 13, she undergoes countless surgeries, blood transfusions, et cetera. It’s not horror, but it is. The younger sister eventually has to make a choice: Sacrifice her own life for her sister, or leave the family and be her own person, knowing her sister might die if she does. It’s young adult lit, but it’s harrowing.

Spare is that in real life. (But without the actual medical issues, so far.)

For me, in the same way that Diana’s death casts a shadow over Spare, the specter of Rickman’s death haunted Madly, Deeply. I was very saddened by it in 2016, and so I felt acutely aware of where we were heading the entire time I read. I kept finding myself feeling relieved he had such love with his partner Rima for so long, and that he got to do work that made him feel happy and fulfilled. (Reading this right after my dad died at about the same age as Rickman probably fueled how I felt about some this, now that I think about it.)

Yet, unlike Harry’s reflexive reviews of how his mother’s death is impacting him at any point, Rickman doesn’t discuss his own traumas much, though there are bound to be many in any life lived. He mentions his mother’s death and briefly notes his sadness over that, but it’s rarely returned to—not because he didn’t feel it deeply, I’m sure, but he’s not writing this diary to deal with his emotions.

In fact, his fatal illness isn’t really discussed in the diaries. On September 7, 2015, he wrote,

8.30 Waiting to go to PMC and the floor came up to meet me…

He’d had a stroke. He never writes down this diagnosis, it’s left to the editors to put in a footnote. This reflects real life though: It’s not until this moment that Rickman’s close friends and associates are alerted to how sick he really is. Even in this personal diary, we get a sense that Rickman was a reserved and private person. Just a few pages before, on July 14, 2015, Rickman writes simply,

A different kind of diary now.

He’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. But again, no medical jargon, no feelings, no reflection. Just facts.

From there, the diary becomes filled with doctor’s appointments and notes on transfusions. As he grew sicker, the entries shrank, until the end abruptly at the end of 2015. He passed away on January 14, 2016. Emma Thompson, in her foreword, talks about those last couple weeks of Rickman’s life. What she has to say is beautiful and sweet and funny, inadequate words for how Rickman probably would have described her. Their friendship is never really reflected upon in the book, but it bleeds into so many pages in the way he notes her presence in his life.

As far as getting to know the subjects, both books allow the reader to do that, and— surprisingly—in similar ways. Harry’s memoir is structured, written, and presented as a memoir, and necessarily he does a lot of self-reflection in it. But it’s actually through reading between the lines that you get to know him—or a public persona of him. For instance, he talks about idolizing The British Empire as a child and then learning how damaging colonialism was and having to unlearn his own biases as an adult. Those are facts about him, but through those facts, we get to know that he’s thoughtful, open to new ideas, and not afraid to admit when he’s wrong. He could have lied and said he always knew colonialism was bad, but instead he tells the more vulnerable story, and that’s a kind of bravery.

Similarly, Rickman lets us in by the side door of talking about what’s happening around him. It’s through his observations of ill-prepared actors that we learn how dedicated he is to his craft. The title Madly, Deeply is apt because it sometimes seems like a kind of manic dedication to acting that keeps him going. The diaries can tell us facts like that he went to the doctor, but it can also show us how he was so in love with acting that he still went on stage with all manner of illnesses. It’s never stated but he comes across as responsible, thoughtful, compassionate, disciplined, and giving.

As for the writing itself:

I talked a lot about how the structure of both books impacts the story they tell above, but let’s talk about the writing.

First off: Rickman’s has been edited by Alan Taylor, but I don’t think it’s been cleaned up much. There are images of his actual diary pages in it, and the handwritten pages seem to match what ended up published. Harry’s doesn’t name an editor, but I imagine that either a ghostwriter or a very involved editor stepped in and helped. (Why in a moment.)

They are both really lovely books in their own ways. Harry’s I found pretty gripping— there’s a lot of insider knowledge that I think the media generally misses. And despite acknowledging that he didn’t like writing as a student, this is a genuinely well-written book. There’s a much better sense of storytelling and tension and self-effacement that I find missing from a lot of other memoirs. I love memoir as a genre and Harry’s is one of the better ones I’ve read. (This is what makes me wonder if I ghost writer contributed to it; this is very well-written for someone who admits to not enjoying writing in school. Not that you can’t learn as an adult, that just stuck out to me.)

A lot of memoirs fall prey to the idea that the subject is never at fault, which usually makes the subject very passive—the world is happening to them. Harry’s family happens to him, but he eventually picks himself up and makes decisions and grows as a person. He admits fault, he learns on the page. I saw some reviews wishing that he had written this in five years when everything had settled for him a little, but I really enjoy the immediacy of it: I think we are watching a man unlearn some toxic shit he was taught in real-time, and there’s a lot of power in that. I’m a big believer in acknowledging pain in the present tense instead of only talking about it when you can wrap it up with a bow as a lesson learned. This is a memoir that’s great for people who are currently unlearning their own shit and striking out on their own.

Rickman’s, despite being short diary entries, is beautifully written. He had a poet’s soul, and some of his turns of phrase are just lovely. Whether it was learned from acting or directing or just ingrained, he has a very clear sense of how to tell a story—when to pause, when to speed up, when to just hint at things. It’s a great peek into a mind that is geared toward storytelling—at moments, it feels like you’re watching someone who doesn’t totally know they’re being watched. As opposed to a creativity-focused memoir like Stephen King’s On Writing, which was written with the explicit intent of him imparting knowledge and weaving memoir in, Madly, Deeply feels like having a mentor you get to watch live their life. This is a great memoir for anyone who is living their creative passion and feeling occasionally alone in it.

It’s worth noting, of course, that these are both stories about how white men experience fame in Britain. Two sides to a coin, and I wouldn’t say they count up much to the whole dollar of Life In Britain In The Twenty-First Century. The beauty and shortfall of memoir is that it can only tell one person’s side of a story; but Alan Rickman’s and Prince Harry’s sides of their stories are fascinating.

Get Madly, Deeply at Bookshop.

Get Spare at Bookshop.

This is the first full book review(s) that I’ve done—I’d love to hear what y’all think of the new section.

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I haven’t been writing much at all lately while I grieve my father’s passing. But, a piece I wrote last October went live this week on Sprudge: When Coffee Becomes a Religious Experience. It explores the varied relationship coffee has had with religions around the world, and I had so much fun researching and writing it.

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