Prince Harry Is Haunted by His Ghostwriter

“The birth of the reader must be at the expense of the death of the author.” So announced the French literary critic Roland Barthes in 1967, indicating what he assumed was the total irrelevance of authorial identity to the appreciation of any literary work. Try telling that to Prince Harry’s ghostwriter though. This week, author J.R. Moehringer came out from behind the scenes and into the spotlight with a long read for the New Yorker, entertainingly describing some of the highs and lows of co-creating the memoir Spare with the Duke of Sussex, as well as outlining his own circuitous life journey towards a career of what basically amounts to ventriloquism on the page.