News about Mary Karr

When Prince Harry's miserable memoir began selling off the shelves, one thing became abundantly: the lofty promise on the jacket of 'insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom' was likely to be undermined by the book's litany of howlers and historical errors. Perhaps spotting the danger in this story, Harry's Pulitzer Prize-winning ghost writer John Moehringer (left) tweeted some words from Mary Karr's cryptic account of 'inadvertent mistakes' in memories and memoirs, hinting at 'inadvertent mistakes' in memories and memoirs. 'The line between memory and truth is blurry, between interpretation and fact,' he wrote. 'My memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers, and curates what it sees as well as traditional academic facts,' For good measure, Moehringer shared a quote from Harry himself: 'My memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers, and curates what it sees, and there's just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember as there is in so-called objective truth.' With that, the ghostwriter, who was reportedly paid £800,000 for his services, and Harry dropped back as Spare's sales plummeted: 3.2 million in the first week alone. Now Moehringer, who grandiosely claims that ghostwriting is a "essential public service," is dismissing his own imperative that 'ghostwriters don't write.' His rage is palpable.

Since a snippet from Prince Harry's memoir appears to have been misattributed to him, a former palace staffer has requested a public apology. Dickie Arbiter, 82, was press secretary to late Queen Elizabeth, but he was not identified in the Duke of Sussex's Spare. However, he claims that a quote in the book could be mistook for him if it was from him and that the publisher should apologise.