bitchy | Prince Harry is already donating his ‘Spare’ money to Sentebale & WellChild

Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, is already the transatlantic talk of the town, and it’s already available for preorder. I would imagine that it will end up being the biggest pre-order of the year on Amazon. Even people who aren’t regular royal gossip followers are like “cool title, I’d like to read that book.” We have to wait two and a half months, sob! But we’ll get there, one step at a time, battling back another palace-orchestrated smear campaign on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. You know how King Charles has masterminded an unhinged campaign against The Crown? The campaign against Harry in the next ten weeks will be like that, only much, much worse.

The Mail actually had a rare complimentary piece on the title, Spare. They talked to a branding expert who was impressed with the humor, simplicity and evocative nature of the single-word title, combined with the close-up cover photo taken by Ramona Rosales. True story: Ramona Rosales also did Meghan’s recent Variety cover shoot. Rosales does a lot of work for Variety, judging from her Instagram.

In most language translations, Spare will be translated plainly, but in Spanish, the memoir will be called Spare: En La Sombra, or In The Shadow. Hilaria Baldwin said “si, yo se!” While Harry is reportedly getting $20 million upfront for this memoir, he’s also pledged to donate the money to charity. I assume that the check went straight into the Archewell Foundation, where it will be allocated over time. Harry has already started – within the press release for Spare, he announced that he will be donating $1.5 million to Sentebale (his Lesotho AIDS charity) and £300,000 to WellChild. This follows donations to Save the Children and UNICEF made by Harry and Meghan earlier this week, targeted to Nigerian flood relief.

Lastly, in the wake of the Spare news, Dan Wootton punched out a screed against Harry, against books, against memoirs, against gingers and against American wives. Wootton must have been shrieking into the abyss for hours, hollering about “Prince Harry appears to want to bring down the Royal Family” and Harry’s “ghoulish decision to press ahead with the publication of his expected monarchy and family-bashing autobiography just four months after the death of Queen Elizabeth the Great and four months before the historic coronation of his father King Charles.” Wootton claimed with a straight face that senior royals and courtiers believed that Harry would make a U-turn on his memoir after “Harry and Meghan were welcomed back into the Windsor bosom in the days before the Queen’s funeral.” You mean when Charles went out of his way to repeatedly and publicly snub Harry and try to humiliate a man who was grieving for a beloved grandmother? Yeah, as we said at the time – the Queen’s funeral was when Harry and Meghan understood that they would never come back, under any circumstances.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images, book cover courtesy of Penguin Random House.