Ronald Reagan’s daughter said Prince Harry should have ‘shut up’ and said he would regret writing his eye-opening memoir, Spare, as she did hers.
Patti Davis, 70, wrote her own explosive memoir The Way I See It in 1992 and has since regretted revealing the inner workings of her family – much like the Duke of Sussex is preparing to do on January 10.
As new bombshells fall on the book, including a claim that the two princes had a physical altercationDavis is worried about Prince Harry and now offers him advice.
Years ago someone asked me what I would say to my younger self if I could. Without hesitation, I replied: It’s easy. I would have said: “Shut up”, she wrote in a New York Times editorial.
Patti Davis, 70, wrote her own explosive memoir The Way I See It in 1992. She is now warning Prince Harry ahead of the publication of her own memoir Spare
Davis advised the prince to “shut up” and warned that he would regret his memoir. Years ago someone asked me what I would say to my younger self if I could. Without hesitation, I replied: It’s easy. I would have said, “Shut up”, she said
Not forever. But until I can step back and look at things through a bigger lens. Until I understood that words have consequences, and they last a very long time.
It looks like Prince Harry himself may be cold-blooded about his explosive memoir, as it’s been revealed he would have liked remove Spare from shelves after Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.
But in her warning to the prince, Davis opened up about the negative consequences of her own memoir.
‘My justification for writing a book that I wish I hadn’t written (and please don’t go and buy it; I’ve written many other books since) was very similar to this which I understand to be Harry’s reasoning. I wanted to tell the truth, I wanted to set the record straight,” she wrote in the editorial.
“Naïvely, I thought that if I put my own feelings and my own truth out there, my family might understand me better too,” she continued. “Of course, people generally don’t react well to being embarrassed and exposed in public.”
She urges Harry to consider the views of Prince William and King Charles.
Regarding the allegations of a physical fight between the brothers, she says that even though Harry bragged about not hitting his brother at the moment, he did it anyway “while writing about the fight”.
She also claimed that Harry “widened” the battlefield between himself, his brother and his father and that the only way to heal such a wound is to “shut up”.
She said her own justification for her book was similar to Harry’s and that she came to regret writing it and had to apologize to her father (pictured in 1984)
She also urged Harry to consider William and Charles’ perspective. She also claimed that Harry had ‘widened’ the battlefield between himself, his brother and his father and that the only way to heal such a wound was to ‘shut up’.
“Harry called William not just his ‘beloved brother’ but his ‘sworn enemy’. He chose words that cut deep, that leave a scar; perhaps if he had taken the time to be quiet, to reflect on the lasting power of his words, he would have chosen otherwise.
She herself apologized to her own father years after her book was published when her father was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Now, looking back, she said she herself would have benefited from silence, because “silence gives you space, it gives you distance.”
“Harry can look back like me and wish he could not say what he said,” she speculated.
Davis notes that Harry – and by extension, his wife Meghan – operated from the perspective that silence is not an option, but she now argues through her own experience, “that it is”.
The explosive memoir of Prince Harry Spare (pictured) will debut on January 10
Spare – which is written by JR Moehringer – has been hailed as “well-written… heartfelt and compelling” and generally receives more positive reviews than the “repetitive and one-dimensional” Netflix docuseries Harry & Megan.
The memoir, which opens with an account of the funeral of his mother Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, is said to give ‘historical context’ to the Duke’s feelings for his family.
Prince Harry feels he “grew up in a closed and dysfunctional institution” and holds her – at least in part – responsible for his mother’s death, the source close to the editor reportedly said.
Although not yet released, Spare has already caused controversy after PR experts warned of Harry’s ‘truth bombs’such as revealing that he took cocaine and killed 25 Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, could have dire consequences for Meghan’s political hopes.
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