“Spare” him the criticism.
Prince Harry’s ghostwriter says easily proven errors in the tattletale tome “Spare” simply prove “the line between memory and fact is blurry.”
New Yorker J.R. Moehringer — who reportedly met Harry through Hollywood star George Clooney — pushed back at the backlash by posting a series of quotes from Mary Karr’s “The Art of Memoir.”
“The line between memory and fact is blurry, interpretation and fact,” one excerpt reads. “There are inadvertent mistakes of those kinds out the wazoo.”
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Manhasset native also quoted Karr noting that with “intense memories,” people “often record the emotion alone, all detail blurred into unreadable smear.”
Moehringer — whose own memoir, “The Tender Bar,” was turned into a movie starring Ben Affleck — also pointed out the once heavy-drinking, drug-taking prince warned readers just how “blurry” his facts might be.
In one of the book’s most obvious mistakes, Harry claims his mom left him an Xbox for his birthday before she died in 1997 — years before the gaming console hit the market.
Harry readily conceded in his book, “That’s the story, anyway. It’s appeared in many accounts of my life, as gospel, and I have no idea if it’s true.”
Suggesting he was “the one with brain damage” after the horror of losing his mom, Harry wrote: “As a defense mechanism, most likely, my memory was no longer recording things quite as it once did.”
Another disproven claim — that King Henry VI was his “great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather,” despite the royal’s only son dying in battle before he could have children — came in a part of the book where Harry recounted how much he hated history classes because it meant learning about his own family.
“Landscape, geography, architecture, that’s how my memory rolls,” Harry wrote in another section shared by his ghostwriter.
“Dates? Sorry, I’ll need to look them up. Dialogue? I’ll try my best, but make no verbatim claims, especially when it comes to the nineties.”
Inside Harry’s memoir bombshells
In another section Moehringer tweeted, Harry suggested “things like chronology and cause-and-effect are often just fables we tell ourselves about the past.”
“Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does… and there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts.”
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Still, many were shocked the errors weren’t picked up by fact checkers — especially since Harry has justified his explosive revelations as making “history” right.
Other mistakes include Harry saying he heard news of the 2002 death of his “Gan-Gan,” the Queen Mother, while he was at school, despite photos showing him skiing in Switzerland with his dad and brother at the time.
He also claimed his wife Meghan Markle had “booked and paid for” a first-class Air New Zealand flight to get her estranged dad from Mexico to the UK for the couple’s royal wedding — though the carrier says it has “never operated flights” on that route nor had a first-class option.
Elsewhere, Harry bragged about being so down-to-earth that he mostly bought his clothes at TK Maxx — the UK version of discount store TJ Maxx — where he “was particularly fond of their once-a-year sale, when they’d be flush with items from Gap or J. Crew.”
TK Maxx told The Telegraph: “Whilst we’re delighted Prince Harry is a big fan, we thought we should explain we don’t actually do sales.”
Royal biographer and historian Hugo Vickers maintained the errors were “quite serious” and only further “discredit” the exiled royal’s explosive allegations.
“I’m horrified by the amount of mistakes that have been found, both historical and also in relation to things he did,” he told The Times of London. “If he can get those sorts of things wrong, what else can he get wrong, you ask yourself.”
Page Six previously revealed Moehringer got a $1 million advance for “Spare,” while Harry got at least $20 million upfront.
Moehringer also helped tennis champion Andre Agassi as well as Nike founder Phil Knight write their memoirs. Fittingly, in the forward to the book about his own dysfunctional family, the Long Islander said his favorite childhood work was “The Prince and the Pauper.”
