TThe two boys have grown up 20 years and nearly 3,500 miles apart, both navigating their parents’ dysfunction, both struggling to find their places in very different worlds. One was a prince; one was much closer to the poor end of the spectrum. Both would be parents when their professional paths crossed.
When that happened, unlikely as it was, the union of ghostwriter JR Moehringer and the Duke of Sussex would lead to one of the most explosive memories in living memory. Prince Harry Reveals His Soul Controversially In Revealing Savebut it was mr. Moehringer who put royal history on paper.
The New York native was perfectly positioned to do just that; he not only has a Pulitzer Prize for writing, but has also published a deeply personal autobiography, the contest bar, about his own family 18 years earlier. Rumor has it that Moehringer was introduced to Prince Harry by George Clooney, who helped turn the ghost writer’s memoir into a film of the same name, starring Ben Affleck in 2021.
Prince Harry may have grown up in a palace while Moehringer grew up in a “boarding house”, as he calls his grandparents’ crowded home in his 2005 memoir, but family trauma, yearning for affection and the mother-son bond in youth of both men closely mirror each other.
Moehringer, 58, was raised in Manhasset, Long Island, the son of a former flight attendant and her abusive husband, New York City radio DJ Johnny Michaels, real name John Joseph Moehringer. Months after giving birth to her namesake – nicknamed JR – she left him after he threatened to cut her face with a straight razor, the memoirist writes, so her father “retaliated by disappearing and withholding all help.”
The author and his mother, Dorothy, lived alternately with her parents – along with their two adult siblings, five nieces and a nephew, for a total of 12 people – and in various apartments on a tight budget. Moehringer labels his absentee father “The Voice” in his memoir, which chronicles how a number of other male influences intervened to help him learn how to become a man, particularly his bartender uncle and the other unlikely role models in his tavern. of work. .
Moehringer attends the premiere of ‘The Tender Bar’ in Los Angeles in December 2021
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“My personal list of needs was long,” he writes in the contest bar. “An only child abandoned by my father, she needed a family, a home and men. Especially men. I needed men as mentors, heroes, role models, and as a kind of male counterweight to my mother, grandmother, aunt, and five cousins I lived with. The bar provided me with all the men I needed, and one or two men who were the last thing I needed.
He often referred to his only male cousin in the house, McGraw, as his brother, and the two shared an obsessive love of sports in the shadow of some of the biggest franchises in the world. They loved the Mets “because we felt like natural losers,” Moehringer wrote in 2008.
“Even though we were only in the first innings of our lives, we were already down four races, with a weak bullpen and no bench. Children of single mothers, living on food stamps, attending so-so schools, wearing inappropriate clothing, we faced a future that seemed to include a great deal of failure, ignorance, and lack.”
Spare: Prince Harry’s memoir becomes best-selling non-fiction book of all time
McGraw pursued his love of sports professionally and became a sports and news radio host; he is currently a popular radio personality in St. Louis. Louis. Moehringer, who inherited a love of words from his eccentric grandfather and uncle, became a journalist, first working as a New York Times copier before moving in 1990 to the now defunct Rocky Mountain News in Colorado, where “newspapers still exuded a vague whiff of the frontier,” he wrote in 2008. “They had a rigid laxity, an Old West tolerance for misfits, eccentrics, outcasts, losers—and upstarts. That’s why I fit in perfectly. Not that I could articulate it at the time. I couldn’t articulate much at the time.”
He honed his craft quickly, however, moving four years later to the Los Angeles Timeswhere his work made him a Pulitzer finalist in 1998 before winning top prize in 2000 for his feature “Crossing Over,” about the descendants of slaves in Georgia.
His first major foray into writing about his own family was in 2001, after one of his Long Island cousins, Timothy Gerard Byrne, was killed on 9/11 at the World Trade Center. Manhasset, a suburban town, has been hit hard by lost lives.
He returned to Long Island to write Mr. Byrne for the Los Angeles Times, recounting a wedding speech his cousin had given which, after 9/11, struck the family as particularly prophetic and healing. The Byrnes and the rest of Moehringer’s relatives made another literary appearance in 2005, when he published the contest bar — and it wasn’t long before a man so impressed by Moehringer’s story of a fatherless child called him and asked him to write his own story.
That man was Andre Agassi.
“I wanted to see my life through the lens of [a] Winner of the Pulitzer Prize,” said the tennis legend The New York Times newspaper in 2009, adding that he sometimes felt he and his ghostwriter were like “brothers from a different mother”.
Mr. Moehringer eventually agreed and threw himself into the project. He moved to Las Vegas to delve into Agassi’s life and memoirs, studying Freud, Jung, and other psychoanalytic works in an attempt to better understand the inner workings of his subject’s mind.
“Our first few interviews were painful,” Moehringer told the Schedules. “He was completely stuck – stiff, resistant, hesitant. His memory was crystal clear about departures, but not about relationships. He hadn’t come to any conclusions about them and couldn’t make any connections.”
The ghostwriter has teased incredibly sensitive admissions – such as the tennis player’s meth use – and has woven Agassi’s life into a narrative that effortlessly explores his life, career and, most importantly, his relationship with his father.
Andre Agassi asked Moehringer to write his memoir – which reveals deeply personal details about the tennis player’s relationship with his father, as well as bombshells like the athlete’s meth use.
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Moehringer told NPR that his experience writing Agassi’s memoir taught him that “all the research in the world doesn’t take you very far — that when you start telling the story, there are all these things you don’t really know.
“And I had the wonderful advantage of being able to call him, sit with him, every time I got to something and I didn’t know what it looked like or smelled like. So it was like writing a novel about an imaginary character, but being able to call that character and say, ‘How was that? We forgot to talk about it. Tell me what that person said.’”
He said the trick to writing a memoir is “trying to inhabit their skin, and even though you’re thinking in third person, you’re writing in first person”, employing the opposite but “nice” technique he uses. for his own autobiography.
By the time the book was finished, the collaboration had been so intense that Agassi tried to convince Mr. Moehringer that his name should be in the book as well. He refused.
“It’s Andre’s memoir, not our memoir, not an ‘as-told’ memoir,” he told the Schedules When Open It was released. “It’s his realization, and he made the final choices.”
Moehringer went on to pursue other projects and write other memoirs, but landing a contract to work with Prince Harry – reportedly for over $1 million – launched him into another level of fame.
A few months before the film adaptation of Mr Moehringer’sthe contest bar was released in 2021, Prince Harry announced that he had partnered with Penguin Random House for a memoir written “not as the prince I was born into, but as the man I became.”
While the royals seem to be freaking out over Prince Harry’s book, Mr. Moehringer has been nothing but publicly kind about the contest bar both in book and film format.
“We are one big, loud, opinionated, loving family, and we have vivid and wonderful memories of the people who helped raise us,” wrote her cousin McGraw Milhaven, co-host of The Big 550 KTRS in St Louis. in 2021. “But when someone reads the book, or now sees the movie, and wants to ask a question or talk about my family, instead of getting angry because they didn’t get it right, I love it. I can talk about the people I loved.”
From left, William, Harry, Meghan and Kate at the 2018 Armistice Day centenary
(Getty)
He continued, “There is a truth to storytelling. The storyteller tells the story. When our family comes together, I’m sure it’s similar to the way you connect with your family. We argue and debate what happened, how it happened, why it happened. We never reached a resolution and almost never agreed. But no matter how much we argue, I often get the feeling that the room is overflowing with pure love.”
That’s not exactly the feeling anyone is getting about how the king and the wider royal clan are reacting. Save. Until Mr. Milhaven, on the day of its release, was less than eager to talk about his ghostwriter cousin, citing the media frenzy surrounding the book’s publication.
“We are thrilled for JR, and he is a great writer,” was all he felt comfortable sharing with The Independent.
Mr. Moehringer now lives in the Bay Area with his wife, editor Shannon Welch, and their two children; his beloved mother, Dorothy, passed away in August 2019. He tweeted an excerpt from his memoir as a tribute to her to her followers, which-until January 10th, the official publication date of Save – numbered only a few thousand. That number has been on the rise, however, and the ghostwriter has been constantly retweeting his explosive mentions on the site.
He has not publicly commented Save throughout Prince Harry’s whirlwind media blitz, but the revelations within the book’s pages – plus the royal’s own comments in interviews – suggest that Mr. Moehringer applied the same style of psychoanalytic interviewing that he used to relax Agassi.
The Prince and The Commoner It was one of Mr. Moehringer as a child, he writes in a new afterword to his own memoirs. It’s hard to imagine that, hungry for paternal affection in his tumultuous childhood home, he could have imagined that the title would one day, oddly enough, reflect a facet of his own life – and that his own relationship with a prince might have made him a legend.
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