She had just been caught by journalists trying to sell foreign access to her princely husband for £500,000, and needed a reinvention story fast. She was eating compulsively and full of self-loathing. As she recorded dramatically in her diary at the time, reproduced in her book: “I don’t know how I will earn a living any longer. I need to rest, but I have to buy food… I must trust… God will provide what I need.”

God turned out to take the form of Oprah Winfrey. As we have learned from the new release of Epstein files, just after Fergie’s unfortunate encounter with the Fake Sheik, the financier emailed Ghislaine Maxwell with a link to an article about the sting: “I do not want this to lead to me.” Quite why he should have thought it would lead to him is unclear. But in any case, he was soon able to report happier news: his friend the impecunious Duchess was now “being sheltered under Oprah’s wing… Oprah decided she had talent and skill that could be used on her network”.

And indeed, some months later, a five-part series and book were commissioned by the media tycoon, entitled Finding Sarah: From Royalty to the Real World. The idea would be to capture an inner journey from disaster to self-understanding; from privileged cluelessness to inner wisdom born of adversity. Ferguson would be berated on camera by various therapists and financial advisors; do some “soul-searching in the desert” — surely better than in the dessert — and traipse for miles through the Canadian arctic, looking for herself. She would also get hypnotized and meet a horse-whisperer. As Winfrey, in classic kindly-but-firm mode, told the gushing royal in a call at the start of the series: “all you’ve got to do, and trust me with this, is to get really real.”

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By Terry Eagleton

Hence the visit to Montecito, a miniature epic in itself. Hanging out with “a friend and spiritual counselor” called Anamika, the Duchess recorded she was there to work on her “ego”. Presumably to convey the depths of that struggle, another diary entry was included: “today the ego feels like a metal mask around my brain and head… It caused a buzzing in my ears. I started to get so angry and wished it would go away.”

Later in the same visit, apparently no longer beset by distracting buzzing sounds, things started to look up for our heroine. Staring into the abyss of her own soul, she became inspired by some Whitney Houston lyrics: “I tumbled but I did not crumble.” “Listening to this powerful song,” wrote the then-resident of the Royal Lodge in Windsor, “I pulled my shoulders back… and remembered the words of a refugee friend in Sierra Leone: ‘They can take my country, but not my soul’.”

Resilience unlocked, the chapter ends with an unexpected philosophical encounter. Conveniently popping up with some heartfelt peasant wisdom, a humble security guard at LAX airport tells the Duchess: “My name is Morgan, and I am from Wales. And I say every day that it is our duty to be happy.” Luckily for Fergie, she has finally met a duty she seems able to fulfill.

But writing her diary on the night of the Oprah deal months before this, she already seemed to be rallying. “Phew… we signed with OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) last night. A whole new start.” And it certainly was. Until then she had been drowning in debt, thanks to compulsively profligate habits. There were exotic holidays, with missed flights and endless excess baggage fees; imperious demands to staff for watercress on ice at 4am; insisting breakfast be laid out for her “in three different locations each morning so she could have a choice”.

Also according to Andrew Lownie’s entertaining biography Entitled — from which these last details are taken — she was being sued for non-payment by her lawyers, and owed thousands to others. Creditors included an artist she had commissioned for a painting, a photographic studio in Woking, and even — plot twist! — a “Malibu-based spirit guide, known as Anamika”. And as the DOJ files now make clear, in 2009 she had also been emailing Epstein about money (“I urgently need 20,000 pounds for rent today”), and had taken her young daughters to visit when he was still under house arrest for sexual crimes against minors. There is no suggestion of criminal wrongdoing on the Duchess’s part; but on the other hand, there is a strong whiff of being a narcissistic venal moron.

Along with a gift of £1.5 million from her ex-husband, the money from the OWN deal put an end to all that misery, at least temporarily. But the connection with Epstein didn’t make it into the Finding Sarah book, and nor did it seem to come up in accompanying interviews she did with Oprah. In May 2011, Ferguson emailed Epstein: “I just want to make sure you know I am going on Oprah tomorrow. And she is going to ask me about my debts, the entrapment of last year and the press about you in Jan… I just want to make sure you are aware of this and seek your advice on how you would like me to answer.” In response, Epstein advised Ferguson to say he had been unfairly characterized as a pedophile, “repaid his debt to society and… sought forgiveness”.

He needn’t have bothered; the question did not appear in the final edit. There is no suggestion here that Epstein had any influence over Winfrey, nor that there was any meaningful connection between them; the internet’s attempts thus far to establish otherwise seem to be fake. Still, an opportunity was missed by someone enormously influential to interrogate a supine Ferguson about what she knew of Epstein’s crimes, and about the extent to which her royal influence was still greasing his wheels. That line of questioning looked like an open goal, and producers appear to have been aware of it; but in practice, there is apparently a limit to how “really real” you can get.

Presumably it would have over-complicated the simple — and extremely lucrative — narrative of redemption. Energized by the fascination with tearful sofa confessions as well as a spate of makeover shows, personal reinvention was massive in the early 21st century. You could get a new house, new wardrobe, new body, new teeth: so why not a new soul too? Later in the new DOJ files, Epstein asks Deepak Chopra: “Should we bring together Woody and Oprah?” Perhaps he had in mind another miraculous reinvention, though this one appears to have been a step too far.

The trope is all over the case, viewed in retrospect. Many of the major players have risen phoenix-like from the ashes several times. The scabrous man at the heart of it was readmitted into parts of high society after his first arrest. The former Prince Andrew was widely considered a waste of space until he joined the Navy, then became a hero, then became a waste of space again when he left. Ferguson was once so unpopular during the Nineties, that — again according to Lownie — the Friargate Museum in York “removed her waxwork from its collection, recycling it as Nell Gwynn”. Even so, she bounced back afterward to something approaching public affection.

Her 2000 collaboration with WeightWatchers was literally called Reinventing Yourself, and there was yet another slim volume, published just two weeks before the cash-for-access furor, poignantly entitled What I Know: Simple Lessons Learned the Hard Way. And of course, the other notable British person caught up in Epstein’s circle is Peter Mandelson, a man with more regenerations behind him than Dr Who. Each new Mandelson fall from grace was absolutely irrevocable, until it wasn’t. Undisclosed loans, major conflicts of interest, dodgy passport applications, free cruises; they all just bounced off.

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Melania: Queen of camp

By Kathleen Stock

In the case of Ferguson — and perhaps Mandelson too, in his recent stint as US Ambassador — the fact of intercontinental ricochet must have helped. When a native son or daughter’s reputation is toast in Blighty, just head to the States and sell something with no currency whatsoever back home — the very fact of your Englishness. The covering up of personal failings seems to go better when your listeners think of you as a character from Love Actually.

Rejuvenation accomplished and back at home in the rain, your newfound Yank-reflected glory will move weaker-minded Brits to consider you redeemed too. As Andrew knows to his cost — and Keir Starmer might be about to find out — homegrown displays of self-justification and pleas for forgiveness don’t tend to go very far here with a skeptical public. But when they come pre-approved Stateside, somehow the bullshit element can get obscured.

In its time, the Oprah industry beloved by millions of women across the globe — the shows, the magazine, the book club — was criticized for its emphasis on individual responsibility, hiding the detriment of structural conditions like poverty or racism. A more basic point is that rarely was real responsibility preached at all. Instead, there was a cult of monstrous self-involvement, full of magical thinking and vacant platitudes like “look inward — the loving begins with you”, and “turn your wounds into wisdom”.

Once named out loud on the couch, personal flaws were treated as usurpers, inevitably rooted in past trauma, occasionally overwhelming you. In Finding Sarah, giddy from the attention of various Oprah-approved therapists, Ferguson is always blaming her “people-pleasing” tendencies, seemingly envisioning them as entirely separate homunculi that have inexplicably got hold of the inner joystick. And the solution is always more self-acceptance and self-forgiveness, not less.

For Oprah was first and foremost a businesswoman, and her aim was always to capture consumers. She did that best by providing salacious glimpses of the stars and feel-good fairytales about redemption, not difficult nor complicated moral lessons. And if, in the process, she ended up inadvertently laundering the reputation of a pedophile rapist at one remove — specifically, by laundering the reputation of the princess who was taking his money and inviting him to Buckingham Palace for tea in return — then perhaps she now tells herself that it is all OK; that she can offset the mistake with good deeds like it was a carbon footprint. After all, self-forgiveness in her world comes fairly cheap.

Or maybe she has calculated that, with the right sort of careful treatment, it will make for the mother of all confessional formats later on. A wide-eyed Fergie will rise from the dead once more and sit on the sofa, saying she’s terribly sorry and blaming the incessant buzzing of her ego, or those irrepressible people-pleasing tendencies. Sources say the Palace is already worried she intends to take another massive wodge from Oprah to spill the beans on Andrew’s sexual interests, but there is “not much they can do to stop her”. That watercress is not getting iced by itself; and nor is the public hunger for tearful self-abasement and spiritual metamorphosis going away anytime soon. Come to think of it, it might be a good time for that museum to put Nell Gwynn back into the melting pot.

It’s hard to quantify what a bad book is but you know one when you read it. Frey was smart enough to avoid some of the self-pitying clichés of the form but not the swamp of sentimental gloop that underlies every fallen tough-guy act on the page. The book is histrionic to the point where the only enjoyment I could salvage was to hear the clipped portentous sentences (“I am blinded by blackness. I am gone […] My eyelids fall”) in the voice of Charlton Heston’s incarnation of Moses in The Ten Commandments. It is resplendent in self-absorption yet bereft of self-awareness. Above all, there is something about the tone, or the voice that doesn’t ring true, especially if you have some knowledge of those junk-sick netherworlds. The implausibilities begin from the first paragraph with Frey, confused and clattered in various bodily fluids, making it through the check-in queue with no knowledge of doing so, only to awake on the flight with this suspect peach of an opener, “How did I get here?” It’s all too neat, convenient, theatrical, and reads like how someone would imagine a drug story to be. The publishers fell for it, maybe because this is how, from a safe and insulated distance, they imagine that lifestyle to be.

The Smoking Gun had suspicions and published the article “A Million Little Lies”, claiming a great deal of the fearlessly verité nonfiction account was fabricated. Having been exalted on Oprah’s show, Frey was all of a sudden rumbled a la Eyes Wide Shut and ominously summoned back, a different kind of gaze now upon him. “I have to say it is difficult for me to talk to you,” Oprah began, “because I feel really duped. But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.” Much of what follows is painful to watch, though also far more compelling and hilarious than A Million Little Pieces.

The most astonishing comments, though, came not from the author but his publisher Nan A. Talese, who cited the book’s “authenticity” as the reason she bought the manuscript. Authenticity was the very quality that it lacked. However, its phoniness went undetected. Another revelatory line came courtesy of Oprah who was aghast that the collapse in ethics might facilitate, god forbid, the dystopian scenario that “anybody can just walk in off the street with whatever story they have and say this is my story”. The reality is that stories from the edges of obliteration are by their nature chaotic, compromised, and rife with lies and indignities, all of which would be infinitely more “authentic” than the abject display of false virtue witnessed on The Oprah Winfrey Show and in the performative book it first championed and later denounced.

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Make Catholicism weird again

By Darran Anderson

“This is my truth,” Nye Bevan used to say, “tell me yours.” This points to the crucial subjectivity of memory, the very basis of memoir, but also demonstrates an openness and unwillingness to police others, acknowledging the ambiguities and contradictions with which we each imbue our real stories of the past, frailties that we do not afford others. Interviewing two of my aunts while researching an event they experienced during the Irish Troubles, I watched a spirited conversation erupt about the veracity of a tiny, seemingly insignificant detail, a detail so slight I cannot recall what it was. Each swore her version was true. And at no point did I believe either was lying. This kind of honest ambivalence is normally unwelcome in literary circles, where authenticity is not something you embody; instead, it is something you sell. What is required by the industry (for it is more industry now than art) is agony followed by redemption. The deeper and more salacious the turmoil experienced, the greater the pleasure aroused in a voyeuristic reader.

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn might seem to be at the other end of the spectrum from the detumescent machismo of A Million Little Pieces. Yet they share more than the disgrace in which they are mired. The Salt Path is a more agreeable elegiac read, mainly because nature is an endless repository of poetry and can be leaned on when talent or vision is wanting. The book about a middle-aged couple, one with a terminal diagnosis, who are evicted from their Arcadian home and then take to the road, sold over two million copies and has recently been adapted as a movie.

Again, success brought unwanted attention. Self-regard and an inclination towards pomposity are not unusual to memoirs, but using the opening lines of The Odyssey as an epigraph is inviting trouble. The book is touching at times but cloying at others. It wobbles in its encounters with others that feel unlikely, the language and sentiments unnatural. As in Frey’s book, there’s a lot of occasionally ludicrous self-mythologizing. Where his was mock-infernal, hers is mock-Edenic. Its arc, like Frey’s, is one of formulaic redemption, despite both feigning to deny it. Is this the message required by a publishing industry whose design is to entertainingly soothe or even sedate, rather than genuinely illuminate?

A newspaper investigation, by Chloe Hadjimatheou for The Observer, has questioned numerous aspects of Winn’s story, from their financial conduct to the gravity of Moth’s illness. Winn has denied the accusations, and defended the veracity of the “physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives”. We may never know what is true and false. Intriguing, though, is the sense of betrayal currently reverberating through the literary establishment, a grievance that perhaps tells us more about the aggrieved than anything else.

The affront Frey and Winn seem to have caused among the literati is not merely that they may have told half-truths. On the surface, there are genuine and well-placed concerns that nonfiction must be objective and verifiable. Memoir is, however, reliant on memory, which is subjective and unreliable. And they have exposed the whole misery memoir genre for what it is: a money-spinning opportunity and an exercise in trauma porn. The outrage is partly down to the fact publishers paid for the tender delicacy of suffering and were cheated out of it. The gladiatorial battle they were baying for was only a rigged wrestling match. The authors in question will be treated as aberrations, in order that the publishing industry, which has courted and encouraged tall tales, continue to appear noble. Yet the adage “don’t hate the player, hate the game” remains evergreen. There will be PR motivated calls for due diligence, of course. But will there be any calls for a vampiric industry to examine its own motives?

I know the publishing game fairly well, having written a memoir several years ago about growing up during the Troubles. It was based around an Oulipo idea of Georges Perec, whereby stories are told via objects. I called the book Inventory after the list of objects that made up my chapters — a deliberate double meaning, an admission that there was always going to be some degree of invention to the creative process. I would be an unreliable narrator, even to myself. Objective facts were sacrosanct, especially the dead, but interpretations and recollections inevitably varied. Leaning into this uncertain complexity felt more truly representative of the political and social fabrications that surround us. A memoir does not and cannot recreate the past but instead creates a simulacrum of it. “Memory,” Walter Benjamin wrote, “is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre.”

In writing about Northern Ireland, I was quite aware of what I was undertaking. There is a cultural omertà there (“the tight gag of place,” as Seamus Heaney called it); writers are regarded as something between a spokesperson, a thief, a liar and a snitch. And every time I tried to approach the topics of conflict, division, poverty etc, people (including family members) would become understandably protective, territorial and evasive. So I braced myself for the inevitable backlash after it was published, which of course occurred. The last lines of “24 Hours from Tulsa” regularly replay in my head: “I can never, never, never go home again.” And it was my own fault for stirring up what had been laid to rest stirred and for piercing coping mechanisms. After a year of barely speaking to my father because of my book, no sooner had I helped to place his coffin in the hearse than I felt a tap on the shoulder from someone who wanted to discuss something I’d written in it. And it struck me how unprepared most writers are, how little counsel the industry gives, and how many of my writer friends have been encouraged to tell a certain exposing type of story, to publish and be damned. And, sure enough, they have been damned.

It fits with a wider trend whereby working-class, ethnic minority, gay, trans, disabled, and neurodivergent writers are expected to write (and sometimes only permitted to write) about those “issues”, while those higher up the social hierarchy are allowed free rein to write about anything. Marginalized identity and trauma are currency. In my case, I’d ended up writing Inventory after my previous book Imaginary Cities had caught the attention of mainstream publishers. Many were keen to listen to my ideas for half a dozen books in that spirit. Nevertheless, virtually all came to the conclusion that the Troubles were all I was fit to write about. It didn’t matter if I had an audience or a voice for something entirely different. I had to stay in the box assigned to me. My compromise was to try and expand the box as much as possible — hence the Oulipo approach — but the box remains and has ever since. So long as the desires for comfort, virtue, redemption, consolation and the status quo prevail, actual authenticity will always be of secondary importance. This is primarily because truth isn’t pretty or palatable. Orwell was onto something when he wrote, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

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By John Maier

No one has done more to establish that redemption-fixated literature which clogs up the bestseller lists than Oprah Winfrey. How appropriate to see her at the wedding of Jeff Bezos, whose company has caused the extinction of countless independent bookshops. It made me realize that the televised struggle session between Oprah and Frey had not been about justice. It was a humiliation ritual, and a cleansing on behalf of an exploitative cultural establishment.

For it’s one thing to lie in a book, it’s quite another to sustain an industry on untruths. And the deception reaches all the way down the food chain to the bookshops Amazon hasn’t yet managed to wipe out. Having worked at a succession of them over the years, I know that the more corporate and mainstream they are, the more corrupt they tend to be. Only one example of this is handselling, whereby a customer would ask booksellers for personalized recommendations. At stores across the nation, there were tally sheets hidden below the counter, encouraging us to sell one of a handful of preordained titles from on high. Deals had been struck with publishers for discounts and favorable terms, if we pushed these orchestrated “word-of-mouth” successes: targets had to be hit.

All of the chosen books were on characteristically middlebrow themes, to the point it felt like social engineering. Each store competed with others to sell the most and managers would drag booksellers over the coals for not hitting quotas. In this way, aided by a cliquish literary criticism industry, the success of certain books has been astroturfed, and an orthodoxy is implanted where characters are always good at heart, life is some centrist fantasy, and narrators find the flattering lessons they want to find — with some quarantined space set aside for the more uncouth writers to flog their trauma and identities. This is what the audience wants, publishers claim, despite the fact that the entire scenario has been covertly manufactured and readers have been duped.

In such an environment you will always get grifters and the sloppy ones will be scapegoated to legitimize it all. Pearls will be clutched over deceptive practices but the appetite and the grift will remain, for as long as publishing remains so unrepresentative of how most people live in this country. Until that hermetically sealed publishing world democratizes, fictional nonfiction will always be incentivized and will always reappear. And readers will be forced to be voyeurs and then jurors rather than being allowed the freedom of reading writers who are allowed to be writers.

James Frey, author of the bestselling memoir A Million Little Pieces, had been exposed as a fraud. Oprah Winfrey, formerly his biggest champion, was about to confront him live on national television. And she was pissed.

“I’ve struggled with the idea of it,” Frey said, in response to a question about the famous and then-allegedly fallacious scene in his book in which he receives a root canal without anaesthesia. Oprah snapped. “No,” she said, icily. “Not the idea of it. The lie of it.”

Frey, whose book was published in 2003, was the most notorious literary fabulist of the moment, but hardly the only one. The Noughties were rife with fabricators. There was Margaret Seltzer, who had lied about being a biracial gang member in South Central Los Angeles. There was J.T. Leroy, a trans sex worker, drug addict, and author of semi-autobiographical novels — who turned out to be the imaginary alter-ego of a middle-aged woman named Laura Albert. There was Herman Rosenblat, whose Holocaust memoir Angel at the Fence was cancelled when it turned out that, though his story of surviving the Buchenwald concentration camp was true, the improbable tale of the little girl who saved his life by throwing apples over the camp’s barbed wire fence, and later became his wife, was not.

All very different narratives, and yet, with a common thread — one that at the time spurred a fiery debate about memoir as a genre, and the proliferation therein of what could only be described as trauma porn.

Memoir offers all the enticing horror of sexual abuse, of graphic violence, of watching a man strapped down and brutalised by a dentist — while offering the upright reader plausible deniability. He consumes these books not because he finds such things titillating but because he cares. Audiences want to read about pain and suffering, abuse and exploitation; you were supposed to feel bad for the people who had written these books, while also feeling good about how bad you felt.

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The Little Mermaid is Disney propaganda

By Kat Rosenfield

When Oprah angrily told James Frey that he had “betrayed millions of readers”, it was this crucial contract he was accused of violating. Because if these stories weren’t true, then the people who were thrilled by them weren’t empaths, but voyeurs.

Today, the collective horror at Frey’s deception feels like the product of a more innocent time, particularly when compared with the muted response to last week’s unmasking of his contemporary equivalent. Comedian and television personality Hasan Minhaj, an alumnus of The Daily Show, built his career on stories of the persecution he had faced as an Indian, Muslim son of immigrants in a post-9/11 America. But as outlined in a devastating report by New Yorker writer Clare Malone, his most popular material contained key omissions and barefaced lies.

The FBI informant who infiltrated Minhaj’s Muslim community and then reported his mosque to the authorities? Minhaj never met him. The hospitalisation of Minhaj’s daughter after someone mailed him an envelope full of a white mystery powder that could have been anthrax? Never happened. And the high school ex-girlfriend who accepted Minhaj’s invitation to prom, only to jilt him on her doorstep for racist reasons while her new (white) date slipped a corsage on her wrist? She had actually turned down Minhaj several days earlier, and this doorstep moment — upon which Minhaj more or less built his career — was a complete fabrication.

Much like Frey, Minhaj’s popularity centred on his suffering. His work was understood to express the crude, unvarnished and sometimes darkly funny truth of what it is like to be a brown-skinned man in a racist America: white liberal audiences treated him as a sort of mascot for the oppressed, while the culturati lauded him for speaking truth to power. Here, as Slate writer Nitish Pahwa puts it, was “an Indian Muslim, hosting his own show, taking the country to task on his terms, terms that had long been absent from the white man–dominated industries of stand-up comedy and late-night TV”.

But things are a little more complicated when the fabricator is telling tales on the stage rather than the page. It is understood that for comedians, the question of truth, as in authenticity, is something separate from what is true, as in accurate. Comedians will do anything for a laugh, lying included, and everybody knows this — even if the precise ethical boundaries of untruth are sometimes the subject of debate, including by comedians themselves. An essay from 2017 by screenwriter and stand-up David Misch, which tackles this very question, includes a prescient little frisson:

“I agree that the idea of authenticity in a stand-up’s persona is bullshit, but subject matter is a different matter — specifically, when a comedian moves from personal observations to cultural critiques. Wouldn’t we feel betrayed if we found out that the political routines of … Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, and Seth Meyers (now) didn’t reflect their beliefs? Being Muslim-American is central to Hasan Minaj’s identity as a stand-up — wouldn’t we feel differently about him if it turned out he was Baptist?”

Misch presents this as a rhetorical question, and it is — but only because of the kind of comedian Minhaj is, which is to say, the kind who is not particularly funny. Consider the top YouTube result from his Netflix special, Homecoming King, in which he talks about the harassment his family endured after 9/11. There are ripples of laughter here and there, but it’s only when he stops joking and starts preaching — “I have the audacity of equality!” he says — that the audience explodes like they’re at a tent revival.

Of course, this is as intended. Minhaj isn’t a make-you-laugh-til-your-face-hurts comedian; he’s a Daily Show guy, a pundit with a slightly-better-than-average sense of humour, but one that is smug rather than silly. His audience isn’t there to laugh so much as enjoy the sensation of moral authority with a wink and a titter. And while Minhaj’s material works well enough on television, onstage it translates to something that is less stand-up comedy and more performance memoir.

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Here, Minhaj is following in the footsteps of performers such as Hari Kondabolu, John Oliver, Seth Myers, and, of course, Hannah Gadsby, whose Netflix special Nanette was more trauma porn that explicitly scolded its audience for showing up expecting to laugh. Critics at the time suggested that Gadsby had broken some final frontier, effectively severing the connection between comedy and jokes. Maybe laughter had had its moment; maybe what we needed from comedians now was some moral instruction in what isn’t funny. Maybe what we needed was to feel bad — and to feel good about how bad we felt.

Under this new contract, drawn up amid the creeping identitarianism of Trump-era art, it is not hard to see why someone like Minhaj might fall into the trap of not just monetising his trauma, but fabricating it. It is what Jay Caspian Kang called “oppression fantasy”, writing that Minhaj’s fakery represents “another example of how oppression stories — in this case fabricated oppression porn — gets leveraged by upwardly mobile immigrants to mostly advance their careers”.

It is also a familiar dynamic to anyone who remembers the memoir hoaxes of 20 years ago; the type of audience who flocks to see Minhaj today is the same one that made James Frey a bestseller. There is nothing that white educated liberals love more than to slum it in a voyeuristic narrative of someone else’s suffering, all while congratulating themselves on being enlightened enough to appreciate it for the art it is. Inject a bit of racial guilt into the mix, and you’ll dine out for the rest of your life courtesy of the New Yorker tote bag class — at least until one of said magazine’s investigative reporters finds out you’re full of shit.

But today’s trauma merchants are ultimately better off than the hoax memoirists. The days in which audiences responded to lies like this with a sense of outrage and betrayal are over; if anything, the anger today is reserved for the person who interrupts a comfortable narrative with a bunch of pesky facts. Consider what happens, inevitably, whenever some bias-stroking outrage is exposed as a fraud — whether it’s Jussie Smollett, or kids identifying as cats, or a guy allegedly shrieking the N-word at a crowded sporting event. Instead of revising our priors, or even being relieved, we look for ways in which being wrong only goes to show how right we were. So, this story wasn’t true? Ah, well: this country is so racist, or sexist, or full of sexually depraved weirdos who want to secretly turn every kid into a trans-cat, that it could have been true, and that’s just as bad.

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Or, as Hasan Minhaj might put it, it doesn’t matter if the story is fake when it is “emotionally true” — which is to say, when it feels like something that could have happened. Needless to say, some people object to this, not least the woman who politely declined that prom invitation as a teenager: she and her family have been receiving death threats for years thanks to Minhaj’s fabrications, a fact about which the comedian is decidedly cavalier. Maybe this girl didn’t do what he described, he says, and maybe what he described wasn’t done to him — but it had certainly happened sometime, to someone, somewhere: “There are so many other kids who have had a similar sort of doorstep experience.”

No doubt this is true, and not just of kids like Minhaj; when I was 17, a more popular boy took me out on a date, then dropped me back at my house several hours later with the dire warning that I couldn’t tell anyone that we were seeing each other. He simply couldn’t risk the humiliation of his friends knowing he was interested in someone like me. His reasons for this had nothing to do with race and everything to do with high-school social dynamics; if I were telling this story as part of a stand-up routine, perhaps I would have to find a way to make him an antisemite.

But despite the fact that the prom story is emotionally resonant with many a teenage experience, there is still something weird — even, dare I say, appropriative — about claiming to have been a victim of something that didn’t happen, let alone making a living off it. On this front, Minhaj has less in common with the comedian who embellishes a wacky story for laughs, and more in common with the TikToker who scammed her followers out of thousands of dollars to treat a cancer she didn’t have. Minhaj has been dining out for years on that doorstep moment. He published it as an essay in Vanity Fair. He’s spoken about it countless times with reporters, never presenting it as anything but a first-person experience. And while it has become a fixture of his comedy over the years, when Minhaj first debuted this material, it wasn’t actually in a stand-up routine, but at a storytelling competition called The Moth.

It is an interesting institution, The Moth: a sort of open-mic night for anecdotes, a performance memoir showcase. It has just one rule: the story you tell on its stage has to be true.

But a noble aspiration is one thing. The emerging reality looks worryingly like one of those “How It Started/How It’s Going” memes. Take, for instance, his latest gig. He’s to be “Commissioner on Information Disorder” at the nonprofit Aspen Foundation, sitting on a panel holding a six-month inquiry into the spread of misinformation online.

And this is how he announced it:

“As I’ve said, the experience of today’s digital world has us inundated with an avalanche of misinformation, affecting our ability as individuals as well as societies to think clearly and truly understand the world we live in. It’s my belief that this is a humanitarian issue and as such, it demands a multi-stakeholder response from advocacy voices, members of the media, academic researchers, and both government and civil society leaders. I’m eager to join this new Aspen commission and look forward to working on a solution-oriented approach to the information disorder crisis.”

Just cherish every word of that: “multi-stakeholder response”, “advocacy voices”, “civil society leaders”, “solution-oriented approach”. Leaving aside the questionable metaphor in that clunking first sentence (can you be inundated by an avalanche?), here is a full card of Bullshit Bingo. These are expressions that no ordinary English-speaking human being has ever uttered spontaneously aloud or written without irony; they are the zombie catchphrases of a corporate PR department.

I have no way of knowing for sure that this is not how Prince Harry naturally expresses himself. But I hope it won’t be considered lèse-majesté to say, I hae ma doots. And in a way it doesn’t matter. It is a sign of how far in the shit we are that many, if not most, people will assume it was written for him, and won’t think anything much of it.

Not only do we consume misinformation but we expect to, and correct for it, and blithely wave through what looks like misinformation even when it’s contained in the announcement of someone “eager” to embark on a new job waging war on misinformation.

Corporate, comms-style bullshit presented as personal from-the-heart statements is so normalised that it looks like nitpicking to even raise the question. Of course you’re not actually supposed to think that Prince Harry thinks anything of the sort, or that if he did, this is how he’d tell you about it. Don’t be so naive!

You could compare the idiom of Prince Harry’s statement, as quoted last week in the announcement of his last new gig — as Chief Impact Officer (whatever that is) for a billionaire wellbeing startup called BetterUp:

“As BetterUp’s first Chief Impact Officer, my goal is to lift up critical dialogues around mental health, build supportive and compassionate communities, and foster an environment for honest and vulnerable conversations. And my hope is to help people develop their inner strength, resilience, and confidence.”

Italics – my hope; my goal — thus. The statement goes on for ages, so I won’t quote it all, but in addition to “lift up critical dialogues around”, we can tick off “driving advocacy”, “peak performance”, “thought leadership”, “outreach and strategic planning”, “self-optimisation” and many more on the bingo card.

More buzzphrases — but tailored in this case to mental wellbeing corporate nonsense rather than tech-bro civil-society corporate nonsense. This statement was introduced, incidentally, by one from BetterUp’s CEO which ended: “I could go on, but I think he can say it better himself.” It seems to me quite possible that the same person drafted both those statements. But let’s suppose it was not, and that Prince Harry not only spoke from the heart about the Aspen Foundation, but that he spoke likewise from the heart about BetterUp, and that he deftly altered his style on each occasion. In some ways, that would be worse: it would suggest that, rather than just letting these organisations put words in his mouth, he has allowed their empty idioms to soak into his very soul.

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The Royal Family always wins

By Will Lloyd

Some years ago, I was hosting a series of book events sponsored by a hotel chain. When they were being announced, the very nice and amiable PR for the hotel let me have a look at the press release. It contained a substantial quote from me, which he had invented (and which sounded not unlike the sort of thing attributed here to the Prince). He was genuinely surprised, and seemed not a little put out, when I insisted that anything I was quoted as saying or writing should be stuff I myself said or wrote. It was, he said, standard practice to do things the way he did them.

Perhaps it is. But look: the Duke of Sussex is a person who has staked his career and the second half of his life on being his own man. He has made authenticity — “speaking your truth”, as Oprah puts it — his big thing. He and his wife have spoken eloquently of refusing to be part of a system where the image of the Firm trumps the authentic needs and feelings of individuals. And yet here he is, within months, meekly offering himself as a human meatpuppet: his name and image, his personal beliefs and feelings, are available to be presented to the world in the hackneyed corporate cliches of a press release.

Even if you haven’t made a performance of how important it is to you to be your own man, parroting the sort of balderdash that comms departments churn out isn’t a trivial thing. It sells the pass.

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Prince Harry is a Freudian dream

By Giles Fraser

Of course Prince Harry would say — and no doubt truthfully — that he’s only taking jobs that align with his existing beliefs and support the causes he cares about. And perhaps he really does believe that he has a unique set of skills that make his executive role in these organisations worth every penny — that he’s a mental health professional and a shrewd analyst of the information ecosystem. Perhaps he believes that he can meaningfully do multiple senior executive jobs at once, and that his name on the masthead is no more than the cherry on the Bakewell tart.

But the application of Occam’s razor here suggests that it’s the right to have their language issue from Prince Harry’s mouth and have him glad-hand donors or shareholders that these companies are really paying for. They’re using him as… how would you put it? A figurehead. Imagine finding yourself in a job where your only role was to sprinkle celebrity fairy-dust on good causes and mouth strings of empty formal phrases. It sounds pretty soul-destroying to me. It sounds, in fact, a bit like being a member of the Royal Family.

The first belonged, to Piers Morgan, who was forced to quit Good Morning Britain after six successful if noisy years for daring to express disbelief at a number of the Duchess’s claims. The claiming of the second scalp, however, has attracted far less attention — even though it serves as an equally, if not more, damning parable for our times…

Do facts still matter? On the face of it, that question appears to have a straightforward answer: of course facts matter; fact-checking is a divine skill and the best defence we have against so-called “fake news”. But in today’s troubled climate, you’re increasingly likely to be given an altogether different response: “Facts? Why are you demanding facts. Don’t be racist.”

Just ask Ian Murray, who until this week was the executive director of the Society of Editors, but now finds himself jobless. The Society attempts, in its own words, to “fight for media freedom”. But as Mr Murray (no relation) has discovered, media freedom is just as elastic as almost every other freedom in this freedom-less age.

In this regard, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s interview with Oprah Winfrey was something of a litmus test. In a free society, people would be able to watch it and draw a number different, but acceptable, conclusions. In an unfree society, however, only one permissible opinion would be allowed. If the past days have taught us anything, then surely it is clear that we have failed this test. The second reality has been borne out, and, as a result, Mr Murray has been forced to end his career.

One of the most disturbing accusations levelled by both Harry and Meghan during their interview concerned the toxicity of the British press, in particular the British tabloids. But a claim does not become true simply because a Duke or Duchess says it. Indeed, it is striking that while the comments made by the Sussexes on the Royal Family have been heavily scrutinised in recent days, their accusations against the British press have managed to slide by, accepted as though they were simply fact.

It didn’t matter that their claims — presented, it should be noted, more as assertions — were particularly egregious: that the reason why Meghan and Harry had come in for criticism from the British press was because Meghan identifies as black, thus implying that the British media is racist.

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How Meghan won

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In the face of such damning charges, it is striking that much of the media has chosen to keep its head down; the Guardian proved a notable exception, predictably endorsing the Sussexes’s worldview. As for the others, I suspect their silence come from a simple and understandable desire not to get in the line of fire.

In the end, the only person brave enough to stand up for Britain’s newspapers turned out to be the since-departed executive director of the Society of Editors. In a statement issued after the Sussexes’s interview, he rightly pointed out that the British press “is not bigoted and will not be swayed from its vital role holding the rich and powerful to account”. It continued: “It is not acceptable for the Duke and Duchess to make such claims without providing any supporting evidence.”

In itself, such a statement should have been unremarkable. But as the fall-out from the past few days has shown, demanding “supporting evidence” can you turn you into a pariah.

In this instance, I suspect that’s probably because when the Sussexes and their supporters talk about racism towards Meghan, genuine examples are never forthcoming. For example, at one point during the interview, Oprah launched into a monologue detailing how Meghan “became the target of unrelenting, pervasive attacks” when she joined the royal family.

To illustrate her point, a selection of allegedly racist headlines from British newspapers appeared on screen. Pretty damning stuff, you might think. Except for the fact that a significant proportion of the headlines were taken completely out of context. More than a third of the articles shown during the interview were from American and Australian publications. And in the case one of the most egregious headlines — “Meghan’s seed will taint our Royal Family” — Oprah failed to mention that the purpose of the news story was actually to expose racist comments made by a model.

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Why is the woke mob so scared?

By Douglas Murray

Point this out to the Sussexes, though, and no doubt they’ll respond that their treatment has still been particularly unpleasant. But such a claim wrongly assumes that other members of the Royal Family have managed to avoid intrusive or negative coverage from the media; or that, when they have, it hasn’t amounted to much. When Meghan, in her Oprah interview, acknowledged that the Duchess of Cambridge had been branded “Waity Katie” by the media for waiting so long for Prince William to propose to her, it was telling that she went on to conclude, with Oprah’s encouragement, that Kate’s unpleasant experience didn’t compare to her own.

As it happens, I find it rather telling that Meghan chose this particular example to illustrate media intrusion into Kate’s life. For when it comes to intrusion, is there anything more intrusive than the publication of photos, in the French press, of the Duchess of Cambridge topless? Unpleasant as it may be, it’s the simple truth that the world’s press is intensely interested in every aspect of the Royal family, and that they are interested in it because their readers — the public — want them to be.

That’s why Ian Murray was entirely right, as the head of a body representing editors, to push back against the unsubstantiated claims made by the Sussexes; to say that if high-profile figures such as Harry and Meghan are going to accuse the press of singling them out, let alone being racist in the process, then they should show proof.

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Prince Harry is a Freudian dream

By Giles Fraser

In a reasonable age that would be a reasonable demand. And that was the only mistake Murray made: forgetting that this age is far from reasonable. The Society of Editors was soon targeted by the usual online activists and Murray was forced to resign, announcing that he had to “take the blame” for his initial statement. “While I do not agree the society’s statement was in any way intended to defend racism, I accept it could have been much clearer in its condemnation of bigotry and has clearly caused upset,” he said.

A new statement from the Murray-less board made the necessary confession, acknowledging that there is “a lot of work to be done in the media to improve diversity and inclusion”. The society went on to promise that it “will reflect on the reaction our statement prompted and work towards being part of the solution.”

So another person finds themselves without a job and another institution bends towards the dogmatic orthodoxies of the time. There are ugly winds in the air. And with evidence and facts unable to save us, I fear Mr Murray’s scalp will not be the last.

“Your truth”. That phrase slipped off Oprah’s tongue with such ease during her interview with Meghan and Harry. But on this apparently simple construction hangs a question that has divided us with an explosion of animosity: how many truths can there be?

With the new world once again pitted against the old, I find myself reminded of the words of another Royal confidante, those of Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “To thine own self be true,” he advised his son. This sentiment seems to encapsulate so much of what is philosophically at stake in this interview, with the Prince and the Princess expressing “their truth”, a truth that was as much a function of the need to be true to who they are, as it was a reference to objective reality.

Put aside for one moment the on-going debate about their claims concerning Royal racism, for it seems to me that there is a troubling tension between two meanings of truth going on here: being true to yourself, something we have come to call authenticity, and truth as an empirical statement of fact.

The former was largely conceived by Rousseau and is often known as “expressivism” — the idea that, as the philosopher Charles Taylor describes in his magisterial Sources of the Self, “the moral or spiritual order of things must come to us indexed to a personal vision.” And this is where we divide. For some their “personal vision” is a hallmark of truth; for others it is very much a reason to be suspicious of it.

Here, too, it’s worth returning to Hamlet — not least because it is impossible not to be struck by the parallels between its title character and Prince Harry. For Freud, Hamlet represented an archetypal example of the Oedipus complex: a kind of childhood compulsion where a son develops an unconscious sexual desire for his mother and a sense of rivalry with his father.

Joseph Schwartz, in his definitive history of psychoanalysis, Cassandra’s Daughter, sees this “sexualisation of the mother-son relationship” as “part of the dynamic of the Victorian patriarchal family”. He continues:

 “This family romance is dominated by an absent authoritarian father who, arriving home, asserts his own needs over his children’s by making overt or covert sexual demands on his wife. The wife, resentful of abandonment by her husband and of his authoritarian attitudes, lavishes attention on her son. And the son, perceiving rivalry for the mother’s affections expressed in sexual terms, responds in kind.”

It is hard to read these words and not be reminded of the relationship between Charles and Diana, a woman “resentful of abandonment by her husband and of his authoritarian attitudes [who] lavished attention on her son”.

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By Giles Fraser

If Freud has taught us anything, it is that we may not always be the best judges of who we really are, let alone what really drives us. That is the very point of the unconscious; we are run by forces that we do not always properly understand, which are often repressed, working away in the background without us being fully aware of them. And if this is the case, then the problem with “my truth” is not just that it can fail to describe objective reality, but — and this is crucial — that it may fail, just as much, to describe subjective reality too.

That is not to say whether we should or should not believe Meghan or Harry. Instead, Freud’s work simply demonstrates that phrases such as “my truth” are not always helpful, either objectively and subjectively. It presumes too quickly that there is little more to inner truth than simply what you feel. But as the psychoanalytic experience so often demonstrates, “my truth” also requires a kind of discipled critical vigilance — the sort of push-back provided by a skilled analyst.

All of us are complex creatures; we are often a mystery, even to ourselves. And being at the intersection of Royalty and celebrity no doubt makes one’s life confusing in ways that are unimaginable to most of us, especially given that both are objects of considerable projection. It cannot be a coincidence that the stories that Freud most associated with the Oedipus complex — Oedipus Rex and Hamlet — are stories about princes.

None of this would matter so much were it not for the fact that the “truth” expressed to Oprah has the capacity to undermine one of the constitutional foundations of this country. It is one thing to sit on a couch in front of a therapist and work out your issues in private. I have done so myself and recommend it.

It is quite another to sit in front of millions of people, giving a half-interview, half-therapy session conducted by an unchallenging friend and neighbour, and for others to take this on face value. The stakes are far too high to allow “my truth” to go unchallenged. At the end of Hamlet, most of the protagonists lie dead; the court in ruins. “To thine own self be true” may have a nice ring to it. But it remains very poor advice.

Typified by its remarkable tendency to sound both sincere and insincere simultaneously, this Sussex-ese appeared again in a separate news story this week. “[We are] saddened by this latest attack on her character, particularly as someone who has been the target of bullying herself and is deeply committed to supporting those who have experienced pain and trauma,” the author wrote. “She is determined to continue her work building compassion around the world and will keep striving to set an example for doing what is right and doing what is good.”

No doubt you will have guessed by now how Sussex-ese was given its name. Both of the above statements come from the House of Sussex, specifically from the spokesperson for the Duchess of Sussex and/or the Duchess herself. And I suspect that they won’t be the last — by all accounts, Sussex-ese is here to stay.

As tempting as it may be, it is not enough to dismiss the House of Sussex’s latest statements as bland, sub-Obama pabulum. They almost always have a certain twist of their own; a style which suggests that Harry and, more importantly, Meghan are not only surprised, but almost amazed that anybody might think ill of them. Excerpts from the couple’s upcoming interview with Oprah Winfrey only confirm this.

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Pity poor oppressed Prince Harry

By Douglas Murray

History is, of course, rife with examples of princes and their spouses expressing their distaste with the lèse-majesté of their critics. But what’s different about Sussex-ese is that it is a creation born not from the Duke’s blue blood, so much as the couple’s unquestionably golden intentions. And as a result, a very modern form of deference is demanded: do not criticise me, for I am doing much good in the world.

Take the first quote above. It relates to the Duchess’s recent successful privacy case against the Mail on Sunday, which published excerpts of a private letter sent by Meghan to her estranged father. Now you could be forgiven for thinking that, even if she weren’t a former actress, the relationship between the wife of the person sixth in line to the British throne and her father is a matter of public interest. You would, however, be wrong — at least that’s the implication of the judge’s decision to halt the trial before witnesses could be called.

But even if you agree with Lord Justice Warby, it is hard to see how “we all won” because of it.  For example, you may not approve of the type of prurient Royal-watcher who wishes to know every detail of the Duchess’s life, but clearly those people don’t view the verdict as a “win”. More importantly, though, there is something deeply unsavoury about the attempt to extrapolate Meghan’s personal victory into a universal one, particularly since most people will never be in a position remotely analogous to the one in which the Sussexes find themselves.

The same can also be said of their response this week to accusations that Meghan bullied two royal aides out of Kensington Palace. Perhaps anticipating that the Sussex’s Oprah interview will show everyone but Harry and Meghan in a bad light, the bullying story may well have been a pre-emptive defence of sorts from London.

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Either way, the nature of the Sussexes’ response — talking about how “saddened” they are — was entirely in fitting with the sanctimonious language used by so many public figures today. What is uncommon, however, is for a person of such power as Meghan to deflect the harm caused to her alleged victims by stressing her own victim-credentials.

This is exactly what the Duchess does by saying that she has been “the target of bullying herself”. And, of course, this Sussex-ese makes almost no sense. There is no reason why someone who has been bullied cannot themselves be a bully; in fact, we’re constantly told the opposite. Yet it isn’t until the claim at the end of the statement that the Sussex-ese becomes completely overpowering. We must assume that the Sussexes have some idea, at least, of statements put out in their name. So how could they possibly allow a statement that claims Meghan “is determined to continue her work building compassion around the world” to be published? Try it for yourself. If a person asked if they could describe you as a person who is busy building “compassion around the world”, would you not turn around and suggest that it could be toned down a bit?

That isn’t to say that the Duchess has had an inconsequential career. But appearing in Suits, marrying a Prince and starting a podcast are eccentric ways to make the world a better place — let alone “set an example”. Indeed, what kind of person honestly believes that everyone should look to them as a beacon “for doing what is right and doing what is good”? Even the Archbishop of Canterbury wouldn’t claim such moral authority.

Unfortunately, the rise of Sussex-ese suggests that the Sussexes have drifted away not just from the world that created them but, particularly in the case of Harry, from the world that grounded them. The type of service embodied in both the army and the Royal family is such that you should not have to say that you are saving the world.

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And as we can now see, when you do bestow that authority on yourself, your inevitable failure is made all the more bitter. For if the latest bullying allegations are true, they will serve as very public proof that the Duchess of Sussex has failed at her own self-appointed mission. You cannot spread love, compassion and understanding around the world if you are cruel and bullying to the people around you — especially those who are, in hierarchy terms, unquestionably below you.

And that is why the creation of Sussex-ese was never going to be convincing. People do not like being told what to do, think or feel by people they do not admire. As working royals, the Sussexes accumulated a certain amount of respect — but that all vanished when they gave up a life of duty for one that enables them to preach from a number of well-remunerated platforms.

If anything, all Sussex-ese does is allow Harry and Meghan to remain blissfully unaware of their fall from grace. It means that the Sussexes can continue to tell us how to “all win”, how to be good and how to save the world, oblivious to the fact that the further away from royal life they drift, the less moral authority they have. And therein lies the irony of it all: that in trying to escape the Firm, the Sussexes have ended up demanding more deference and behaving with more grandiosity than any British royal for generations.