- Ronald Reagan's daughter Patti Davis said she thinks Prince Harry may regret writing his memoir "Spare."
- In an op-ed for The New York Times, Davis compared "Spare" to her own tell-all about her family.
Patti Davis, the daughter of former President Ronald Reagan and author of her own tell-all book, said she thinks Prince Harry may regret writing his memoir "Spare."
In an op-ed for The New York Times published Saturday, Davis compared Harry's upcoming book with the fallout from her 1992 autobiography "The Way I See It." The memoir is described on Goodreads as "an insider's view of growing up Reagan, describing her father's emotional abandonment of her, her mother's cruelty, and the family's bitter rivalries, uncontrollable rage, and dark secrets."
Davis has spoken out about criticizing and reconciling with her famous parents, telling USA Today in 2004 that she "needed to run away to come home."
She wrote Saturday that she apologized to her father for writing the book that "flung open the gates of our troubled family life" after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1994. Davis also noted she was reminded of that moment while reading "Spare."
"My justification in writing a book I now wish I hadn't written was very similar to what I understand to be Harry's reasoning. I wanted to tell the truth, I wanted to set the record straight," she wrote in the op-ed. "Naïvely, I thought if I put my own feelings and my own truth out there for the world to read, my family might also come to understand me better."
The author also said she thinks that "William's truth has to be considered as well" when discussing the royal family's tense interactions, such as the supposed physical altercation between Harry and Prince William in 2019.
"Harry has written that, after William hit him, William told Harry to hit him back, which he declined to do. But by writing about the fight, he's done exactly that," Davis wrote.
After releasing "The Way I See It," Davis wrote that she learned that "not every truth has to be told to the entire world." She said she wishes she could tell her younger self to "be quiet" until she could "stand back and look at things from a wider lens" — and she gave the same advice to the Duke of Sussex.
"Harry seems to operate on the dictum that 'Silence is not an option,'" she concluded. "I would, respectfully, suggest to him that it is."
Although "Spare" is set to be published worldwide on Tuesday, excerpts from the book began surfacing Thursday after a Spanish-language version accidentally went on sale in Spain.
An unnamed source "with knowledge of the book" who spoke to The Sunday Times in December said that the memoir is "tough on William."
"I personally can't see how Harry and William will be able to reconcile after this," the source told the outlet.