It's Your Week: Staying up all night to read 'Spare'
When a fourth grader wins a contest for most books read in a semester, they're likely destined to be a words person as an adult. That was true for USA TODAY Celebrity Culture reporter Hannah Yasharoff, our reporter tasked with reading and writing about Prince Harry's memoir "Spare" through the wee hours of the night on the day of the book's release.
👋 Nicole Fallert here and welcome to Your Week, our newsletter exclusively for USA TODAY subscribers (that's you!). As you may know by now, the amazing Sallee Ann has moved to her next adventure. She's irreplaceable, but I'll be your friendly writer moving forward, sending the best from our newsroom to your inbox. I can't wait to get started.
This week, we talk with Yasharoff about her chart-topping reporting on biggest bombshells in Prince Harry's memoir "Spare." You can read her story here.
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Read, write, edit: What a reporter learned from reading 'Spare' in real-time
Take us to the scene of you receiving it and reading it through the night
We weren’t quite sure when my advance copy of the book was going to arrive — and a few select people were able to get their hands on books in the days leading up to the release, despite bookstores being required to sign very strict “do not sell before Tuesday” contracts — but I received “Spare” Monday afternoon and started reading a little after noon ET.
Our books editor, Barbara VanDenburgh, had also received a copy that afternoon and was reading along with me. Our plan was to build what we call a “rolling file” — basically publishing all of the biggest things I learned from reading in real-time, rather than reading and writing everything and then publishing, in order to keep readers as up-to-date as I was.
So I would read for an hour or two, writing about the anecdotes that stuck out to me the most, before sending to Barbara for a round of editing. Read, write, edit, publish. Lather, rinse, repeat. We stuck to that plan, save for a quick dinner break, until I had finished reading the book (and finished writing about it!), which took until just shy of 2 a.m.
What surprised you the most about the book?
Many of the more explosive anecdotes in the book had leaked in the days leading up to publication, so those didn’t come as a complete surprise. I was, however, pretty pleasantly surprised at what an enjoyable read it was. (It’s worth noting that the book was ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer, who’s also responsible for Andre Agassi’s bestselling 2009 memoir, “Open.”) When you’re tasked with reading 400+ pages in one day, it definitely helps for it to not be a total snoozefest.
I’ve covered my fair share of the royal family and celebrity memoirs over the last four-and-a-half years, and both the British royals and (often) celebrities writing memoirs are pretty selective when it comes to what they share with the public. Prince Harry has certainly shown precedent for being willing to air his family’s dirty laundry, but this book blows away even his and Duchess Meghan’s 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview, at times veering on TMI in a way that was genuinely surprising for someone of his notoriety.
Another thing about celebrity memoirs: A fair amount of them — but definitely not all! — are not the best pieces of writing. Aside from page after page of Harry spilling tea, I was struck by how much of a genuinely interesting and poetically-constructed story this was. Come for the drama, stay for what I am going to — way too early in the year — call one of the best books of 2023.
Did you feel pressure covering such a highly anticipated story?
I was definitely cognizant that, as a highly-anticipated book written by a high-profile figure seen as controversial to many, this story was going to get a lot of eyeballs on it. But the goal for every single story is to deliver the most informative story to readers as fast as possible, and that was what we aimed to do with this one, too.
Still, there was pressure to race against the clock. “Spare” was released Tuesday, which meant we had less than a day before everyone in the world was able to get their hands on the book and (we) wanted to get the information out as fast as possible. Thankfully I set a record for most books read in a semester in my 4th grade class, so speed-reading is in my repertoire!
Thank you
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I'm sincerely looking forward to steering Your Week. Stay tuned for more incredible features from USA TODAY next week.
Best wishes,
Nicole Fallert
Want to send Nicole a note? Shoot her an email at NFallert@usatoday.com or follow along with her musings on Twitter.
Associated Press contributed reporting.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: It's Your Week: Staying up all night to read 'Spare'
