The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

JR Moehringer, the ghostwriter of Henry of England, an expert in exploring the tense relationships between fathers and sons

2023-01-10T05:08:04.347Z


The 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Journalism also signed the celebrated memoirs of tennis player Andre Agassi. Among the central themes of his work are childhood traumas or the transformation of a boy into a man


The journalist and writer

JR Moehringer (New York, 58 years old) began by writing his own story before writing the stories of others.

It was in 2005 when he published

The Bar of Great Expectations

,

an autobiographical novel where he recounted his childhood, marked by the absence of his father, and his constant search for a substitute.

"Men.

Especially men.

I needed them to serve as mentors, as heroes, as role models."

Little Moehringer did not find a father, but a bar, that of his maternal uncle Charlie.

And, inside, a good handful of parishioners.

Men of their time, incapable of showing their fears and sorrows, their feelings or their emotions, except when they crossed the door of Dickens and asked for a drink: "Among men, those things could only be said in a bar."

In his particular school of life, JR Moehringer became the man he is today by imitation and observation: "He was a master at 'identity theft' when that crime was more benign," he would write,

"The bar fostered in me the habit of turning each person who crossed my path into a mentor or a character."

Also in that bar would find the germ of his literary vocation and some of the central themes of his work: the tense relationship between parents and children, childhood traumas or the transformation from child to man.

The name of JR Moehringer does not appear on the cover of

Spare

(in Spanish,

In the Shadow

), the long-awaited memoirs of Prince Henry of England that are published this Tuesday, January 10, throughout the world, despite being the author of them .

He wouldn't sign on the

Open deck either.

My story

,

the celebrated biography

of the tennis player

Andre Agassi published in 2014 and which would earn him even more recognition than his 2000 Pulitzer Prize for journalism. Nor would Moehringer write his name on the flap of

Never Stop

, the biography of Nike founder Phil Knight, published in 2018. "The midwife never goes home with the baby," said the writer when asked about the issue on the occasion of the launch of

Open

: “They are Andre's memories, not our memories.

It is his achievement ”.

“It seemed to him that only one name could appear on the cover”, Agassi himself would recount in his thanks.

But Moehringer does not need to sign anything to continue amassing prestige and fortune: as a result of the tennis player's successful biography, his name is synonymous with the good work of the once reviled ghost writers.

So much so, that today it is one of the most valued in the sector: of the 40 million pounds that Prince Henry would have signed in exchange for four books with the Penguin Random House publishing house, the ghostwriter would have earned a sum of seven figures.

More information

A reading of the memories of Henry of England: sibling fights, cocaine at 17 and the denial of Diana's death

"He's half a psychiatrist," the founder of Nike would say of him

.

"It gets you to say things you didn't really think you would say."

Moehringer has a reputation for throwing himself into his projects and working hard for as long as necessary.

To write Andre Agassi's memoirs, he moved to Las Vegas for two years, where the tennis player lived.

Agassi bought a house a few kilometers from his own, which Moehringer occupied while working on the book.

All the writer asked for was a long table where he could place the scenes from Agassi's life that he would compose during the process.

“The first thing we did was have a long conversation about his life,” Moehringer said of the writing process: “It worked like therapy.

I sat in a straight-backed chair and Andre sat on a sofa.

I had a notebook and he opened up, and together we found patterns and themes in his life,” Moehringer recounted,

who read Freud and Jung during the period in order to better analyze the character.

At the end, it had 250 hours of recording and more than 1,200 transcribed pages.

Prince Harry and his father, King Charles, at an event at Chelsea Hospital in London in 2015. The complex relationship between parents and children is one of the central themes of JR Moehringer's work, a theme of interest in Enrique's biography. Max Mumby/Indigo (Getty Images)

Open.

My Story

was a game changer, considered the ultimate autobiography model for its in-depth excavation of a life that was seemingly out for all to see.

In it, the central themes of Moehringer's work come together again: a violent father, obsessed with turning his son into a tennis champion, a child who hates the sport that would make him a star, a star who is nothing more than a fearful man (of winning, losing, continuing or leaving it).

It is not surprising that the similarities between one life and another led Agassi to choose Moehringer, of whom he went so far as to say that they were "like brothers from different mothers".

They say it was the director and actor George Clooney who introduced him to Prince Harry —Clooney took

The Bar of High Expectations to the movies

in the year 2022, starring Ben Affleck—, but the Duke of Sussex could have chosen the writer for his curriculum and for the parallels between both lives: both are children of unhappy marriages, with childhoods marked by tragedy (in the case of Moehringer, due to the abandonment of the father and, in the case of Enrique, due to the death of the mother).

Moehringer confessed in an interview in EL PAÍS in 2015 that what he initially had in common with Agassi was that he hated writing and Agassi hated tennis, both could be joined by Enrique, who has made it clear that he was not happy with his role within an institution like the British monarchy.

And then there is the figure of the father (absent, in the case of Moehringer, distant and cold, in the case of Enrique) and the search for one's own path.

It is as if Enrique had chosen the author for his own story and for the story that he has already told, with great success, so many other times.

Also, of course, for the prestige of being told by Moehringer and not by any other ghost writer.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-01-10

You may like

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-28T06:04:53.137Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.