Prince Harry Misses The Point Of Quitting Your Family

How can you approach a disgraced Prince? I am a traditionalist. “Could we speak a moment, Your Highness?” Or given recent events, perhaps simply, “Harry Honey, we need to talk.”

I don’t want to be part of the Duke and Duchess’s sordid spiral, you understand. But since quitting my own family two decades ago, I’ve become a sort of discreet adviser to those considering an exit from the familial fold. This is not by design or desire. However, because of people I know (a client and a mentor in business), who were kind and generous with their experience and advice when I was searching for a change I feel strongly about giving back.

Okay, Prince Harry, let’s get two things out of the way up front. While it is admirable for you to try to change your life and move on from everything that has been, it can be difficult to do so without hurting the feelings of others. Two, breaking from the family fold is essentially a private matter and nobody else’s business.

It is important to have space and time to grieve. The difficult question of who to tell and when to tell is one that many people struggle with. It took six months for me to be able to tell anyone, except my husband, about what had happened.

Twenty-five years later, I still strive for an even balance. While I don’t avoid talking about my situation despite its painful nature, I don’t randomly introduce it, either. I try to avoid being the victim or pointing fingers. If the other person is only listening to gossip, I stop the conversation.

Admittedly, I am a private person, in contrast to today’s climate of indiscriminate tell-all. I am not isolated. My work as an essayist involves analysis and writing about personal experiences. After years of reading about craft and process, writing workshops, online classes, and work with one-on-one mentors (one of whom pushed hard for me to mine the gory details of my split), I learned the difficult lesson, the memoir writer’s golden rule: The only story you have the right to tell is your own.

Don’t Seek Revenge

His book is: “To Show and to Tell, The Craft of Literary Nonfiction,” writing guru Phillip Lopate explains, “Never write to settle scores. Enter into the other person’s point of view, and be as fair-minded as possible.”

With the benefit of hindsight and time, I see that revenge is not an option after twenty years. The fact that I split from my parents and sisters is simply part of my narrative: I’m very athletic, have wild curly hair, and have been happily married to the same man for 35 years. And 20 years ago, my family left me.

With the exception of some sobbing, it was a drama-free exit. It was a drama-free exit, with no denouement or telling my parents off.