People: When it comes to your family, be a William, not a Harry

Never take the family business to the highest bidder.

I have essentially zero interest in the Royal Family, I take no real notice of them or their doings or goings-on in either my day-to-day or long-term life, they function as complete strangers to me, and that’s really as it should be. But it seems quite obvious, even for someone who cares not at all for this sort of thing, that Harry with the publishing of his late memoir has done has family dirt, that he has betrayed them in some vital and important way, and that this whole weird and dirty saga can serve as a reminder for all of us as something we shouldn’t do.

The issue here isn’t any one particular thing that Harry has revealed about his family, only that he has revealed personal things about his family, publicly, unabashedly, for profit, and evidently as part of some bitter feud. In some cases he has revealed immaterial details of personal life that are, nevertheless, obviously personal and not meant to be revealed. “Willy turned to me and said ‘Fuck off!’,” he writes at one point. At another point he reveals that his brother, allegedly, violently attacked him in a dispute over Harry’s wife, Meghan: “He wanted me to hit him back,” he told a journalist, “but I chose not to.” He claims both he and his brother begged his father not to remarry—a deeply embarrassing admission for both his father and his now-stepmother. Elsewhere he remarks that his brother and his father, in meeting with him about the tumultuous state of the Royal Family, had “come ready for a fight,” and he claims his brother is his “arch nemesis.” He wrote this tawdry tabloid dreck about his own father, and his own brother. This is low stuff, the behavior of someone with no real loyalty and no compunctions about squalid perfidy.

The rest of the family, meanwhile, has kept their mouths shut—likely in no small part because that’s pretty ironclad royal policy and you get thrown in the Tower of London and beheaded if you talk, but you also get the sense that, whatever else they’re about, the royals at least recognize and adhere to certain principles about family loyalty that transcend publisher’s advances. One would like to think so, anyway, because an entire family of people sniping at each other through seven-figure advances and speaking tours feels just a little too depressing to contemplate, like the world’s richest trailer trash engaging in the most well-connected toxic triangulation in global history.

That this kind of scandal involves the Royal Family is immaterial. It can and does happen countless times a day with people and families of lesser birth and lower status. The lesson is clear: When you’ve got family problems, you don’t take them out of the family. All of that stays in. You work it out in private, behind closed doors, over the phone, in email, whatever. Maybe you ask a very trusted close friend for some advice about how to handle a thorny situation, but that’s as far outside the bounds of the family circle that it should stray. Families have an expectation of each other that the intimate and difficult contours of their lives will not be made a spectacle or grist for some terrible gawking machine, be it an entire country or even just a group of adjacents at a lunch table. This is not an unreasonable demand and to betray it as Harry has done is on a practical level nearly unforgivable; if he is never welcomed back to his family’s homes it will be very sad but not surprising at all.

Keep it private, folks. You can work out your problems, even major problems, without making them public. Family loyalty and intimacy count for something, they are important, and if you disagree with that and act upon it you are going to find yourself without either of those things, as Harry himself now surely does—a sad coda for anyone, royal or not.