The most striking part in “Spare”, Prince Harry’s 416-page confessional autobiography, may be the contrast between his emotional incontinence — the repetitive iterations of every detail of his trauma — while his wife remains notably composed. From the moment she appears in his life (at Soho House in 2016, when Harry finally meets her, sweaty and flustered because heavy traffic made him half an hour late: already a supplicant to the woman he immediately thinks “perfect, perfect, perfect!”) to the decision of their joint departure, she is a cool anchor to his angst-tossed sense of self; and remains so even when he portrays her being relentlessly chased by paparazzi or crying helplessly on the floor of their house.

We see it all through Harry’s eyes: he appears, not least to himself, as both culprit and victim, the reason for his wife’s distress and for being his mother’s son. He presents himself as cause and target and torturer all at once, as if investing the woman he loves with the attributes of the mother he lost.

It’s Harry’s self-destruction, from drugs, booze, extreme sports, sibling fisticuffs and confessional dictation (to the Pulitzer Prize winner novelist J.P. Moehringer, who deserves every cent of that reported $5m ghostwriting contract) that fascinates us. “Spare” is a post-Puccini tale, but it’s also a feminist one, in which the woman, no longer the victim, flips every narrative trope upside down: The One Where Butterfly Takes Pinkerton Back Home. Meghan, the saviour heroine, changes the lines of every femme perdue (or fatale). She’s Violetta kicking out Germont and grabbing Alfredo for keeps; she’s Carmen taking over the smugglers’ business and running it while José ambles about the (Californian) mountain caves with a yoga mat; she’s Marguerite coolly considering Faust’s pact with the Devil, and raising the price to $20 million plus serial rights.