Why do we read memoirs? For me, part of the appeal is getting a glimpse into the life of someone who means something to me. But I wonder if it isn’t also that I’m hoping they can give me some kind of insight into my own life. I’m not sure how much any of us would suppose we have in common with a movie star, a middle-aged comedian or an English prince. And yet, I find that these three memoirs offer not just great reads, but rich insight into life. Long before Prince Harry’s memoir came out late last year, it seemed that everyone had already made up their minds about him and his relationship with his family. But in reading “Spare,” I was surprised to discover it was mostly not the behind-the-scenes attack on King Charles and Prince William that the press had hyped it to be. Nor was it a crass tell-all. Instead, I found the story of a man who lost his mom as a child in the most outrageous and astonishing of ways, and what that did to him. It’s simultaneously Harry trying to understand himself and explain himself to his family. “If they didn’t know why I’d left, maybe they just didn’t know me. At all,” he writes at the beginning, after a conversation with his father and brother. “Maybe they never really did. And to be fair, maybe I didn’t either.” The book is his heartfelt attempt to connect and also perhaps to heal. “Spare” is also a blistering attack on the media’s treatment of the royal family, one that will make any reader question the human cost of every picture we see of them in the press, whether mainstream or tabloid. And not just of them, but everyone who has ever come in contact with them. Prince Harry’s book is filled with stories of ex-girlfriends and others whose lives were turned upside down by “journalists” looking for a scoop. Like the two friends Prince William asked to be the best men at his wedding. The press reported it was Harry instead, which the palace confirmed. “The lie gave cover to James and Thomas,” Harry explains. “Had they been outed as Willy’s best men, the rabid press would’ve chased them, tracked them, hacked them, investigated them, ruined their families’ lives.” The middle section of the book also details his decade in the military, a period that gave him a whole other kind of family, and a powerful sense of meaning and freedom in his life. “Spare” is often a poignant read, but it’s never maudlin. And the book is often marked by a profound sense of reverie on Harry’s part, concerning the course and blessings of his life.