The cream of feather ready
His name does not appear anywhere on the cover of Spare (“The Alternate”), Prince Harry’s world-famous memoir, but the words therein are also his own. You have to get to the long list of acknowledgments to read his surname: J.R. Moehringer, the one the Duke of Sussex chose to help him write his book. Meghan’s husband greets this 58-year-old American, renowned among the most brilliant feather-readers, “a collaborator and friend, confessor and sometimes sparring-partner”. This is the third time that Moehringer has hid behind a personality – at least from what we know. The man had already been talked about in 2009 for Open (Ed. Plon), the autobiography of American tennis player Andre Agassi, considered the must of the genre. He also put his talent, in 2016, at the service of the co-founder of Nike, Phil Knight, for The Art of Victory (Ed. Hugo).
A deserved Pulitzer Prize
The Yale graduate began his career at the bottom of the New York Times in 1986. The experience was inconclusive and the journalist went to work for local publications before joining the Los Angeles Times. In 1998, he was on the Pulitzer Prize shortlist but the very prestigious award escaped him. Two years later, Moehringer landed it for Crossing over (“crossing”), an article on Gee’s Bend, a community of descendants of slaves who lived at the time isolated, at the bottom of the Alabama River, in the State of the same name, who dread and hope for the arrival of a ferry.
A successful autobiographer
In addition to his 2012 fiction book, Sutton, based on the real-life life of bank robber Willie Sutton, Moehringer wrote a critically acclaimed autobiography, The Tender Bar, under his name in 2005. Raised by a single mother between Long Island and Arizona, the New Yorker by birth recounts, with a good dose of self-mockery, his young years, the absence of a father who left without warning and the refuge he found in a local bar, that of Uncle Charlie. Ben Affleck will play this substitute father figure in a film directed by George Clooney in 2021.
An exalted method
Writing for others requires great availability, unfailing discretion and a good dose of self-sacrifice. Moehringer has a reputation for not doing things by halves. The New York Times explains that for Open, he moved to Las Vegas to settle not far from the house of Andre Agassi. With more than 250 hours of interview, Freud and Jung on his bedside table, the exercise has almost turned into the psychoanalysis of the player. Moehringer tells the American daily that he spent so much time getting into the tennis player’s head that it was sometimes a shock when Agassi appeared in the flesh. “It was like, how can you be here when I’ve been you before?” “, he explains.
