Diana: Her True Story & The Diana Chronicles

A teacher friend and I were discussing nonfiction recently, and I mentioned that I was currently reading my second biography of Princess Diana.  He chuckled and asked, “Why?”

“… I don’t know,” I realized.  “I’m not sure why.” 

“You don’t know,” he said incredulously, “or you don’t want to admit it?” 

The truth is that I really don’t know why I’ve been reading so voraciously about Princess Diana’s life.  It started with a TIME magazine article about the new biography of Prince Charles that just came out.  Charles has a very interesting and complicated life, one that only seems to become more complicated as his mother The Queen ages and his son has children, and I enjoy reading about it.  Sometimes I've wondered if Charles gets a bad rap due to his presence in the media opposite Diana, so this kind of naturally led to me being curious about her life. 

I originally ventured to the library looking for a biography written after Diana's death in 1997.  I found that in Brown's The Diana Chronicles, but I was also drawn to Morton's 1992 biography, written not only before Diana died but before she and Charles even divorced! Fascinated, I grabbed it -- and ploughed through it in roughly 3 days. 

The portrait it paints is of a depressed, downtrodden woman who is utterly alone, and it's incredibly sad.  The reading experience was fascinating but difficult at times; it's hard to read about her life and know that she isn't some made up character and instead she's really experiencing these things. 

Brown's The Diana Chronicles was something else entirely, and the contrast is quite striking. 

Brown’s biography is much harsher, much more judgmental, in comparison to Morton’s.  This makes sense in retrospect: Diana later admitted that much of the material in “Her True Story” actually came from her as opposed to or via the friends credited in the book.  In that way, she was able to cushion her appearance to the public; Brown offers her no such sanctuary. 

The Diana Chronicles is also from a media perspective; Morton is associated with the media, for sure, but he seems to also be an extreme Diana sympathizer, willing to shelter both her and her image in exchange for her favor.  Brown appears much more removed, more journalistic than anything else, and in doing so, Diana’s story changes.  Where Morton offered exclusively Diana’s opinion and reflection on most topics, Brown expands on events, providing different sides of the stories and drama and interjecting her own opinions about how events played out. 

I think what makes Brown’s account so interesting is that she is constantly suspicious of events, regardless of their origins. Sometimes she has Diana in mind, questioning if the Princess was really as depressed or innocent as she seemed; at other times, she has the Royal Family in the crosshairs, accusing them of destroying opportunities or failing to support the Princess.  There are moments where Brown deviates entirely from accepted versions of events, such as in discussions of who visited Charles just weeks before the first famous Royal Wedding; here she offers her own analysis of events, citing evidence and uncovering stories previously absent from the record.  In this way, her book is absolutely fascinating, perhaps more so than “Her True Story.” 

At their hearts, both books ask the same question: Why is the world so fascinated with Diana?  Both illustrate distinctly different times: Her True Story came out in 1992, years before Diana died, and The Diana Chronicles was published in 2007, about ten years after her untimely deal.  Both are widely read and remain interesting, even when the fairytale wedding that captured the world was close to 35 years ago and Diana herself passed almost 20 years ago. 

Her life and death continue to hold sway over the public, and the question of why remains at the forefront of the discussion. 

Diana famously said that she wanted to be the “queen of people’s hearts,” and Tony Blair crowned her the People’s Princess just after her death.  Both titles demonstrate that allure which Diana embodied (and both also demonstrate why Brown pulls in a lot of psychology in her analysis of Diana’s personality, too).  She was the People’s Princess – she was accessible to the public, a huge change from royalty of the past, and that made her popular in ways beyond anyone’s expectation or control.  Analyses of her life and person make it clear that she thrived on this exposure, wanting to be connected to the people, for good or ill.  (That feeds into the conspiracy theory community surrounding her death too, though that’s a different topic entirely.) 

I understand this about Diana and her life, but I remain curious about why I find her fascinating.  The unfortunate answer remains that, deep down, I’m not really sure. 

I remember where I was when Diana died.  There are few moments in my life like this, where the outside world embedded itself into my memory.  It was August 1997, which means I was only 8 years old, and I was spending the weekend with a friend's family at their lakehouse.  The crash happened in the middle of the night in Paris, which means it was early evening for us, and I recall watching it on the news.  I can still picture the living room where we stood, oddly enough; the TV was canted in one corner near the deck, its blinds moving gently with a breeze from the open door. The ceiling light made the room seem almost yellowy, and I remember seeing the black car, crushed, on the screen.  I had been playing with someone's knee brace but stopped when I realized how upset the adults were.  If I remember right, I think my friend's mom called my mom to discuss the accident. 

I didn't know this was such a significant moment at the time.  Looking back, it's easy to see based on how others responded, but even so, I didn't really attach a lot of meaning to it until I was far older.  Diana's life was important, her death defining.  The world changed, just a little.

Even so, even now, so much about Diana remains unknown.  She has been picked apart for years, and yet it seems like so few actually knew the ‘real’ Diana, whatever that might mean.  She’s so wildly public, and yet she’s so alone; she’s one of the most discussed people on the planet, and yet she’s unknowable. 

She’ll stay this way forever, and I think that’s what makes her life worth knowing. 

The Price of Privilege

Parenting has always struck me as intimidating. 

It involves so much of everything you have: money, time, energy, work, emotion, responsibility, and everything else, so much of your life.  And even if you do everything right, you still have the chance to profoundly fuck something up. 

I’ve never wanted kids – frankly, it’s never occurred to me.  I’ve never had that “parental” instinct, and I don’t feel a lot of affection for little kids either.  I like the kids I deal with – seniors in high school on the cusp of the world, kids who are (for the most part) pretty functional and self-sufficient. That’s about it.  The overwhelming responsibility of raising my own kids, the effort involved, the expense, the idea that someone out there is relying on me for every single thing in their life… no, thank you. 

I can’t even handle the emotional responsibility of a dog; how on earth could I have a kid??

There are those in my life who have undoubtedly decided that this lack of interest in kids indicates something profoundly fucked up about me, and really, I’m okay with that.  I know who I am, and a parent is not part of that. 

This book, The Price of Privilege, is one of those books that confirms all my fears about parenting, solidifying my lack of desire to produce one of my own.  At its heart, The Price of Privilege is about what happens when parents try to do everything right, and how those kids can (and do) still end up screwed up. 

The Price of Privilege deals with children of affluence, those kids who tend to be psychologically ignored due to the obvious and serious issues faced by children of poverty and other poor circumstances.  But the children of affluent parents, affluent lives, struggle with just as many issues as children in other circumstances and their problems have largely gone unstudied until Dr. Madeline Levine noticed a pattern in the patients coming into her private therapy practice. 

Her patients seemed to have everything: their parents were well off, they went to good schools and lived in good neighborhoods, they were involved in activities and extracurriculars, and they wanted for little.  Often they had strong social skills and good grades too.  There was no reason for these kids to have problems, and yet they were deeply unhappy, many dealing with anxiety and depression, involved with drugs and alcohol, or worse. 

Parents, as a group, are under immense pressure.  The ability to raise a functional, well-adjusted person to adulthood stuns me, especially when I consider that it happens fairly routinely.  But sometimes – often, perhaps – things go wrong, and that’s where people like Levine come in, the therapists who must try to collect the broken pieces and somehow re-create a whole person. 

The phenomenon she describes seems to happen when parents have money to support their children but lack the time to devote to them.  In those cases, children can develop the sense that they are being bought off – a car to cover up the fact that a parent missed their birthday, an allowance being spent to buy drugs while the parents are out of town, endless funds devoted to club sports and equipment but no attendance at games, the list goes on.  Over time, this sends a clear message about what’s more valuable, and the kids respond accordingly. 

(There’s so much more to this in the book, so much psychology and detail that I can’t begin to recreate here.  Suffice it to say that the book is a smooth, interesting, and educating read, one well worth your time.)

It is not a universal practice, thank goodness – parents with money are not destined to treat their kids like like, nor are children of privilege doomed to being ignored emotionally but overflowing financially.  But the pattern is clear, and it’s scary. 

There’s a wonderful article in The Atlantic called “How to Land Your Kids in Therapy” (here) that dovetails nicely with this book; it’s a great read that breaks this down into a more manageable size if you can’t get to the book J

I do sometimes wonder about how much of these issues are truly, at heart, the parents’ faults.  

Throughout the book, the ability of kids to make choices is essentially removed from the equation.  So I can’t help but think: what about those situations where the parents are great, involved but not too involved, balanced between emotional functionality and giving their kids independence, but their kids screw around anyway?  I guarantee it happens, but that’s not discussed much here. 

In fact, I see it on a near-daily basis at my job.  Since I’m a high school teacher in a pretty affluent area, I watch all of this happen (that’s how I ended up reading the book in the first place).  I definitely see students whose parents are great but they suck anyway.  It’s a fact of life: kids make choices that aren’t always smart, regardless of the way they were raised. 

Levine is clearly going for a broad picture of this issue, a generic of how this works and how to fix it, but it runs the risk of placing kids into a broad category. 

This book also ignores those kids who have great lives but suffer from depression or anxiety anyway, and I see those kids all the time too.  I have many great kids – smart, capable, independent, friendly – who struggle immensely anyway.  I’ve seen kids hospitalized for anxiety, placed in emergency care due to suicide risk, or something worse.  What things like that happen… well, too often the parents seem to be awesome (at least from what I see).  They’re scared, clueless about what went wrong, and often it was nothing they did.  That falls by the wayside too.   

I know that this isn’t an all-encompassing book, but still.  Sometimes parents do everything right, and that should be acknowledged and celebrated too. 

Levine writes a short section about how to try to address mistakes in the back of the book, a section that I found more interesting than I was expecting to.  The ideas of responsibility and boundaries, the ideas for how to push kids to find independence, to find themselves, are all things I can work to incorporate into my classroom.  Teachers may not be kids’ parents, of course, but we do still see those kiddos a lot – it’s just as easy for me to assess how a kid’s doing emotionally as academically, so I’m glad to have a guide for offering the support and structure that can help them grow and heal. 

It’s a worthwhile book, especially for parents and teachers, and seeing as I’m not planning on leaving my school district anytime soon, it is definitely a resource worth incorporating.