Her funeral came 16 years after the wedding of 1981. Nearly three decades after that, the review finds Diana's younger brother still going over his eulogy line by line. That's the book Catherine Ostler reviews in the Journal's Fall Books section, Swan Song by Charles Spencer (Penguin Press, 384 pages, $35). She reads it as his side of the story, written so that he gets the last word. The palace has already answered it.
Diana Spencer was a teenage nursery-school teacher when she got engaged to the Prince of Wales in February 1981, the review says. Her parents had split. She had two older sisters and one younger brother. Two televised events put those siblings in public view, the wedding at St. Paul's on July 29, 1981, and the funeral at Westminster Abbey 16 years later.
The brother, Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer, wants to correct what he sees as years of slights and bad reporting, the review says. The reviewer calls the result “part misery memoir, part revenge tragedy.” She compares it to a therapy session where the patient avoids his own story. His own four marriages and three divorces barely get a mention, she writes. She notes a contradiction too. He resents the press for its cruelty, yet his own pen is hard on everyone. The book's heaviest claims concern a phone call with the then Prince Charles right after Diana's death. The reviewer questions whether he read a man in shock correctly.
The palace answered the book with a statement. The pain of a brother's grief, it says, “can cloud reason, affect judgment and color memory”, even many years on. Spencer's word for that, the review says, is gaslighting. He calls the king's response very aggressive. Both sides are on the record, and the review gives each its say.
The childhood pages
The book's strongest memories are from childhood, the reviewer says. Their mother left with the man she'd later marry while the two oldest girls were away at boarding school. She was kept from holding a baby son, John, who died hours after birth. The stories about young Diana are rougher. The book has her stabbing a giant eel with a penknife when her mother and brother flinched. It has her shoving her small brother down a steep bank he'd said he feared. The reviewer's point is sharp. A book written to praise Diana makes her sound frightening. She credits Spencer with real insight into a rich child's unhappiness in a 1960s divorce, the subject of his A Very Private School (2024). She can't tell what he's trying to say, and doubts he can. Her closing line gives the book “the subtlety of a rabid corgi.”
Our read
This is Estate, with a strong dose of Behavioral. Strip away the titles and it's a story any family lawyer knows. Parents split. A stepmother arrives. One child becomes famous and dies young. Decades later a sibling is still arguing about who counts as her children's family and whose version of events is true. The review's sharpest line says the two sides would agree on little beyond the baldest facts. That's what happens when a family never settles its story while everyone's alive to tell it.
An estate plan and a family conversation exist to prevent three things this book shows. A contest over who counts as the children's family. A version of events nobody else recognizes. And grief still steering decisions decades on. Put the facts and the wishes in writing, say them out loud once, and name who decides. You don't want the last word written in a memoir. You want it written in a plan, while you can still sign it.