The wonderful thing about dying young, rich, and famous is that you’re spared the cruelties of time. Wrinkles don’t line your eyes. The amber glow of nostalgia blurs over your scandals. You don’t have time to make an off-color joke or political faux pas, let alone hawk overpriced branded jam. Your worst moments are forgotten, your best images become merchandise, and nobody remembers the real you. And, if you were as image-conscious as the young Princess of Wales was, death can make you a permanent celebrity.
Recommended Stories
- Susan Choi’s uneven return: Review of 'Flashlight' by Susan Choi
- Caught in the momentum of New York: Review of 'Glass Century' by Ross Barkan
- Letter rip: Review of ‘Syme’s Letter Writer: A Guide to Modern Correspondence’ by Rachel Syme
And so, despite a tumultuous 28 years since her abrupt death featuring 9/11, the Iraq War, a global financial crisis, and a global pandemic, and the repeated election of a reality TV star as president, the love of Princess Diana remains. Zoomers buy replicas of her black-sheep sweater from Shein. The “Revenge Dress” is a staple reference in fashion and online culture. Her gloveless handshake of a man with AIDS is routinely posted on gay rights Instagram accounts. The entire run of Netflix‘s The Crown was built on the lead up to the “Diana Affair,” despite it already having been covered in 2013’s Diana and 2021’s Spencer, and Balenciaga’s Demna, perhaps the most important fashion designer of his generation, collects Princess Diana porcelain.
Such is the obsession with Diana Spencer that, at this point, a standard biography of her would be unwritable. Seemingly every angle has been taken, all interesting information has been reported out, and everyone knows her story. So what would be the point? Edward White, therefore, takes a different tack with his new book Dianaworld, and writes a meta-biography: a story of the obsession and mythos around Diana, which have kept her culturally relevant for decades after her death. Dianaworld is structured around a linear retelling of her life story, diligently going from cradle to Parisian tunnel, but each chapter explores various angles and interested parties in her, getting into class, feminism, and questions about fame and the role of the media, while speaking to the people who made her the “People’s Princess,” cleverly referred to as the “Princess’s People,” be they tabloid editors, royal staffers, drag queens, conspiracy theorists, or celebrity impersonators. And that works, a bit, until it doesn’t.
His thoroughness is occasionally rewarded with funny moments, such as someone remarking that the Pakistani community viewed Diana as “one of us” because “she was doing what every Asian daughter was meant to do: marrying an Asian doctor.” But for every engaging or interesting point, there are five or more that feel like page filler, and it feels like a drawn-out doctoral thesis, particularly when White drops in academese like “iconicity.” When reading a book, you never want to ask yourself, “Why do I care what this person thinks?” But when an interview subject is another person who never met Diana but cares a lot about her, then it’s hard to keep the thought at bay.
Perhaps White knows this, as he often drifts from what others think of Diana or how they relate to her to just writing about the princess herself. Sure, he’s talking about class or feminism or the media, but he makes time to drop in enough flippant details per chapter that Esquire ran a piece titled “10 Silly Things We Learned from Edward White’s New Book ‘Dianaworld,’” with entries such as that she “had a big head” and “owned a vibrator called “Le gaget.”
More importantly, though, some of these diversions from Diana-fan-watching let White challenge the image of Diana, and these are consistently the most interesting parts of the book. For example, though her hugging and handshaking are broadly interpreted as showing her belief in a common humanity, White puts this in the context of her belief in mystics and spiritual powers, and that she had a royal healing touch. She once told the Bishop of Norwich that “she was protected in life by the spirits of deceased loved ones” and said “I understand people’s pain, people’s suffering, more than you will ever know,” which sounds as suitably narcissistic as you’d expect from a vain, rich celebrity.
MICHAEL LEWIS SHOWS OFF GOVERNMENT
Similarly, her treatment by the paparazzi is broadly viewed as cruel and invasive, so much so that her son, Harry, blames them for her death. (This view requires ignoring that her car was being driven at twice the speed limit by a drunk driver, through a major city, with none of the passengers wearing seat belts. And that an 18-month French report from 1999 found that only that driver was responsible, and the paparazzi were too far behind to have contributed. But never mind.) Reading the book, you’re reminded that she used the press constantly for her own ends, figuring out how to play them, and every pre-viral image was a photo-op. The chief difference between her use of fame and a modern influencer or reality TV star was that she didn’t hold the cameras, but she certainly controlled them. In the ’90s, Britain’s news programs were all broadcasting Keeping Up With the Spencers.
There’s a good premise here. The obsession with Diana is a real cultural force, and White has interesting thoughts and notes on it. But Dianaworld is a research memo to write a book out of, not the book itself. A British Michael Lewis could find the most interesting Diana fans and profile them, telling a compelling story through their love of a celebrity, or a writer such as Jarrett Kobek could write a shorter, better, meaner, funnier book, reframing Diana as a proto-influencer — rich, ignorant, and vapid, but with a canny understanding of how to use her beauty in images. Such a book would serve both as a follow-up to Christopher Hitchens’s 1998 TV documentary Diana: The Mourning After and a treatise on modern celebrity, and that could be fantastic. But White is too concerned about being fair, or being academic, and studying this as a social phenomenon. So he ends up with something that is waffly, unfocused, and its sprinkles of greatness are too often drowned by dross. When he tries to vaguely connect her rise with the populist politics of the 21st century, it’s hard not to groan.
Ross Anderson is the life editor at the Spectator World and a tech and culture contributor for the New York Sun.