âBut I recall every physical detail of the scene. The daffodils out, the new grass sprouting, a jet taking off from Heathrow, heading west, unusually low, its engines making my chest vibrate.â Iâm no Harry expert but this does not sound like him or how heâd speak. To me, this has his wifeâs writing style all over it. Itâs like sheâs writing about something she heard from Harry, doesnât have all the details, and filled in with her overwrought style. I donât think Harry is deep enough to take in his surrounding this way and she likes to think she is deeper than the puddle she actually is.
I kinda agree - I agree that this definitely isn't Harry but I disagree that it's Meghan. I think it's Moehringer at work here, because it's too writerly.
Meghan's style is more word salady and she likes long abstractly-descriptive compound sentences, so I'd expect her to handiwork to wax poetic more on springtime than the direction and effect of an airplane.
Moehringer is also descriptive, but he uses short phrases and metaphors. It's not as eye-rolly as Meghan's descriptions, which is the best way I can describe it (but yes, I can and do fully admit to being biased against Meghan because, well, she's Meghan).
Anyway, you can decide for yourself.
Here's an example of Meghan's writing, from her Thanksgiving 2020 op-ed:
Hours later, I lay in a hospital bed, holding my husbandâs hand. I felt the clamminess of his palm and kissed his knuckles, wet from both our tears. Staring at the cold white walls, my eyes glazed over. I tried to imagine how weâd heal...Sitting in a hospital bed, watching my husbandâs heart break as he tried to hold the shattered pieces of mine, I realized that the only way to begin to heal is to first ask, âAre you OK?â
Here's a sample of Moehringer's writing, from his Pulitzer Prize-winning article, Crossing Over:
White folks say a ferry would bring the modern world at last to this rural wilderness 60 miles southwest of Montgomery, where the heat-crazed insects sound like a million clocks ticking; where only two businesses exist, a post office the size of a phone booth and a general store with nothing on its shelves; where the night sky is unbroken by a single street lamp or stop light, and Orion feels close enough to gather in your fist, like a cluster of fireflies. Mary Lee knows better. A ferry would also bring tourists and hunters and developers and criminals and snoops. In other words, the end of Gee's Bend, the last place on Earth still safe enough for children and dead folks to go walking after dark. 'When you can sit in a place,' she says, 'and everybody be lovely--no fussing, no killing. To me, this don't even seem like the USA.'