Reading time: About 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about metaphors and similes from the Prince Harry memoir, Spare…
I hadn’t planned on reading the memoir of Prince Harry — son of King Charles and Diana, the late Princess of Wales. I’m not a monarchist and while I had enormous respect and admiration for Queen Elizabeth, my feelings toward her offspring are less complimentary.
What changed my mind about reading the book was learning that J. R. Moehringer had ghostwritten it. I adored his earlier book Open, about tennis great Andre Agassi and his own memoir, The Tender Bar.
Moehringer began his career in journalism as a news assistant at The New York Times. He then moved to the Rocky Mountain News. and went from there to the Orange County bureau of the Los Angeles Times. While at the Times he received the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing in 2000 for an article headlined “Crossing Over.”
Here are my favourite examples of his figurative language from Spare:
- We never worried about Pat catching ups. She was a tortoise and we were tree frogs.
- His eyebrows flew up to his hairline, like startled birds.
- I wilted at the mere mention of heat: how was I supposed to put up with an oven inside a blast furnace inside a nuclear reactor set on top of an active volcano?
- The Hills let me bunk with them in the main house, a sweet little bungalow with white clapboard, wooden steps leading to a wide porch, a front door that gave out a kittenish squeak every time you pulled it open and a loud bang every time you let it fly shut.
[Photo credit: Cropped from the UK Department for International Development. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.]
