'Voice Notes at 1 AM': Insider Claims Meghan Markle Secretly Floated 'Post-Harry Divorce Book' to Publishers

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are facing a new wave of intense scrutiny, with explosive claims surfacing this week regarding both their professional future and their private manoeuvring within the Royal Family.

The latest burst of speculation about a potential Meghan Markle 'post-Harry divorce book' comes more than a year after Vanity Fair quietly floated what sounded, at the time, like a wild hypothetical. Buried at the end of a long piece on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, the magazine reported that Meghan's team had informally sounded out major publishers about a tell-all memoir she might write in the event of a future split from Prince Harry. No manuscript, no proposal, just exploratory chats to test how hungry the market might be.

According to that reporting, there was no formal deal on the table. The idea was essentially an industry-style thought experiment, designed to gauge interest in what would inevitably be pitched as the ultimate insider account of royal implosion. If Harry's own memoir Spare could command a reported £16 million advance and become the fastest-selling non-fiction book of all time, the logic went, what might Meghan's version of events be worth?

'Post-Harry Divorce Book' Idea Would Be Publishing Gold

The Vanity Fair report stressed that any talk of a Meghan Markle 'post-Harry divorce book' was purely speculative, yet no one in publishing seriously doubts how huge the appetite would be. Harry's memoir, Spare, sold more than 1.4 million copies on its first day in January 2023 and reportedly topped 6 million in sales worldwide by the following year. Several industry figures now argue, quite openly, that a Meghan memoir could eclipse even that.

The logic is brutally simple. The Sussexes have already proved they can sustain a multi-platform narrative, from their Oprah Winfrey interview, watched by 17 million viewers in the US and 11 million in the UK, to their Netflix series and Harry's own book. A Meghan-fronted project would be pitched not just as an autobiography but as a global media event, complete with high-profile interviews, streaming spin-offs and intricate rights deals carved up across formats and continents.

Then there is the untapped material. Spare delved into Harry's grief, his military service and his long-running war with the press, but large chunks of the Sussex saga remain conspicuously vague. Neither Harry nor Meghan has fully laid out the most incendiary claims they have levelled at the Royal Family, and Meghan has never publicly unpacked who or what she believes pushed her to the point of feeling suicidal as a working royal, or how she lives with that period now.

Publishers believe she would arrive with receipts. One insider, asked about the prospect of a book, claimed Meghan has been 'documenting everything since before Megxit', describing 'voice notes on her phone at 1am, written journals, structured reflections'. For a seasoned editor, that kind of archive is catnip. In this case, it would not just shape a memoir, it would throw petrol on an already volatile story.

Inside The Rumoured Meghan Markle Divorce Memoir

Any Meghan Markle 'post-Harry divorce book' would not, at least officially, be sold as pure revenge, however much commentators love that line. Her pre-royal life, from a childhood shaped by divorce to years of slogging through auditions before Suits and the role of Rachel Zane, offers the kind of aspirational graft American readers happily chew through.

The real heat, though, as everyone in publishing quietly admits, lies in the last decade, from the moment her relationship with Harry went public. Parts of that story were sketched out in the couple's Netflix series, where Meghan spoke of feeling abandoned by some of Harry's relatives, hounded by the British press and devastated by the collapse of her relationship with her father. A memoir in her own voice, without a director shaping the narrative, would pin those grievances to the page.

Meghan would not be entering that arena alone. She moves in a circle of heavy hitters who understand how to build a blockbuster project from the ground up. Oprah Winfrey, her Montecito neighbour, was the first to hand the Sussexes a primetime platform for their 'truth', a sit-down that drew huge audiences and prompted the late Queen Elizabeth II's dry but cutting response that 'recollections may vary'.

There is also Mellody Hobson, co-chief executive of Ariel Investments and former chair of Starbucks, married to Star Wars creator George Lucas. Hobson is regarded as one of the most connected figures in US business and media, and friends say she has mentored Meghan for years, the sort of ally who can get almost anyone to pick up the phone.

Then comes Nicole Avant, a former US ambassador and close friend of Meghan's, married to Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos. The Sussexes' five-year £74 million Netflix deal has reportedly cooled and shifted to a looser, non-exclusive arrangement, with the streamer also stepping back from Meghan's lifestyle venture As Ever, but Avant's personal support appears to have held.

According to reporting by royal writer Emily Andrews, Avant has been a key behind-the-scenes advocate for tying any future Meghan memoir to the screen. The idea would be to develop the book in tandem with Netflix or other platforms, turning it from a straightforward celebrity title into a broader entertainment property, the kind of cross-media stuff Hollywood loves to hype.

Meghan Markle Book Talk Collides With Delicate Royal Truce

The tension, as so often with the Sussexes, is timing.

On one side, Meghan is reported to see a book as a reset button, a way to showcase what she views as her success in the US while finally laying out her version of life inside the Royal Family, in her own words and at her own pace. Given the level of scrutiny she has faced since her relationship with Harry became public, that urge to claim the narrative is hardly surprising.

On the other hand, Harry appears to be inching through a fragile, deliberately slow attempt to rebuild trust with his father, King Charles. Royal commentators say he wants to 'stabilise and improve' relations with the family he walked away from and has been quietly pleased that Archie, seven, and Lili, five, now have occasional chats and video calls with their grandfather.

Drop a Meghan Markle 'post-Harry divorce book' into the middle of that and you do not get mild discomfort, you get a front-page crisis. It would almost certainly drag Harry back into the kind of public family warfare he now insists he wants less of. That is a key reason why most insiders do not expect any such memoir, even if it already exists in rough form, to surface soon. The risk to the fragile détente between Montecito and Buckingham Palace is obvious.

Yet, as Emily Andrews notes, the book's idea serves as leverage in itself. The suggestion that Meghan has years of diaries, 1am voice notes and carefully structured reflections stored away, and that her team has already sounded out publishers about a potential post-Harry divorce memoir, hangs over the ongoing royal saga like a storm cloud. Nothing is confirmed yet, so everything should be taken with a grain of salt. But for a family obsessed with controlling the story, the possibility alone carries real power.