Forget the other 10,000 books on Diana. This is the real story -- of a poorly educated, shallow-minded ninny who took on more than she could handle and paid the ultimate price. ( )

This is the only biography of Diana that I've read. I read it because a reviewer said that unlike most biographers, Smith actually knew both Charles and Diana. It turns out that she had met each of them. Once. Charles paid more attention to her, so he's the good guy. It is most successful at pointing up the futility of trying to make judgments based on contradictory "secret" sources.

I thought that the author frequently showed poor reasoning. The author argues that Diana lied frequently. As an example, she gave Diana's "contradictory" accounts of her wedding day. Noticing that many of them came from the same book, I read the original. Frankly, they struck me as a reasonable representation of the roller-coaster of emotions that one experiences at such a time.

Smith, like too many historian/biographers, has a crippling literal-mindedness for conversations. Most people, relating an anecdote, mercifully stick to the parts relevant to the conversation in which they are recounting them. These are not affidavits, just social chat. And this doesn't even take into consideration unavoidable changes of memory. After splitting, people who were once close friends may be unable to remember what they originally liked about one another. Therefore, I don't consider non-contradictory differences to be lies: usually they relate to context. So Smith once again offers as proof of lying that two of Diana's descriptions of her mother's leaving the family differ. This ignores the fact that her mother left twice, and she might not be talking about the same event. Further, the differences are not contradictory: both could be true and for some reason Diana emphasized different things in the two accounts.

Smith eventually diagnoses Diana as suffering from borderline personality disorder. The reader who has encountered posthumous diagnoses, especially contradictory ones, may make of this what they want. Smith says that her findings show that Diana wasn't the awful person she has portrayed her as being throughout the book; she couldn't help herself. If she seriously meant to convey that, she should have mentioned it at the beginning of the book. At the end, it just looks like a play for publicity and a weasel factor. ( )