Aside from reports that the royals were up in arms over Harry’s book, Spare was officially greeted with a wall of silence from the palace.

But Harry insisted in multiple interviews that this wasn’t him trying to stick a fork in his relationship with his family, but rather clear all the cobwebs and air the dirty laundry so they could perhaps really see what he’d been going through all those years. As he described, his angst and unaddressed trauma went back decades, long before Meghan came into the picture.

“I’m not sure how honesty is burning bridges,” he told ITV’s Bradby in a Jan. 8 interview. “You know, silence only allows the abuser to abuse. Right? So I don’t know how staying silent is ever gonna make things better.”

And “though I would like to have reconciliation,” he continued, “I would like accountability. I’ve managed to make peace over this time with a lot of things that have happened. But that doesn’t mean that I’m just gonna let it go.”

Still, Harry noted, he wanted to be able to forgive and be forgiven. “I would like to get my father back,” he said. “I would like to have my brother back. At the moment, I don’t recognize them, as much as they probably don’t recognize me.”

He loved his family and always would, he stressed. “Nothing of what I’ve done in this book or otherwise,” he said, “has ever been [with] any intention to harm them or hurt them.”