Princess Diana Was Not Your Mother
The outpouring of grief over Diana’s death 25 years ago was the curtain-raiser for our age of hysteria.
Do I remember where I was? Sure. I was in my bedroom watching TV. It was the early hours of Sunday, a sultry late summer’s night, when a newsflash announced that there had been a serious accident in a Parisian underpass.
Soon I was looking at the mouth of a tunnel, the concrete surrounds illuminated by the pulse of emergency vehicle lights. Beneath, a chyron read: “FATAL PARIS CAR CRASH. Princess Diana seriously hurt.” It became clear very quickly, from the portentous timbre of the reporting, that Diana’s injuries were grave, and that we were on a countdown — not dissimilar to that which followed the Kennedy assassination a generation earlier — to the announcement that she, too, had died.
Through the fog of my teenage insomnia, I recall recognizing that this was a thing both exceptionally sad and seismically newsworthy. At the time, Diana was arguably the most famous woman on the planet. She had married Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, just a few months after I was born. Her fame had endured at that rarefied valence for the duration of my life. Nonetheless, though I sensed the days ahead would be disorienting, the true dimensions of the shock were yet…
