The Duchess of Sussex has talked of her childhood as a 'latchkey kid' in a new Archetypes podcast episode released on Spotify.
In conversation with American actress Mindy Kaling, Meghan, who is currently on an unofficial Royal tour with Prince Harry, described how she was “alone so much as a child” and was a “latchkey kid”.
The conversation arose as Meghan talked about her favourite childhood reading material, saying she romanticised the Archie comics because she wanted the “cookie cutter-looking perfect life”.
The duchess said: “I was alone so much as a child, right, and also a latchkey kid, and I think I read a lot of Archie comic books ironically.
“My son is not named after Archie comic books, but I loved them. I collected them.”
She added: “I think for me, especially, my parents split up when I was around two, three years old, and I always wanted this sort of cookie cutter-looking perfect life and you looked at that and there’s like a boy in a letterman jacket.
“I romanticised that. It’s all part of the things that make you have this idea of what you want your life to be like when you grew up.
“I always thought I’m way more Betty than Veronica and am I gonna get the guy one day? And I was the smart one, not the pretty ones. All this stuff was wrapped up in reading Archie comic books, and just, I think, was aspirational in some ways.”
The American Archie comics feature a main character who has red hair just like the Duke of Sussex.
Archie Andrews is known as “America’s typical teenager” and he and his friends have been updated for a modern audience with Riverdale, a Netflix American teenage drama series.
Kaling said that the comics “never got too sexy”, telling Meghan: “Well, you like redheads.”
Meghan laughed and said: “I do and I like the name Archie”, describing it as all being “full circle”.
The podcast began with Meghan saying: “When I was 14, I planned my wedding. Not my actual wedding, that would have been a bit harder to imagine.”
The duchess described how it was actually a religious studies assignment at her Catholic school and how she wanted her wedding to be in the Bel Air hotel, with a “Swan Lake” and “oh my goodness, the dress, strapless and pouffy and I’d seen it in a bridal magazine”.
“I took this project seriously, I wanted to get an A. And I did. Maybe I got an A minus,” Meghan said.
She questioned why the assignment had even existed, saying: “At no point can you say ‘Nope. My dream for the future is to be single’.
“The message even at my feminist all-girls school was as traditional as it gets. First comes love. Then comes marriage.”
Meghan spoke with actress Mindy about the joys, challenges and stigmas of being a single, unmarried woman.
Discussing marriage, Meghan said: “What was and what is so threatening about women who live outside of marriage?”
She added: “The associations our society makes around unmarried women feels so outdated and I wanted to give them a refresh.”
The duchess, introducing Kaling, said: “Mindy and I are talking about how her decision to have children as a single, unmarried woman showed her the importance of forging your own path.”
Source: Read Full Article