Excerpt from Diana In Search of Herself by Sally Bedell Smith, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Yet she tended to define herself in terms of the approval of others. "I think essentially that she was an ill person," said Dr. Michael Adler of the National AIDS Trust. "She was very, very insecure. She didn't believe in herself. There was not a sort of real center to her personality. Her identity was created for her, and she increasingly got herself into personal problems, which highlighted her inadequacies."

When she started out, she appeared to be a typical Sloane Ranger--an ill-educated girl with a perfect pedigree and good manners, but little else to prepare her for the rough-and-tumble ahead. Her identity was incomplete and unsatisfactory, her self-esteem shaky, especially regarding her intellectual ability. What's more, she had certain juvenile preconceptions of her future, an idealized version of marriage that was fed by the fairy-tale romances written by her stepgrandmother, Barbara Cartland.

The royal family imposed a new identity on her, which was glamorized by the press and the demands of her international celebrity. She was expected to be a wife and mother as well as a royal spokesman and stylish symbol. As she tried to fulfill her duties, she felt that neither the royal family nor the press adequately praised her. The tabloids would create one image of her, and she would react, at times unwittingly, to a view of herself that the public had accepted but that often had little basis in fact. "As she expressed it to friends," wrote Charles's biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, ... she did not know who she really was."

Seeing herself over and over in photographs and on television only deepened her insecurities. "She scoured the newspapers for photographs of herself with an eagerness unalloyed by familiarity," wrote Dimbleby. "Not for the first time, it seemed to [Charles and Diana's] friends that she was searching for her own identity in the image of a princess that smiled back at her from every front page."

Diana felt inadequate to the burgeoning expectations, so she continually sought a new persona that would please everyone, mutating to fit the predominant impression and placate criticism. As Sam McKnight, one of her many hairstylists observed, "Her whole life appears to have been a series of transformations, and I guess it was, but I think she made it like that because she had to transform and transform until she found her true self." Diana's constantly changing hairstyles were only the most visible evidence of her shifting identities. "The haircut was a way to have a strong image," said her friend Roberto Devorick. "She changed it according to her moods.When she went to the excess of cutting it too short or making it too wet, she wanted to make a statement or fight a moment of her life. When it was looser and softer, I think she was feeling better about herself."

When Diana began actively spinning her own story in 1991 by collaborating with journalists, she declared, "From now on, I am going to own myself and be true to myself. I no longer want to live someone else's idea of what and who I should be. I am going to be me." But she was still obsessed by the expectations of others. "Whatever I do," she said toward the end of her life, "it's never good enough for some people."

Living as a celebrity did incalculable damage to Diana, whose emotional underpinnings were tenuous to begin with. "It is the inability to see oneself from the inside," said a friend who was privy to Diana's psychological torment. "There is always a reflection, a distortion. Who one is and what one's contributions are may be perfectly ordinary and valuable, but they are skewed by the distortion of fame. It is difficult to see oneself in that circumstance."

Copyright © 1999 Sally Bedell Smith .