Following a report in The Observer last month, questioning many of the memoir’s foundational claims, the public has been hooked on a story that’s just getting motoring – and proving to be far more interesting than the book itself could ever have dreamed of.
But the scandal’s latest instalment comes courtesy of Joanna Cocking, the owner of a Cornish café that the book seems to reference. While “[Winn] never named the café […] there is only one café in this cove,” notes Cocking – as such, she must have been taken aback to read her apparent analogue in The Salt Path, who harangues a young employee as he serves paninis and sweeps floors: “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? There’s two tables out there uncleared. What do I pay you for? You’re fucking lazy.”
The more I read about Winn, the more of a nightmare she sounds – but it’s not hard to imagine why she might have thought that being liberal with the truth in a memoir, rather than just writing a novel where she could invent as much as she pleased, would make her book a hit. After all, the only thing the public loves more than a good story is one that’s true – or at least seems that way.
As such, if Winn did embroider her experience to make it more compelling, she’d be far from the first – but for an audience expecting the truth, artistic license is a fine line, and it can backfire.
square YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN From ‘The Salt Path’ to my fake columns, we can't recognise truth anymore
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We swallowed Winn’s account back in 2018, when that was all that was on offer – but since a Bigger, Truer story entered the chat, her original narrative is done for. What once was a tale about a plucky couple on a long walk is now one about a woman (allegedly!) fudging everything from the reasons they set off to the café staff they met along the way – I know which one I’d rather read, and, judging by the public’s feverish appetite for fresh developments in The Salt Path saga, I’m far from alone.
Real life rarely unfolds according to the neat, satisfying narrative beats that fiction can offer – but get caught out trying to pass the latter off as the former, and you risk becoming the story rather than writing it.
No doubt, there is something extraordinarily satisfying about a memoir being bested by its own exposée. In her book, Winn banked on our appetite for true tales enough to (allegedly!) fake some; in the delirious reaction to her downfall, she got more than she bargained for.
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