Earlier this year I received a message from a stranger on Instagram. They knew Raynor Winn, the author of The Salt Path and they had a tip off: her husband, Moth, the subject of her book, didn’t seem to be as ill as she claimed.
Readers had opened their hearts to this woman and her true story of how her husband Moth had received a terminal neurological diagnosis just days after they had been conned out of their home and left destitute. The couple had then made a radical decision: to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path of England, rough camping and surviving on a pittance. They told how the physical exertion of the hike, and the beauty of nature, helped to reverse many of Moth’s symptoms.
Looking into Moth’s neurological condition, I saw immediate red flags. Corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare disease with similar symptoms to Parkinson’s, usually kills sufferers within six to eight years of diagnosis. They can experience muscle stiffness and shaking, have issues with balance and eventually lose the use of their hands and legs, often slipping into dementia, before they lose the ability to swallow.
At this point, my editor at The Observer warned me that it would be difficult to publish. Medical histories are private and this probably wasn’t a story we could pursue. But he gave me a few days to follow up on other information the anonymous tip-off had provided. It’s not unusual for authors to take on pen-names, but Raynor Winn and her husband’s real names, Sally and Tim Walker, were not publicly available. My source provided the names and the location in Wales where they’d lost their house.
I travelled to Pwllheli, in north-west Wales, and learnt of rumours that Sally Walker, aka Raynor Winn, had stolen money from her employer and got away with it.
Memoir is never entire truth; omission and curation is part of the creative process. But Winn had painted herself as a victim when that seemed far from the truth. And knowing that she’d lied about how she lost her home, cast more suspicion on inconsistencies with Moth’s health. It now seemed plausible that readers may have been sold a lie. Most of all, the suspicion that very sick people might have been misled by Moth’s miraculous recovery felt like a pressing issue of public interest.
We made new discoveries: we found a novel that Winn had written years before The Salt Path that contains a level of autobiographical truth absent in her memoirs, and found members of their two respective families who have been prepared to talk to me, lifting the lid on more revelations from their past.
On her website, the author called my original investigation “grossly unfair”, although she doesn’t give any detail about which aspects she specifically takes issue with. And she has said that The Salt Path was the true story of the couple’s physical and spiritual journey. But when her truth and the facts clash, it seems only fair that readers of her books should be furnished with both so they can make up their own minds about what to believe.
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