A friend of mine in possession of a greater bullshit detector than my own had always been suspicious. “It just doesn’t ring true,” she said.
And so when, on Sunday, it was alleged in the Observer that Raynor Winn, author of the beloved, inspirational 2018 memoir The Salt Path – which has sold more than two million copies worldwide and was recently turned into a film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs – had in fact seemingly spun parts of the story from a tissue of obfuscation and lies, I reached for my phone in defeat.
“You were right,” I texted.
Her response, which ran to several messages, most of them gloating, essentially read: “Told you!!!”
I felt like an idiot. Of course I did. But should I, like my savvy friend, have realised sooner? Should I have instinctively presumed that the memoirist made it all up, and that her agent, her editor, and her publishing house Penguin, were all in collusion? Call me naïve – you wouldn’t be the first – but I don’t think I live in that world just yet.
When I read a book, a work of memoir, I believe it. I trust in the words on the page. Yes, I know that it is human nature to exaggerate, and to colour in, and I know too that memoir requires a riveting and sustaining narrative. But I don’t expect blatant deception, or wild embellishment. I go to fiction for that.
The Salt Path follows Winn and her husband Moth – who has a neurodegenerative brain condition called corticobasal degeneration – after they become homeless having seen an investment in a friend’s company go wrong. So they decide to walk the South West Coast Path, and go on an uplifting spiritual journey in the process.
Yet the Observer piece alleges that The Salt Path’s claims of Winn’s homelessness and bankruptcy at the hands of some merciless (former) friends is not only untrue, but also that their plight was self-inflicted.
Their home was repossessed after Winn racked up debts repaying £64,000 she stole from a former employer – for which she’d been arrested – and that, far from being homeless, they “had land in France”. They weren’t walking the South West Coast Path to commune with nature so much as they were running away.
Winn, for her part, has responded by saying that the Observer piece is “highly misleading”.
“The Salt Path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives,” a statement said. “This is the true story of our journey.”
The sheer chutzpah on display here is almost fantastic. What sort of mindset must one possess to maintain the charade? Did they never think that the truth might eventually come out?
square WALKING I walked Cornwall's coast and met hikers inspired by The Salt Path
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The most compelling strand of the book was Moth’s illness, the progression of which Moth was seemingly able to reverse simply by walking outdoors on a windy day. But now we wonder: was Moth ever that sick in the first place?
I read The Salt Path back in 2020, and found it inspirational. I was won over by Winn’s sheer determination in the face of such adversity. When I interviewed her for this paper a year later, on the publication of her second book, I congratulated her success.
“I must admit it’s been really quite strange,” she said. “I seem to be recognised everywhere I go these days, no matter how sweaty I might be.”
Winn isn’t of course the first writer to fail to understand the unwritten rules of the genre. Back in 2003, American author James Frey published A Million Little Pieces, which catalogued his descent into drug addiction and the hard-won climb back to sobriety. Oprah Winfrey loved it, it sold millions – and was then revealed to be filled with untruths, a novel in all but name.
But what Winn is alleged to have done here is far worse. Frey’s book was merely evidence of a typically tiresome American bro flexing his survivalist muscles; no harm done, ultimately. But The Salt Path milked its redemptive arc, and gave hope to all sorts of people, particularly fellow sufferers of Moth’s illness.
This is not, as has since been confirmed by neurologists, the kind of disease whose symptoms can be lessened simply by purchasing a pair of sturdy walking boots from Millets.
“Everybody faces adversity at some point in their lives and has to find a way through,” Winn told me in 2021. “So perhaps that’s why [people] have connected to my story.
“I met a couple yesterday who told me how my books have made them re-evaluate the way they approached their own lives. They talked to me as if we were friends.” They might not feel like friends anymore.
As it stands, Winn has a fourth instalment of her walking adventures due for publication in the autumn. It can’t possibly come out now though, surely? If it does, a suggestion: file it not in the memoir section, but in fantasy.
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