The Salt Path scandal proves you should never trust a memoir  ...Middle East

The American novelist Tom Robbins once wrote that people write memoirs “because they lack the imagination to make things up”. Perhaps that’s not always the case. This week the book world has been rocked by allegations that the bestselling memoir The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, which details the long coastal walk she and her terminally ill husband took after they lost their home – so poor they had to wild camp along the way – contains major inaccuracies.

Raynor and Moth are, an investigation by The Observer has revealed, actually called Sally and Tim Walker, and, the newspaper alleges, didn’t lose their home through a bad investment as detailed in the book, but after embezzling £64,000 stolen from Sally’s former employer. The piece goes on to cast doubt too on the severity of Moth’s illness, with one neurologist saying, “It didn’t pass the sniff test”.

Memoirists all around the world have expressed sadness and fury. “How bad does it make all of us look, to be in an industry that now seems so unverified?” wrote best-selling memoirist Sophie Heawood in her popular newsletter on Substack, The Sophist.

Interestingly, a high number of commenters on book websites such as Goodreads and Amazon seem to have had doubts long before any journalists. “Her homelessness facts ring hollow,” one wrote years ago. “Much of it I simply don’t believe,” wrote another. “I really liked this book until… I doubted all of it […] Something didn’t add up,” said another, concerned with the repetitive way she felt Winn described people’s angry reactions to the couple’s homelessness.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” wrote another, citing an interview with the author in which she appeared to be struggling when asked to recall what part of the coast she liked best.

Winn has responded by saying The Observer article is “highly misleading”, that the book “is the true story of our journey” and the couple are taking legal advice. The health charity, PSPA, that she and her husband previously fronted have publicly ended their relationship with the pair saying they are “shocked and disappointed to learn of the allegations”.

The publisher Penguin Random House have issued a statement arguing that they “undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence, including a contract with an author warranty about factual accuracy, and a legal read, as is standard with most works of non-fiction”.

So, what does happen if someone fakes a memoir? Most publishing contracts include an indemnity clause in which the author guarantees things such as the writing being their own original work, that they are not defaming anyone and that the work is substantially true and correct. As a result, the author is technically liable for any financial loss suffered by the publisher as a result of errors, plagiarism or lies.

Heawood recalls “extensive legalling” in the run-up to the publication of The Hungover Games in 2020. ‘Here’s a funny example,” she tells me. “There’s a chapter where I went on one date with a guy. He was a perfect gentleman. We did not go to bed together. It was a comically bad date, but all my own fault and I clearly show that. I don’t name him, I don’t identify him. But he, along with anyone else who was mentioned in the book, had to be sent a manuscript of that chapter prior to publication to consent to it and to have the right to reply.

square NICK DUERDEN

I interviewed ‘The Salt Path’ author Raynor Winn – now I feel duped

“He had to tell me he would not pursue legal action and only when I’d had all that back from him and everyone else who was a living person in the book was I allowed to publish.” If this is the case one wonders if the publisher tried to show The Salt Path manuscript to the people with whom they believed the author had had financial wranglings.

Damien Barr, whose memoir Maggie and Me was published in 2013, recalls sitting down with his legal editor (whom he had to pay himself) to go over “all the ways in which I might be sued by people or inadvertently create legal ramifications. It was terrifying.”

There are cases where “fake memoirs” have resulted in court cases. James Frey’s 2003 so-called memoir about addiction and recovery, A Million Little Pieces, had sold 3.5 million copies after Oprah Winfrey lauded it as part of her much coveted Book Club. Journalists then revealed that large parts of it were invented, including the details of Frey’s drug use and jail time and the circumstances of his girlfriend’s death. The publisher Random House later had to spend $1.4m reimbursing readers who sued saying they felt defrauded.

It’s worth noting though that Frey had already earned $4.4m in royalties so was not out of pocket, that he went on to form successful publishing and gaming companies, as well as writing and publishing multiple successful further books, including a new novel just this year.

Frey has harnessed his own disgrace, telling The New York Times in an interview in June: “I was working in autofiction before that word existed.” (A Million Little Pieces can be currently found in Waterstones under both the fiction and biography sections.) Frey added: “The ability to shock and dismay people based on a story unearthing lies? I don’t think it would have anywhere near the effect nowadays.”

Herman Rosenblat also faked parts of his Holocaust memoir, An Angel at the Fence in 2008, in which he claimed that while imprisoned at Schlieben concentration camp, a young girl had managed to pass him food through a fence for seven months, and that they had later gone on to marry as adults. Oprah (again!) hailed the book as a triumph, but historians later disputed it. Rosenblat was forced to admit that he had invented the story of the girl and the food, and the book and a planned film were cancelled.

Belle Gibson, the wellness guru at the core of recent Netflix show Apple Cider Vinegar did not write a memoir. But The Whole Pantry, the cookbook and wildly successful app drawn from her own supposed life experience healing various aggressive cancers with a healthy lifestyle, was cancelled after she was shown not to be ill at all, and to have siphoned off money she had promised to give to charity for herself. In 2017 she was fined A$410,000 for misleading her readers, although that money appears still to be unpaid.

Will anything similar happen to Raynor Winn – if The Observer’s allegations are proven to be correct? Scott Pack, a former publisher at HarperCollins turned freelance editor, thinks a lawsuit such as Frey’s is unlikely (“This isn’t America!”) and so is a court case like Gibson’s since “these guys basically just sold a book and a film ticket”, rather than an app and lifestyle.

And libel feels unlikely. “I suspect refunds would be offered to readers but we’re talking about a few thousand pounds here probably. I don’t think Penguin will ask Winn to pay back any royalties she has received up to date either, because there’s no need to. She’s written hugely successful books. Penguin, the author and the agent will all have been making a lot of money. There isn’t really an impact to Penguin on previous sales.”

The impact, says Pack, is on future sales, and book four, On Winter Hill, which was due out this October, may be cancelled. “Penguin will have paid what I guess is a very good six figure advance for that. They will have spent possibly tens of thousands of pounds producing that book, getting it edited, art work, setting up international editions, possibly translation rights. I’d be amazed if they didn’t ask her for the advance back. And possibly compensation for money spent on it so far. I don’t think they’ll have gone to print yet so that’s one good thing.”

The film, starring Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson, came out in June, and Pack wonders if the film-makers or distributors might seek compensation too – again, assuming the allegations are true.

In response to people concerned that the publisher didn’t do sufficient due diligence, Pack says: “They’re not going to look into the financial records. The Observer journalist spent months looking into this; publishers just don’t do that.”

square KATE MALTBY

'The Salt Path' is the new Captain Tom: a story built for an insecure society

Is it really important for memoirs to be truthful? Some online comments (and the continued success of Frey’s book post-scandal) suggest that some readers simply don’t care. But Heawood points out the “contract” memoirists have with their reader, promising a certain type of “connection with a real person that you obviously just don’t get in fiction”.

She adds that “all memoirists are still liars” because they have to construct a narrative and omit things, and publishers, she says, are also keen to create redemptive arcs of the kind found in The Salt Path. It can be challenging to resist the pressure to conform to predetermined memoir templates.

But there is a way to do this and still be telling a truth of sorts. Heawood adds that her agent told her “never to write memoir with an axe to grind because you will lose the reader […] somehow sensing it to be unjust that the other person in the text isn’t there to defend themself.”

In Damian Barr’s podcast Whose Truth is it Anyway, the writer Jenn Ashworth says: “If a memoirist ever sits down and says: ‘I have the whole unvarnished tale…’ dishonesty creeps in. I think [a memoir] says, ‘Please, believe that this is as I remember it’.”

Barr agrees. “I hate to see the genre discredited with something like this, because it’s already such a fine line with memoir, which is innately subjective,” he says. “All memoir is a snapshot of one person at one moment in time. That’s all you can hope to offer.”

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