The end of the road? What The Salt Path scandal means for the nature memoir

The Guardian

2 days ago

When The Salt Path came out in 2018, it was a publishing phenomenon, going on to sell more than 2m copies globally. As even those who haven't read it are likely to know by now, the book charted Raynor Winn and her husband Moth's emotionally and physically transformative long-distance walk along the South West Coast Path in the wake of utter disaster: a financial collapse that cost them their home, and Moth's diagnosis with an incurable neurological disorder. Winn followed it with two further books in a similar vein, The Wild Silence and Landlines, also bestsellers. Earlier this year came a film of The Salt Path, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. That original book by a first-time writer had become what writers, editors and booksellers all dream of: a bestselling, spin-off generating brand.
But it wasn't the first nature memoir to top the charts, by any means. In 2012, Wild by Cheryl Strayed described the 26-year‑old's hike across the west coast of America in the wake of her mother's death and the end of her marriage, and after soaring up the book charts it was made into a film starring Reese Witherspoon two years later. That same year, H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald was a surprise bestseller, telling the story of a year spent training a Eurasian goshawk as a journey through grief after the death of their father. In 2016, Amy Liptrot's The Outrun saw her return to the sheep farm on Orkney where she'd grown up in order to recover from addiction through contact with nature; it was also recently filmed, with Saoirse Ronan in the lead role. Meanwhile, in last year's bestselling Raising Hare, foreign policy adviser Chloe Dalton describes moving to the countryside, rescuing a leveret and rediscovering her relationship with the land.
There is clearly a thriving market for this particular blend of nature writing, personal memoir and a specific form of self-help in which the embattled individual – or in the case of The Salt Path, a couple – finds solace, sustenance and even redemption by withdrawing from everyday society and launching themselves into the great outdoors. It's not difficult to see why such narratives are attractive, but what do they tell us about ourselves and our relationship with the natural world? And what damage might The Salt Path affair do to this genre of nature memoir?
It is not given to any of us to know the definitive truth, of course, and any memoir is subject to the pitfalls of perception, memory and judgment. But the two most significant accusations levelled against Winn are that, some time before the journey described in The Salt Path, she embezzled large amounts of money from an employer, and that she exaggerated the severity of Moth's illness. She denies both, and is particularly insistent that neither she nor Moth intended to suggest that their travels were a miracle cure for his condition.
However, the book tapped into a strong desire among readers for narratives of healing through nature. For Melissa Harrison, author of novels for adults and children as well as nonfiction ranging from memoir to nature guides, these kinds of nature books represent 'proxies through which we can relate to the natural world in a way that most of us don't have the time or the inclination to in real life'. Reading about someone else's deep dive into forest, field or water furnishes us with the sense that we're participating in an environment that, for much of the time, is at arm's length. 'That mediated experience is reassuring: it tells us that we still have the capacity for a certain depth and intensity of feeling, and that one day, when whatever the circumstances are that prevent us from doing so currently are over, we can pick up our relationship with nature where we left off – most likely in adolescence – and find meaning and belonging again.'
Harrison adds a cautionary note, however, about the 'healing narrative' or 'quest structure' in such nature writing. Having admired Dalton's work, for example, she observes that 'for every Raising Hare there are five books in which it seems the author simply wanted to write a nature memoir and cast about for some kind of experience to structure the book. Readers deserve better – and publishers should do better than this.'
Harrison is not the only writer I speak with to bring up the issue of publishers' responsibilities. Indeed, the post-Salt Path conversation has included criticism of Winn's publisher, Penguin Random House, and its perceived failure to carry out due diligence on her manuscript. While the more trenchant comments seem tinged with a post-hoc lack of realism – can editors really be expected to play detective and, for example, interview a prospective writer's wider circle to establish veracity? – there is more justification for the feeling that the industry will publish relentlessly into an area it deems likely to achieve mainstream success, even if that means green-lighting repetitive or imitative work.
Mo Hafeez, a commissioning editor at Faber, agrees that there has been a certain homogenisation of writing about the natural world, especially in work coming through after the pandemic. 'People were engaging in nature more, purely by virtue of being in lockdown and not being able to see each other,' he says. 'There was this surge of nature writing that came through, and often, instead of it being career-long naturalists or academics or people who had been writing in this area for a long time, it was everyday people's engagements with nature. Which in a way was very lovely, and it democratised the genre quite a lot, but it got to a point where it was quite a saturated area of the market.'
The challenge, he thinks, is to resist expectations of what a nature memoir should look like, and remain open to work from unexpected angles – he has recently been reading the poet Jason Allen-Paisant's nonfiction exploration of rural landscapes in the UK and in Jamaica, for example.
There are numerous writers who sit within the genre but are writing according to their own imperative, rather than a notional market: an incomplete list might include Noreen Masud, whose book A Flat Place observes trauma through the lens of different landscapes; poet Polly Atkin, author of a biography of Dorothy Wordsworth and a memoir, Some of Us Just Fall, in which she contemplates her own chronic illness; and Natasha Carthew, writer and founder of the Nature Writing prize for working class writers.
It's likely that none of these writers will compete with Raynor Winn in terms of sales. Bestselling books become so because idea, execution, publishing knowhow and the zeitgeist combine in precisely the right way and at the right moment to capture readers' imagination. One can certainly see what made The Salt Path successful: a compelling piece of storytelling in its own right, it tapped into deeply held anxieties about the sudden loss of home and health, and countered them with a portrait of resilience against the odds.
It is the accusation that Winn misrepresented her husband's illness, and that the books allowed, if not encouraged, readers to believe that the couple's walks and wild camping had led to an improvement in his condition, that has provoked the most vehement negative reactions. That strength of feeling is telling.
'What I'm interested in,' says Rachel Hewitt, author of In Her Nature, 'is that use of physical illness as morally unambiguous. It's a shield, isn't it?' She argues that the full story – whatever the truth of it – would have made a more interesting narrative. But it is easier to market the more crafted tale, which is 'actually very simple: a walk from illness to recovery, a walk from homelessness to finding a new concept of home. You know, all those things are quite simple, and there's clearly something within publishing houses or within readers that really responds to that.'
Writing about illness is an intensely personal and immensely delicate undertaking, both in terms of the challenges it holds for the writer and the impact it can have on the reader. Susan Sontag famously outlined the dangers in Illness As Metaphor; Hilary Mantel counselled that 'illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false.'
Hewitt suggests that there might be an inherent smoothing over of complication in the stories that publishers find it easiest to present to the public; and that a woman in her 50s, with a necessarily involved past, constitutes a challenge to that narrative simplicity. Hewitt is currently contemplating writing about grief from the perspective of her own widowhood, and has become increasingly aware of 'these sort of neat, linear narratives that have become such a staple of nature writing, but don't represent human experience'.
In terms of writing about the natural world, author Nic Wilson believes this approach is symptomatic of 'much wider societal attitudes towards nature and the transactional way that quite a lot of our society goes into the relationship with nature'. Her debut book, Land Beneath the Waves, has been published recently, and she explains how she initially resisted the idea of writing about her family history and her own chronic illness in relation to nature, deterred partly by an awareness of the limitations of memory, and partly by a belief that her story was too 'ordinary'.
'I think perhaps even some of the books that are billed as healing narratives are more complex than that. It's just that this becomes sort of a trope that's talked about. And I think it simplifies things, and sets a precedent that other books are expected to follow, which is not helpful to [having] a diversity of voices within memoir, particularly within nature memoir, because the greater diversity of voices we have, the more people's individual experiences are validated and spoken to.'
Through all these conversations, there's a clear insistence that we need to see 'nature' not as a resource, but as a multifaceted and interdependent series of contexts and environments. 'Let's be honest, it's full of death, isn't it?' says James Rebanks, whose accounts of his life as a farmer in The Shepherd's Life and English Pastoral have recently been joined by The Place of Tides, a memoir about time spent with a wild duck farmer on a Norwegian island. As he points out, nature is 'full of death and disease and failure and decline. It isn't all butterflies, sunshine and healing, is it? In my last book, I was trying to make it more complicated: nature can be lonely. Nature can be too quiet. It can be too isolated. It can lead to you not being in the right place. And nature itself is broken, so it can make you depressed. It's falling apart around you. I find it more interesting when it's less about personal redemption and more of a mirror on the big things that I care about: the politics, the economics, what's actually really happening in the world.'
Rebanks, who loves Tolstoy and the American writer Wendell Berry and thinks of himself in the tradition of the agrarian radical, is an engaging presence, both off and on the page and, like the best writers on nature, is alive to the frequent contradictions in portraying it in either fiction or nonfiction. Helen Macdonald, too, whose prize-winning H Is for Hawk has been made into a film with Claire Foy and Brendan Gleeson, is acutely aware of the expectations we bring to the genre.
'Nature is considered to be the one place free of human artifice, the place where deep universal truths can be uncovered that are not to do with us,' Macdonald says, 'which, of course, is bullshit. That's not the case. We put all our deepest human meanings into nature. We sort of force them in there, and then we use them to prove the veracity of our own concepts back at us, which is what nature writing does all the time.'
Macdonald highlights a literary-critical tradition that is useful in understanding both the success of The Salt Path and the reaction to its alleged departures from fact. 'Tramp' or 'vagabonding' literature, which flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries, was by its nature highly individualistic and accepted to contain fabrications; it encompassed writing by those who were marginalised from society, and those, like George Orwell, who put themselves in that position in order to analyse societal structures. It's a world away from contemporary memoir and the idea that nature can be instrumental in making us feel better.
So is the genre now facing an existential crisis? Is there still room in the market for stories of journeys into the wilderness, complete with a healing narrative? For Jessica Lee, author of books for both adults and children and the founder of The Willowherb Review, which ran from 2018 to 2022 and aimed to provide a platform for writers of colour, the issues raised by The Salt Path furore present us with an opportunity to explore innovative ways of writing about nature.
'If we're talking about wanting to write about the natural world,' Lee says, 'we can't get rid of ourselves. We can't write ourselves out of the narratives; we're the ones telling the story. But what we can do is allow the world to inform the shape that we take.' That means resisting the idea of linear progression, or redemptive arcs, in favour of the cyclical and the messy. 'The personal, with us at the centre, can be the door that opens the story. But then we really need to be very proactively seeking to undo that the second we've opened that door.'
Meanwhile, the fallout from such microscopic attention to a huge bestseller offers us a window into the realities of nature publishing, where experimentation and complexity persist, but often do so without the resources afforded to more commercially appealing narratives. A salutary lesson, perhaps, but not one likely to deter the most adventurous and committed of those attempting to survey our threatened environment and to capture both its wonders and its fragility.