Robert Eaglestone, The Conversation
Raynor Winn, author of the award-winning memoir 'The Salt Path' has been accused of 'lies, deceit and desperation'.
Robert Eaglestone, The Conversation
· 27 minutes ago
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Fact or fiction? 7 memoirs that blurred the line
Memoirs are built on the promise of honesty. They offer a raw, intimate look into lives touched by trauma, transformation, or triumph, and readers trust that what they are consuming is at least fundamentally true. However, recently, Raynor Winn's bestselling memoir, which was recently adapted for screen, found itself in the eye of a controversy after she was accused of fabricating parts of her widely acclaimed life story. Published in 2018, The Salt Path recounts Winn's 630-mile walk with her husband, Moth, along the South West Coast Path after losing their home and receiving a terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare neurodegenerative condition. The story became an inspiration for those struggling with challenging medical diagnoses, and sold over two million copies worldwide. The recent controversy is only the latest in a long line of publishing betrayals. For decades, authors have published so-called true stories that turned o James Frey's memoir about drug addiction and recovery skyrocketed after Oprah chose it for her Book Club. Brutal, unflinching, and famously detailing a root canal with no anesthesia and an 87-day jail sentence, it felt almost too intense to be true. In 2006, The Smoking Gun revealed that Frey had fabricated or grossly exaggerated key parts of the story. He had never been in a fatal accident, never served serious jail time, and had embellished nearly every detail of his 'rock bottom.' Oprah, feeling misled, called him back on air to publicly rebuke him. Frey's publisher issued a disclaimer. Frey, meanwhile, pivoted back to fiction with Bright Shiny Morning. Claiming to be a half-Native foster child raised in gang-infested South Central L.A., 'Margaret B. Jones' delivered a gripping account of violence, survival, and resilience. Critics hailed Love and Consequences as authentic and vital, until the author's real sister stepped in. Margaret B Jones was actually Margaret Seltzer, a white woman raised in suburban Los Angeles and educated at private school. Her entire memoir was fiction. Photos, staged interviews, even 'foster siblings' had been fabricated to sell the illusion. The book was recalled immediately, with only 19,000 copies in circulation. Seltzer's defense that she was trying to give a voice to unheard communities was dismissed as exploitation. Misha Defonseca's story was almost too miraculous to believe. At age 7, she claimed, she walked 1,900 miles across Nazi-occupied Europe to find her deported parents, lived with wolves, snuck into the Warsaw Ghetto, and killed a German soldier in self-defense. The book struggled in the US but became a massive bestseller overseas and was adapted into a French film. 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Eventually, youth counselor Beatrice Sparks admitted to editing and 'enhancing' the diary. Over time, critics determined that much of it had likely been fabricated or written entirely by Sparks herself. Despite mounting evidence, the book remains on school reading lists and is still classified as nonfiction in some libraries. Sparks went on to publish other 'diary' memoirs, many of which followed the same sensationalist, moralising formula.
Scroll.in
6 days ago
- Scroll.in
Robert Eaglestone, The Conversation
'The Salt Path' scandal: Defending a memoir's 'emotional truth' is a high-risk strategy Raynor Winn, author of the award-winning memoir 'The Salt Path' has been accused of 'lies, deceit and desperation'. Robert Eaglestone, The Conversation · 27 minutes ago
Scroll.in
6 days ago
- Scroll.in
‘The Salt Path' scandal: Defending a memoir's ‘emotional truth' is a high-risk strategy
Raynor Winn, author of the award-winning memoir The Salt Path, which was recently adapted into a film, has been accused of 'lies, deceit and desperation'. Writing in The Observer, reporter Chloe Hadjimatheou claims that Winn left out significant facts and invented parts of the story. The Salt Path follows a transformative 630-mile trek along England's South West Coast Path that Winn took with her terminally ill husband Moth, after they lost their home and livelihood. The Observer article claims that aspects of both the story of losing their home and Winn's husband's illness were fabricated. In a statement on her website, Winn has defended her memoir, calling the claims 'grotesquely unfair' and 'highly misleading'. There's a long list of memoirs which have been shown to be problematic. James Frey's recovery memoir A Million Little Pieces (2003) was allegedly exaggerated. In 2006, he apologised for fabricating portions of the book. Worse, Binjamin Wilkomirski's feted Holocaust survivor memoir F ragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1995) was completely fake. Wilkomirski's real name was Bruno Dössekker and he was not a Holocaust survivor; he had simply invented his 'memories' of a death camp, though he seemed to believe they were true. Trust the artist or trust the tale But, for readers, how much does this matter? Novelist DH Lawrence wrote that readers should: 'Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.' As readers of The Salt Path, we fear for Raynor and Moth as they desperately try to escape drowning from a freak high tide at Portheras Cove. We are relieved when we hear that Moth's terminal disease was 'somehow, for a while, held at bay'. The origin of the word fiction is from the Latin fingere, which means not to lie, but to fashion or form. All memoirs – indeed, all texts, from scientific articles to history books to bestselling novels – are 'formed' or 'shaped'. Writing doesn't just fall from a tree; we make it, and it reveals the world by mediating the world. But this idea, that writing is a 'shaping', is why this case matters. Writing, done by oneself, or by a ghostwriter (or even by AI), has conventions, not-quite-rules that underlie its creation and reception. Some of these are in the text (the enemies eventually become lovers); some are outside the text itself (you really can judge a book by its cover). But most conventions are both inside and outside at the same time. Works by historians have footnotes to sources, so you (and other historians) can check the claims. Each scientific article refers to many others, because each article is just one tiny piece of the whole puzzle on which a huge community of scientists are working, and the extensive references show how this piece fits (or doesn't). Non-fiction follows conventions, while novelists can do whatever they want, of course, to challenge or obey the conventions (that's one reason why novels are exciting). Memoir has a particularly important convention, revealed most clearly by the historian Stefan Maechler's report on Wilkomirski's fraudulent memoir. Maechler argued that Wilkomirski broke what the French critic Philippe Lejeune called the 'autobiographical pact', a contract of truth between the author and the reader. For Lejeune, however, this pact is not like a legal agreement. A memoir, unlike a scientific article, need only put forward the truth as it appeared to the author in that area of their life. While the information needs to be accurate to some degree, its level of verifiability is less than a legal document or work of history. Much more important for Lejeune is the harder-to-pin-down fidelity to meaning. After all, many meaningful things – falling in love, for example, or grief – happen mostly inside us and are hard to verify. Even more, the developing overall shape of our life as it seems to us is not really a historical fact, but our own making of meaning. For Lejeune, in a memoir, this emotional truth is more significant than the verifiable truth. Playing with 'emotional truth' The author of The Salt Path seems to have leaned into this idea. In her first statement after The Observer 's piece, she claims that her book 'lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives … This is the true story of our journey'. How, after all, could one verify a 'spiritual journey'? However, I don't fully agree with Lejeune. Perhaps our inner and outer worlds are not as separate as he supposes. Our public actions, including sharing facts, show who we are as much as our words describing our inner journeys. In a memoir, the verifiable truth and the emotional truth are linked by a kind of feedback loop. As readers, we allow some degree of playing with verifiable truth: dialogue is reconstructed, not recorded; we accept some level of dramatisation; we know it's from one person's perspective. But we also make a judgment about these things (there's no fixed rule, no science to this judgment). If there's too much reconstruction, too much dramatisation, we begin to get suspicious about the emotional truth, too: is this really how it felt for them? Was it honestly a spiritual journey? And, in turn, this makes us more suspicious of the verifiable claims. By contrast, the novelist's pact with the reader admits they fake emotional truth, which somehow makes it not fake at all: that's one reason why novels are complicated. This is why defending a memoir's 'emotional truth' is a high-risk strategy. We know from our own lives that people who are unreliable in small (verifiable) things are often unreliable in large (emotional, meaningful) ones. So, for readers, the facts behind The Salt Path matter less in themselves and more because each question points to a larger issue about the book's meaning. When you call someone 'fake', you don't really mean that 'their factual claims are inaccurate', but that they are somehow inauthentic, hollow or – it's a teenager's word, but still – phoney. Once the 'autobiographical pact' looks broken in enough small details, the reader no longer trusts the teller or the tale. In a lengthy statement published on her website in which she addresses the allegations in detail, Winn said that the suggestion that Moth's illness was fabricated was an 'utterly vile, unfair, and false suggestion' and added: 'I can't allow any more doubt to be cast on the validity of those memories, or the joy they have given so many.' Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway University of London.
