The Salt Path and the sins of memoir

New Statesman​

4 days ago

Photo by Steve Tanner/Black Bear
It is not, to put it mildly, a good look. At a time when household finances are stretched and the government is cutting benefits for the sick and disabled, author Raynor Winn stands accused of exaggerating her husband's illness and misrepresenting the circumstances of their destitution in her 2019 memoir The Salt Path – and getting rich via book sales and film rights in the process. Cue fury from betrayed readers (and, undoubtedly, a few jealous writers) on X, and a spate of solemn op-eds on the line between fact and fiction.
As the author of a memoir myself, I admit the story left me unscandalised. Yes, the allegations, if accurate, make a mockery of The Salt Path's claim to be nonfiction. But to tell you the truth – and would I, dear reader, do anything else? – I've come to have low expectations of the average memoir. The genre defined by fidelity to the facts is, on average, a poor guide to deeper truths about human beings. If you want to understand people, you're better off reading fiction.
To be sure, few books beat a brilliant memoir. The best – Primo Levi's Auschwitz testimony If This Is a Man, James Baldwin's searing race chronicle Notes of a Native Son, Annie Ernaux's spare sociological masterpieces – combine the artistry of a great novel with the electric frisson of self-exposure. But for every thrilling confession by a Thomas De Quincey or a Tove Ditlevsen, there are countless frauds and duds.
Naturally, the frauds get the headlines. Winn joins a long and ignoble list of autobiographers accused of deception. The canonical modern example is James Frey, unmasked on Oprah after fabricating parts of his addiction memoir A Million Little Pieces (and recently profiled by the New York Times, unrepentantly recalling the scandal from a house full of Matisses and Picassos bought with his royalties).
Before Frey came Binjamin Wilkormiski, author of a feted Holocaust memoir who turned out to be neither a survivor nor Jewish. Wilkormiski was defended by fellow 'survivor' Laura Grabowski, who swore she remembered him from Birkenau – until it transpired she was in fact Laurel Wilson, author of her own hoax memoir of ritual abuse, Satan's Underground. But frauds are much rarer than duds. Since the 'memoir boom' of the late Eighties and Nineties – led by superb originals like Mary Karr's The Liar's Club and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes – the demand for truly revelatory personal narrative has outstripped supply.
A deluge of mediocrity has filled the gap. The journalist Will Storr recently detailed how AI has already perfected the bland tone and nebulous detail that makes for a viral Substack confessional. So much for the hope – floated by David Shields in his manifesto Reality Hunger – that autobiography might offer an answer to the artifice of modern life. Of course, in all literary forms the dross outweighs the gold. But the paradox of memoir is that the form premised on truth is usually so poor at delivering it. That's because we are, on the whole, thoroughly unreliable narrators of our own lives.
One problem lies with the fallibility of memory. It isn't just that we repress unbearable truths, as Freud taught. Psychologists have shown how memory is itself a storyteller, weaving together experience, imagination, beliefs and memories of memories into a plausible version of what might have happened – and then selling it to us as the truth. Even if memory were trustworthy, a host of factors militate against truthful autobiography. The story of your life is the story of your most important relationships. And a good story, as every creative writing teacher knows, requires conflict and moral nuance. To tell your life story, you have to reveal unflattering things about the people you love: parents, lovers, siblings. Few have the stomach for that.
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Nor are most people willing to write unflatteringly about themselves. When I tell people I've written a memoir, they sometimes tell me about some episode from their own life they'd like to write about. These stories are often fascinating – but not always for the reasons their tellers think. Often the most interesting parts are the ones they're unwilling or unable to see. People want to tell their life story with all the moral and psychological nuance stripped out, leaving them as virtuous victims or heroic survivors (or, seemingly in Winn's case, both).
All good memoirs find solutions to these problems. A certain ruthlessness with the feelings of others can help: I admire the cold honesty of Rachel Cusk's memoir of motherhood A Life's Work, even as I wince for her children. Some depend on a kind of masochistic self-exposure: see Karl Ove Knausgaard. Another solution is to be French. Their less censorious literary culture than ours licences greater self-disclosure, producing the Nobel-winning Ernaux as well as the undeniably narcissistic but peerless Emmanuel Carrère.
It can help if you've already cut ties with family members before you write about them. One reason many classic memoirs – like Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? – are about escaping religious upbringings is that their authors are relatively free from the usual ties of filial loyalty. Or you can wait until the people you're writing about are dead, as Edmund Gosse did before writing his immortal account of childhood Father and Son.
Some of my favourite memoirs find creative formal ways of engaging with the slipperiness of self-narration. In Night of the Gun David Carr applies the methods of investigative journalism to reconstruct his own past as a crack addict. Lauren Slater's Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir is a stunning Nabokovian experiment that recounts the author's struggle with a rare variant of epilepsy characterised by compulsive fabulism.
But successful memoirs are exceptions. We're much better at seeing through other people's hypocrisies and contradictions than our own. That insight underpins the narrative revolution pioneered by Jane Austen: the blending of a character's innocent perspective with the author's more knowing one. If Elizabeth Bennett had written her own story, it would be a banal tissue of vanity and delusion. But when Austen told it, she invented 'free indirect speech' – and the modern novel.
The messy truth behind the Salt Path may well turn out to be neither Winn's inspiring redemption story nor the cynical fraud imagined by her online critics. Perhaps it's something more interesting: a case of two people backed into a corner by bad luck and terrible decisions, who stumbled onto a slightly too perfect escape – and found themselves trapped in their own distortions once it succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Whatever actually happened, it would make a gripping story. Just don't expect Raynor Winn to be the person to tell it.
[See also: The Salt Path is Scientology for the middle classes]
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