The Salt Path is Scientology for the middle classes
The Salt Path has been quite a phenomenon. As soon as it was published in 2018, Raynor Winn's memoir – about how she and her husband, Moth, had overcome the loss of their house and Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare neurological condition, by walking the 630-mile South West Coast Path, with almost no resources – became a huge success.
It was well reviewed. Touching interviews with Winn appeared. The book was shortlisted for both the 2018 Costa Book Award and the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. It won the inaugural RSL Christopher Bland Prize for debut authors over 50. With a pastoral cover by printmaker Angela Harding, it soon became a best-seller, topping the Sunday Times lists for months, and turned into a mainstay of independent bookshops. Altogether, some two million copies were sold. Raynor Winn became a 'charity ambassador' to the South West Coast Path, many walkers setting off in emulation of the book. The couple also became fundraisers for the PSPA, a charity raising awareness of CBD and progressive supranuclear palsy.
Winn has since published two more similar memoirs of walks in adversity, with her husband continuing to keep his illness at bay – The Wild Silence in 2020, and Landlines in 2022. In May, a film of The Salt Path, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, filmed on the coastal path, found a receptive audience. I was surprised to learn that my own mother and her friends, in their nineties, had made a trip to the cinema for the first time in ages to catch the movie – though they only quite liked it.
This story appears to be in doubt, however. Last Sunday's Observer splashed on a devastating exposé of the book and its author by the investigative journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou. She alleged that the couple's real names were Sally and Tim Walker. Far from being the innocent, exploited victims of a business deal that had gone wrong, Sally Walker faced criminal proceedings for allegedly stealing around £64,000 from her employer, then borrowed £100,000 from a relative to pay her way out of the case; the couple then lost their house when the relative's debt was called in and enforced by a court. Far from being completely homeless, the Observer claims, the couple still owned a property, albeit in ruins and beset by debts, in south-west France. Perhaps most damagingly, nine neurologists and researchers specialising in CBD cast doubt on whether Moth, diagnosed in 2013, could possibly be as well as he seems to be, or have had the miraculous improvements described in the memoir. The PSPA promptly broke links with the pair, taking down a video on its website of Moth talking about his condition.
In response, Winn told Sky News and the Guardian that the Observer article was 'highly misleading'. Her statement continued: 'We are taking legal advice and won't be making any further comment at this time. 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. This is the true story of our journey.'
Its publisher Penguin Books, having called The Salt Path 'an unflinchingly honest, inspiring and life-affirming true story of coming to terms with grief and the healing power of the natural world', today said that it 'undertook all the necessary due diligence' before the book's release. The film's producers, meanwhile, have said that 'there were no known claims against the book at the time of optioning it or producing and distributing the film and we undertook all necessary due diligence before acquiring the book'.
It's the first movie to be directed by the acclaimed theatre producer Marianne Elliott (War Horse, Angels in America, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) and the script is by the playwright and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who had previously been given the book for Christmas by her mother. Hélène Louvart, who has worked with directors like Claire Denis and Agnès Varda, is the cinematographer. They may be feeling indignant now.
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As for the film itself, Gillian Anderson embraces the indignities of the walk bravely, down to a severely sunburned nose, but she remains distinctly glamorous, even dainty, in suitably natty outfits. In the book, 'Raynor Winn' worries about her weight and frequently remarks that, not being able to wash often, they both smelled so bad that people would swiftly move away from them. These embarrassments have been dropped. Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy, Georgy Zhukov in The Death of Stalin) is solid and sympathetic as Moth, gasping and grunting mightily as he struggles with every ascent and descent, each one seeming beyond his strength. In the book, his pain and disability seem located mainly in a shoulder. In the film, he is alarmingly incapacitated from the off.
Gillian Anderson had evidently been so taken by The Salt Path she had attempted to option the book herself prior to being approached by its eventual producers. Before the shoot started, both Anderson and Isaacs spent a day with the Walkers at their home in Cornwall. Isaacs, promoting the film, was effusive about how Moth had been 'incredibly generous about opening himself up to me… I'm madly in love with him. That's the truth.' Gillian Anderson was more cautious about Raynor: 'I was surprised at how guarded she was… It was interesting to encounter a certain steeliness.'
If the film-makers feel stung by the allegations against the Winns, all those who have invested in Raynor Winn's tale simply as readers or cinema-goers, or walkers in their wake, will feel similarly. Read now, the memoir does seem implausible, its tone off throughout. Even the film-makers appear to have baulked at some of what Winn describes. In the book, the disasters of homelessness and terminal disease are further exacerbated by the tragic death of her favourite old ewe, Smotyn (Welsh for spotty): 'I curled on the grass next to her and sobbed… Let me die now, let me be the one to go, don't let me be left alone, let me die.' This scene was quietly dropped from the film.
The explanation of their financial crash and their reduction to a £48-a-week tax credit never made any sense at all, despite the moving exclamations about how 'we lost, lost the case, lost the house, and lost ourselves'. Readers didn't seem to mind, though. Nor did they care that the exalted passages about healing communion with nature were just as unconvincing. 'I could stand in the wind and I was the wind, the rain, the sea; it was all me, and I was nothing within it.' The book ends with Winn saying she had no idea what the future would bring. 'All I knew was that we were lightly salted blackberries hanging in the last of the summer sun, and this perfect moment was the only one we needed.' Being a lightly salted blackberry seems unlikely to suffice now.
Comparisons have been made between The Salt Path furore and other controversies over authors' authenticity – but that storytellers often make things up is not surprising. What is more revealing about The Salt Path case is how large and eager an audience it found for its story of pilgrimage, redemption and miraculous healing.
Winn is careful to emphasise early in the book that she doesn't 'believe in God, in any higher force', yet this serves only to make her homespun parable of salvation all the more approachable to those with a faith-shaped hole in their lives no longer occupied by the Church of England. The acceptable, overtly fictional version of this story was The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the debut novel of radio dramatist Rachel Joyce, published in 2012, the year before the events described in The Salt Path. In this book, our hero receives a letter from a dying friend in Berwick-upon-Tweed and, though not religious, sets off on foot on a penitential pilgrimage of 627 miles (compared to the 630 claimed by Winn) in the belief that while he keeps walking, she will miraculously stay alive. Sentimental, mildly entertaining and hardly objectionable, it has sold four million copies and been translated into 37 languages. In 2023, it was made into a film starring the unimprovably English Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton.
There is a long list of 'inspirational' writers, from Paulo Coelho to L Ron Hubbard, who fabricated the marvels they wrote about. Such is our hunger for inspiration, though, and however potentially dubious a source, that we ask no questions until too late.
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Daily Mail
a day ago
- Daily Mail
Cafe owner 'felt sick' after The Salt Path author 'falsely portrayed her mother as a bully' in best-selling book
A cafe owner has claimed she 'felt sick' after discovering The Salt Path author Raynor Winn had depicted her mother as a bully in the hit memoir. Joanna Cocking, 51, said that while the Porthmellin cafe - run by her mother - was not mentioned by name in the book, there is only one cafe in Mullion Cove. The 2018 memoir, which has been turned into a film, was presented by Winn as a true story about her life, but is under intense scrutiny amid claims of omissions and exaggerations. Upon reading a portrayal of her family business in the book, Ms Cocking told The Observer: 'When I got sent the bit of the book that we were in, I just felt sick. I just wanted to write to the publisher and say: ''You can't write this.''' She added that at first she thought it must be some sort of mistake, but concluded the extract must be about her mother due to no other cafes existing in the area. In her memoir, Winn described how after losing their home, she and her husband 'Moth' - real name Timothy - walked the 630-mile South West Coast Path. En route, the couple stopped off at the cafe on the Lizard peninsula. 'A man in his twenties waited tables, cleared tables, politely dealt with grumpy customers, cut cakes, swept the floor,' Winn wrote. She then described the arrival of the angry owner. 'What the f*** do you think you're doing? There's two tables out there uncleared. What do I pay you for? You're f****** lazy.' According to the memoir, the waiter handed the couple two free paninis before deciding he was quitting. In response to the extract, Ms Cocking said: 'When I read that, I was thinking: ''That can't be us.'' I was absolutely mortified. She never named the cafe but she might as well have because there is only one cafe in this cove.' The cafe owner, who took over from her mother, claimed the fact that there is a cafe in Mullion Cove is the only part of the passage that is accurate. She added that nobody could have swept the floor because there has been carpet for years, and that her mother was a 'typical old Cornish woman' who would never speak like that. Ms Cocking also claimed that while there has been a few male waiting staff working at the cafe over the years, nobody has ever walked out. Additionally, the business has allegedly never sold paninis. Via her lawyers, Winn told The Observer: 'The Salt Path is an honest account of what we lived through on the path, and I stand by it.' Penguin Michael Joseph, the memoir's publisher, called Winn's best-selling book 'unflinchingly honest' - but parts of the tale have been scrutinised after claims of dishonesty emerged. While the author painted herself as a victim dealing with homelessness and the critical health of her husband, she has since accepted she 'made mistakes' after being accused of stealing from her former employer. Previously, a widow who claimed Winn stole thousands of pounds from her family business claimed it destroyed her late husband's confidence in people. Ros Hemmings and her daughter Debbie spoke out about Ms Winn, who worked for their property business in the early 2000s as a bookkeeper. They claim she stole around £64,000 from the family business. An investigation by The Observer in July suggested Winn's story about her life in The Salt Path was misleading. The Observer claimed that Raynor and her husband Moth, real names Sally and Tim Walker, lost their money after failing to pay money they had been accused of stealing from Martin Hemmings, husband of Ros. In a statement following The Observer investigation, Raynor Winn said: 'The dispute with Martin Hemmings, referred to in the Observer by his wife, is not the court case in The Salt Path. 'Nor did it result in us losing our home. Mr Hemmings is not Cooper. Mrs Hemmings is not in the book, nor is she a relative of someone who is. 'I worked for Martin Hemmings in the years before the economic crash of 2008. For me it was a pressured time. 'It was also a time when mistakes were being made in the business. Any mistakes I made during the years in that office, I deeply regret, and I am truly sorry.' The Daily Mail has contacted Winn's representatives for comment on Ms Cocking's claims.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
The end of the road? What The Salt Path scandal means for the nature memoir
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.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- The Guardian
The end of the road? What The Salt Path scandal means for the nature memoir
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.
