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New Statesman
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
The Salt Path and the sins of memoir
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. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 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] Related
Yahoo
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Feisty Labradoodle Chases Off Massive Black Bear Like the Most Fearless Little Protector
Feisty Labradoodle Chases Off Massive Black Bear Like the Most Fearless Little Protector originally appeared on PetHelpful. For better and for worse, our canine companions can be absolutely fearless. Perhaps that, combined with the seemingly unwavering loyalty, is why we have given them the nickname man's best friend. But sometimes our beloved fur babies are just as capable of the same follies as we humans. Sometimes, they can get a little too caught up in the moment and exhibit serious overconfidence. Take the very feisty Labradoodle, Zelda, in this video, for instance. When a massive black bear came into her yard, she had absolutely no qualms about barking her little head off like a maniac and charging right at this mighty apex predator to give them a piece of her mind. That was pretty intense, to say the least! Zelda's human mama can be heard saying, 'Oh my gosh, she's going to die!' towards the climax of this wild encounter. Thankfully, both Zelda and this massive black bear were able to walk away from this skirmish unscathed. Although truth be told, we don't know that there was ever any real danger of Zelda hurting this black bear. And apparently, that was not a memo that Zelda received. She was only concerned about being a good little guard dog, no matter the intruder. And she really did help that black bear off, chasing them all the way out into the middle of the street until the hulking creature was fully in retreat. Thankfully, this black bear never really put up a soon as Zelda was running around and frantically barking at them, they began to walk away, regarding her with disinterest. Of course, Zelda was very proud of herself for defending her yard. You can see her tail wagging furiously as she trots back to her human mama with plenty of pep in her step. Even though bear attacks are incredibly rare in North America, of the ones that happened, many involved a dog that was not on a leash. While our canine companions can smell bears and alert their humans about potential danger, a dog chasing after these creatures is asking for trouble. If you do see a bear outside, do not approach the creature. You want to make sure that your dog remains calm and that you respect the bear's space. You do not want to try running away or making any sudden movements, because bears can run faster than 30 mph, meaning they can easily chase you and your dog down. It's a good idea to make sure that the bear has a way to leave and does not feel trapped where they are. And remember, the best encounter between a bear and a dog is the one that doesn't happen at all. Looking for more PetHelpful updates? Follow us on YouTube for more entertaining videos. Or, share your own adorable pet by submitting a video, and sign up for our newsletter for the latest pet updates and tips. Feisty Labradoodle Chases Off Massive Black Bear Like the Most Fearless Little Protector first appeared on PetHelpful on Jun 12, 2025 This story was originally reported by PetHelpful on Jun 12, 2025, where it first appeared.
New Statesman
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
The Salt Path is Scientology for the middle classes
Photo by Steve Tanner courtesy of Black Bear 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. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 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. [See more: Oasis are the greatest Irish band of all time] Related
Scottish Sun
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Embezzlement arrest, couple's real names & a house in France… How bestseller The Salt Path may be more fiction than fact
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) THE question everyone asks about a movie 'based on a true story' is how much is fact and how much is fiction? It is what I wanted to know when I interviewed The Salt Path author Raynor Winn in April about her best-selling memoir, which had been turned into a film starring Gillian Anderson. 5 Author Raynor Winn on the coast path in 2018 5 Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs play Raynor and Moth Winn in The Salt Path Credit: Black Bear Sipping tea from a fine porcelain cup, the softly spoken mother-of-two told me: 'The book's my interpretation of that time.' Well, that is one way of putting it. This week it was alleged that crucial parts of Raynor's prize-winning book were more fiction than fact. In her account, Raynor, 62, and her husband Moth were made homeless in 2013 after an investment went horribly wrong. During the same week, Moth, 64, was diagnosed with rare and fatal neurological condition, corticobasal degeneration (CBD), which affects movement, speech and memory. With nowhere else to go, the couple trek for 630 miles along Britain's South West Coast Path. Life expectancy But according to a lengthy investigation by The Observer newspaper, the reason Raynor lost her house in the Welsh countryside was that she embezzled £64,000 from an employer. The report also found evidence that the Winns, whose real names are Sally and Tim Walker, owned a house in France at the time they were supposedly homeless. Perhaps, just as disturbing, was the suggestion from nine neurologists and researchers that they were sceptical someone could have survived for so many years with CBD, which has a life expectancy of around six to eight years. It was certainly the most niggling doubt I had about the Winns' story when I sat down with Raynor, who likes to be called Ray, at a historic hotel in London three months ago. When Moth was diagnosed in 2013 it was suspected he'd already had CBD for six years. Today, he is not only still alive, he lacks acute symptoms and is going on walks. Raynor told me: 'There are many, many theories that swirl around, and there's very little fact, because these illnesses that come under the umbrella of CBD. 'They don't receive much funding because they're so rare, and so we understand very little about them.' It was a convincing answer and there is no proof that Moth does not have this fatal condition. Patients do defy predictions, with doctors unsure how the late Stephen Hawking was able to live with motor neurone disease for 55 years. There is strong evidence, though, that when Raynor was Sally Walker she got into trouble with the law. Two decades ago she worked part-time as a bookkeeper for an estate agency in Pwllheli, North Wales. Raynor's claims it was all just a business deal that went wrong really upset me. When really she had embezzled the money from my husband. It made me feel sick Ros Hemmings A local police officer told how Sally was arrested and questioned after the company's owner Martin Hemmings reported that £64,000 had gone missing from the accounts. One of Sally's unnamed relatives offered to pay off the sum in return for Martin not to pursue a criminal case against her. This was agreed to, and the bookkeeper went free. But Sally had put up the family home in Wales as security for the loan from the relative and this debt was then passed on to other people. They wanted the money back and when the Walkers could not pay up, a judge ruled they had to give up the property. In the book, Raynor blames it on Moth's childhood friend 'Cooper'. Martin Hemmings died in 2012, but his widow Ros said: 'Her claims that it was all just a business deal that went wrong really upset me. 'When really she had embezzled the money from my husband. It made me feel sick.' There is also evidence that the couple put their home up as a prize even though the judge had said it should be repossessed if they could not sell it. It was offered 'free of mortgage or any other legal or registered charge' in a draw available to anyone who bought a book called How Not to Dal dy Dir [Stand Firm], written by the author Izzy Wyn-Thomas. In the end the house was taken from the Walkers and it is unclear if anyone entered the prize draw. The couple were never charged with any offences, so details of these events lay hidden until now. 5 Gillian and Raynor at the Munich Film Festival last week Credit: Getty 5 The real-life couple at a London film screening in May Credit: Getty Raynor has not spoken publicly about the claims, but in a statement said: 'The Observer article is highly misleading. '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.' They gave no clarification as to exactly what was 'misleading'. After losing their home, the couple remerged as Raynor and Moth Winn in 2018 when The Salt Path was published. Her vivid account of their trials and tribulations in Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and Dorset is full of convincing details. If there is anything that I hope people take from this film, I would really love it if people walked out of the cinema and saw someone in a doorway they would see them slightly differently, maybe just as an individual, not a difficult statistic Raynor And when I spoke to the polite author, her recollection of events were replayed with authority. It was impossible not to feel sympathy when Raynor told me how a woman called her a tramp when she scrabbled around for change in the gutter. No one has suggested that the pair did not live in a tent or go on the 630-mile walk. But it did seem remarkable that this middle-class couple, hailing from the West Midlands, did not have friends who could put them up for a few weeks while they got back on their feet after their home was repossessed. Down and out The Observer found documents that appear to show the Winns bought an old house in the south-west of France in 2007, and still owned it during the years they were 'homeless'. That flies in the face of the passionate feelings Raynor expressed to me about being a rough sleeper. She said: 'If there is anything that I hope people take from this film, I would really love it if people walked out of the cinema and saw someone in a doorway they would see them slightly differently, maybe just as an individual, not a difficult statistic.' Raynor, who has written about homelessness for The Big Issue magazine, gave a performance that Gillian Anderson would have been proud of. When she said it, I felt no doubt that this was a woman who had truly been down and out. But I was certainly not the only person who seems to have been taken in by her warm words. Prior to this week's revelations, the X Files and Sex Education actress Gillian, who met Raynor before filming started, said: 'When I read the book, I could not get it out of my system for weeks. It changed my perspective on homeless individuals, on people living rough, on the fact that any one of us at any time can become homeless and destitute.' The film's producers put out a statement on Monday denying knowledge of Raynor's past. 5 The book won the Royal Society of Literature Christopher Bland prize in 2019 and was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award A spokeswoman for Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features said they 'undertook all necessary due diligence before acquiring the book'. Why would they not believe a story that had won the Royal Society of Literature Christopher Bland prize in 2019 and was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award? The critically acclaimed film, with Jason Isaacs playing Moth, made more than £7.5million at the box office when it was released in the UK in May. But plans to show it in the US and other countries have now been thrown into doubt. Raynor is due to release her fourth book, titled On Winter Hill, later this year. Fans may not be so keen to read this account of her walk from coast to coast in the north of England with all the doubts about her reliability. Despite the controversy, the website of her publisher, Penguin, still describes The Salt Path as 'unflinchingly honest'. Half of that phrase still carries weight. The Raynor Winn I met was certainly unflinching.
New York Post
24-06-2025
- Climate
- New York Post
NYC grapples with historic heat wave as temps surpass 100
Coney Island resident Chrystelle Davis makes sure her dog Luigi Cohart is kept cool while on the boardwalk in Coney Island. Aristide Economopoulos FDNY members Anthony Rizzo, front and Roman Roumiantsev of Ladder 166 in Coney Isalnd cool off after working a fire. Aristide Economopoulos A person walking with an umbrella in Midtown. Billy Becerra/NY Post A woman inside a tent on Coney Island. Aristide Economopoulos A man squints at the sun. AP Coney Island Lifeguard Nnaemeka Okoli looks over bathers in the water during a heat wave. Aristide Economopoulos A Black Bear cooling off in the water at the Bronx Zoo. Robert Miller A worker splashes water on their face ahead of the opening of the pool at the new Davis Center. Michael Nagle Bed–Stuy resident David sells his umbrella hats for $5 at Coney Island. Aristide Economopoulos People on the beach in Coney Island. Aristide Economopoulos People cross the Brooklyn Bridge during the heat wave. AP A woman takes a bite of an ice cream cone during the heatwave. AP NYC Lifeguard Sam Artov, who is starting his 5th season as a lifeguard in Coney Island, looks over the crowd in the water from his stand. Aristide Economopoulos A man using an outdoor shower at Coney Island. Aristide Economopoulos Alison Mortier, a vistor from Belgium, finding some shade in Columbus Park. William Farrington A family cools off on the Brooklyn waterfront. AP People cool off in the waters in Coney Island, Brooklyn. Aristide Economopoulos A man reads a newspaper while sunbathing in Washington Square Park. AFP via Getty Images A digital thermometer at a bus stop in Midtown, Manhattan. Billy Becerra/NY Post A Swan at the Bronx Zoo during the heat wave. Robert Miller A woman cools off with a portable fan while walking in Midtown during the heatwave. AP Aaron Miles, a fashion designer, cools off in the Washington Square Park fountain on Tuesday, June 24, 2025 in New York City. Michael Nagle
