Latest news with #Winn
The Advertiser
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
Is it ever okay for a memoir to stray from the truth?
Raynor Winn, author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path - also a film starring Gillian Anderson - has been accused of deception in her story of hardship and healing. In Winn's account, after their "forever home" is dispossessed, she and her partner, Moth (who faces a terminal diagnosis) decide to walk the famous 630-mile South West Coast Path along the dramatic cliffs of south-west England. This week, an Observer investigation cast doubt over key aspects of Winn's memoir, which has sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. Her response? A statement through her lawyer that raises enduring questions about what it means to claim a story is the "truth": "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." Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph told The Bookseller it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence" and that "prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content". Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features told the UK's Sky News their film was a "faithful adaptation" of a book. In the book, Winn claims she and her husband lost their home in North Wales after making a bad investment in a friend's business, leaving them liable for debts when it folded. The Observer report claims they lost the house after Winn defrauded her employer of about £64,000, then borrowed £100,000 (with 18 per cent interest) from a distant relative, secured against their house, to repay the money. The couple's house was reportedly repossessed after they were sued to recover the money owed. While in the book they wrote they had nowhere to go, the Observer reports that the couple "owned land in France on which they had previously stayed". The report also raised serious doubts about Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease. He has been living with it for 18 years, "with no visibly acute symptoms", according to the Observer, but it usually has a life expectancy of around six to eight years and the specialists the publication spoke to were "sceptical". While they still make headlines, do these scandals around fabrication have the same impact they once did, in today's era of "fake news"? And what is "truth" in memoir anyway? Of course, we've been here before - most infamously, perhaps, 20 years ago with James Frey, 1990s poster boy for literary pork pies. In 2005, key claims in his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were debunked by website The Smoking Gun, which posts legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. Frey's US publisher, Random House, was sued by a group of readers for breach of contract and fraud. The publisher offered refunds to any reader with a receipt for buying the book. Culturally, Frey suffered a blow worse than anything financial: he was cancelled by Oprah. In last month's interview, Frey indignantly argued his book was "85 per cent true [...] as most memoirs are". His main retort, though, was more philosophical: "When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it invalid?" Is a true story akin to the facts? What does it matter, and to whom? In the case of A Million Little Pieces, the question was interrogated legally. To call something memoir is to make a contract with the reader around facts - and this was breached. In the case of The Salt Path, that process is still unfolding. But how exactly do we cordon off facts from embellishments? Is fact strictly tied to the observable: times, places, names, events, chronologies? Can something be true but not factual? What about feelings? Pain itself is known to be experienced in variable ways, and any hotel review will tell you one person's ultimate luxury is another's shabby hell. The task of the writer is, surely, to reflect the peculiarly specific feeling of their living. Fundamentally, memoirists always manipulate story. Memoir is not autobiography. It involves a careful selection of the parts of our life that fit together to make a narrative - and it can employ a vast spectrum of fictional techniques. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, for example, uses a disjointed narrative arc of strung-together genre tropes (like sci-fi and self-help) to tell the story of her time in an abusive relationship. Helen Garner has written about the careful act of shaping the "I" who appears in her nonfiction. "There can be no writing without the creation of a persona," she says. "In order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an 'I'." But it is clear that for Garner, the creation of a persona is not mere invention. We know this because she has spoken, too, about the freedom fiction gives her to make things up - a freedom she no doubt embraced after criticism over her conflation of multiple people into a single person in The First Stone. Much of Frey's indignance now seems to stem from the absurdity of how low the bar has sunk when it comes to standards of truth. And he has a point. To know whether an image is counterfeit, now we have to hope it includes hands (notoriously difficult for AI to master). Ours is a world where social media, absent of checks and balances, is the only growing source of news media. A world where whole journals are compromised by the mass generation of fake science - and where we swallow wholesale the documentarian claims of "reality TV", while knowing it is scripted. In such a world, what's a little fuzziness around the exact reasons a couple found themselves without a home and walking the cliffs of Devon? The contract with a reader is an emotional one - to believe someone has lived through the story they are telling involves a different kind of investment of self: a deeper empathy, a willingness to sit with pain or joy or fear that was real for the writer. And that is worth honouring. Raynor Winn, author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path - also a film starring Gillian Anderson - has been accused of deception in her story of hardship and healing. In Winn's account, after their "forever home" is dispossessed, she and her partner, Moth (who faces a terminal diagnosis) decide to walk the famous 630-mile South West Coast Path along the dramatic cliffs of south-west England. This week, an Observer investigation cast doubt over key aspects of Winn's memoir, which has sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. Her response? A statement through her lawyer that raises enduring questions about what it means to claim a story is the "truth": "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." Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph told The Bookseller it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence" and that "prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content". Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features told the UK's Sky News their film was a "faithful adaptation" of a book. In the book, Winn claims she and her husband lost their home in North Wales after making a bad investment in a friend's business, leaving them liable for debts when it folded. The Observer report claims they lost the house after Winn defrauded her employer of about £64,000, then borrowed £100,000 (with 18 per cent interest) from a distant relative, secured against their house, to repay the money. The couple's house was reportedly repossessed after they were sued to recover the money owed. While in the book they wrote they had nowhere to go, the Observer reports that the couple "owned land in France on which they had previously stayed". The report also raised serious doubts about Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease. He has been living with it for 18 years, "with no visibly acute symptoms", according to the Observer, but it usually has a life expectancy of around six to eight years and the specialists the publication spoke to were "sceptical". While they still make headlines, do these scandals around fabrication have the same impact they once did, in today's era of "fake news"? And what is "truth" in memoir anyway? Of course, we've been here before - most infamously, perhaps, 20 years ago with James Frey, 1990s poster boy for literary pork pies. In 2005, key claims in his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were debunked by website The Smoking Gun, which posts legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. Frey's US publisher, Random House, was sued by a group of readers for breach of contract and fraud. The publisher offered refunds to any reader with a receipt for buying the book. Culturally, Frey suffered a blow worse than anything financial: he was cancelled by Oprah. In last month's interview, Frey indignantly argued his book was "85 per cent true [...] as most memoirs are". His main retort, though, was more philosophical: "When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it invalid?" Is a true story akin to the facts? What does it matter, and to whom? In the case of A Million Little Pieces, the question was interrogated legally. To call something memoir is to make a contract with the reader around facts - and this was breached. In the case of The Salt Path, that process is still unfolding. But how exactly do we cordon off facts from embellishments? Is fact strictly tied to the observable: times, places, names, events, chronologies? Can something be true but not factual? What about feelings? Pain itself is known to be experienced in variable ways, and any hotel review will tell you one person's ultimate luxury is another's shabby hell. The task of the writer is, surely, to reflect the peculiarly specific feeling of their living. Fundamentally, memoirists always manipulate story. Memoir is not autobiography. It involves a careful selection of the parts of our life that fit together to make a narrative - and it can employ a vast spectrum of fictional techniques. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, for example, uses a disjointed narrative arc of strung-together genre tropes (like sci-fi and self-help) to tell the story of her time in an abusive relationship. Helen Garner has written about the careful act of shaping the "I" who appears in her nonfiction. "There can be no writing without the creation of a persona," she says. "In order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an 'I'." But it is clear that for Garner, the creation of a persona is not mere invention. We know this because she has spoken, too, about the freedom fiction gives her to make things up - a freedom she no doubt embraced after criticism over her conflation of multiple people into a single person in The First Stone. Much of Frey's indignance now seems to stem from the absurdity of how low the bar has sunk when it comes to standards of truth. And he has a point. To know whether an image is counterfeit, now we have to hope it includes hands (notoriously difficult for AI to master). Ours is a world where social media, absent of checks and balances, is the only growing source of news media. A world where whole journals are compromised by the mass generation of fake science - and where we swallow wholesale the documentarian claims of "reality TV", while knowing it is scripted. In such a world, what's a little fuzziness around the exact reasons a couple found themselves without a home and walking the cliffs of Devon? The contract with a reader is an emotional one - to believe someone has lived through the story they are telling involves a different kind of investment of self: a deeper empathy, a willingness to sit with pain or joy or fear that was real for the writer. And that is worth honouring. Raynor Winn, author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path - also a film starring Gillian Anderson - has been accused of deception in her story of hardship and healing. In Winn's account, after their "forever home" is dispossessed, she and her partner, Moth (who faces a terminal diagnosis) decide to walk the famous 630-mile South West Coast Path along the dramatic cliffs of south-west England. This week, an Observer investigation cast doubt over key aspects of Winn's memoir, which has sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. Her response? A statement through her lawyer that raises enduring questions about what it means to claim a story is the "truth": "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." Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph told The Bookseller it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence" and that "prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content". Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features told the UK's Sky News their film was a "faithful adaptation" of a book. In the book, Winn claims she and her husband lost their home in North Wales after making a bad investment in a friend's business, leaving them liable for debts when it folded. The Observer report claims they lost the house after Winn defrauded her employer of about £64,000, then borrowed £100,000 (with 18 per cent interest) from a distant relative, secured against their house, to repay the money. The couple's house was reportedly repossessed after they were sued to recover the money owed. While in the book they wrote they had nowhere to go, the Observer reports that the couple "owned land in France on which they had previously stayed". The report also raised serious doubts about Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease. He has been living with it for 18 years, "with no visibly acute symptoms", according to the Observer, but it usually has a life expectancy of around six to eight years and the specialists the publication spoke to were "sceptical". While they still make headlines, do these scandals around fabrication have the same impact they once did, in today's era of "fake news"? And what is "truth" in memoir anyway? Of course, we've been here before - most infamously, perhaps, 20 years ago with James Frey, 1990s poster boy for literary pork pies. In 2005, key claims in his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were debunked by website The Smoking Gun, which posts legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. Frey's US publisher, Random House, was sued by a group of readers for breach of contract and fraud. The publisher offered refunds to any reader with a receipt for buying the book. Culturally, Frey suffered a blow worse than anything financial: he was cancelled by Oprah. In last month's interview, Frey indignantly argued his book was "85 per cent true [...] as most memoirs are". His main retort, though, was more philosophical: "When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it invalid?" Is a true story akin to the facts? What does it matter, and to whom? In the case of A Million Little Pieces, the question was interrogated legally. To call something memoir is to make a contract with the reader around facts - and this was breached. In the case of The Salt Path, that process is still unfolding. But how exactly do we cordon off facts from embellishments? Is fact strictly tied to the observable: times, places, names, events, chronologies? Can something be true but not factual? What about feelings? Pain itself is known to be experienced in variable ways, and any hotel review will tell you one person's ultimate luxury is another's shabby hell. The task of the writer is, surely, to reflect the peculiarly specific feeling of their living. Fundamentally, memoirists always manipulate story. Memoir is not autobiography. It involves a careful selection of the parts of our life that fit together to make a narrative - and it can employ a vast spectrum of fictional techniques. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, for example, uses a disjointed narrative arc of strung-together genre tropes (like sci-fi and self-help) to tell the story of her time in an abusive relationship. Helen Garner has written about the careful act of shaping the "I" who appears in her nonfiction. "There can be no writing without the creation of a persona," she says. "In order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an 'I'." But it is clear that for Garner, the creation of a persona is not mere invention. We know this because she has spoken, too, about the freedom fiction gives her to make things up - a freedom she no doubt embraced after criticism over her conflation of multiple people into a single person in The First Stone. Much of Frey's indignance now seems to stem from the absurdity of how low the bar has sunk when it comes to standards of truth. And he has a point. To know whether an image is counterfeit, now we have to hope it includes hands (notoriously difficult for AI to master). Ours is a world where social media, absent of checks and balances, is the only growing source of news media. A world where whole journals are compromised by the mass generation of fake science - and where we swallow wholesale the documentarian claims of "reality TV", while knowing it is scripted. In such a world, what's a little fuzziness around the exact reasons a couple found themselves without a home and walking the cliffs of Devon? The contract with a reader is an emotional one - to believe someone has lived through the story they are telling involves a different kind of investment of self: a deeper empathy, a willingness to sit with pain or joy or fear that was real for the writer. And that is worth honouring. Raynor Winn, author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path - also a film starring Gillian Anderson - has been accused of deception in her story of hardship and healing. In Winn's account, after their "forever home" is dispossessed, she and her partner, Moth (who faces a terminal diagnosis) decide to walk the famous 630-mile South West Coast Path along the dramatic cliffs of south-west England. This week, an Observer investigation cast doubt over key aspects of Winn's memoir, which has sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. Her response? A statement through her lawyer that raises enduring questions about what it means to claim a story is the "truth": "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." Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph told The Bookseller it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence" and that "prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content". Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features told the UK's Sky News their film was a "faithful adaptation" of a book. In the book, Winn claims she and her husband lost their home in North Wales after making a bad investment in a friend's business, leaving them liable for debts when it folded. The Observer report claims they lost the house after Winn defrauded her employer of about £64,000, then borrowed £100,000 (with 18 per cent interest) from a distant relative, secured against their house, to repay the money. The couple's house was reportedly repossessed after they were sued to recover the money owed. While in the book they wrote they had nowhere to go, the Observer reports that the couple "owned land in France on which they had previously stayed". The report also raised serious doubts about Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease. He has been living with it for 18 years, "with no visibly acute symptoms", according to the Observer, but it usually has a life expectancy of around six to eight years and the specialists the publication spoke to were "sceptical". While they still make headlines, do these scandals around fabrication have the same impact they once did, in today's era of "fake news"? And what is "truth" in memoir anyway? Of course, we've been here before - most infamously, perhaps, 20 years ago with James Frey, 1990s poster boy for literary pork pies. In 2005, key claims in his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were debunked by website The Smoking Gun, which posts legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. Frey's US publisher, Random House, was sued by a group of readers for breach of contract and fraud. The publisher offered refunds to any reader with a receipt for buying the book. Culturally, Frey suffered a blow worse than anything financial: he was cancelled by Oprah. In last month's interview, Frey indignantly argued his book was "85 per cent true [...] as most memoirs are". His main retort, though, was more philosophical: "When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it invalid?" Is a true story akin to the facts? What does it matter, and to whom? In the case of A Million Little Pieces, the question was interrogated legally. To call something memoir is to make a contract with the reader around facts - and this was breached. In the case of The Salt Path, that process is still unfolding. But how exactly do we cordon off facts from embellishments? Is fact strictly tied to the observable: times, places, names, events, chronologies? Can something be true but not factual? What about feelings? Pain itself is known to be experienced in variable ways, and any hotel review will tell you one person's ultimate luxury is another's shabby hell. The task of the writer is, surely, to reflect the peculiarly specific feeling of their living. Fundamentally, memoirists always manipulate story. Memoir is not autobiography. It involves a careful selection of the parts of our life that fit together to make a narrative - and it can employ a vast spectrum of fictional techniques. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, for example, uses a disjointed narrative arc of strung-together genre tropes (like sci-fi and self-help) to tell the story of her time in an abusive relationship. Helen Garner has written about the careful act of shaping the "I" who appears in her nonfiction. "There can be no writing without the creation of a persona," she says. "In order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an 'I'." But it is clear that for Garner, the creation of a persona is not mere invention. We know this because she has spoken, too, about the freedom fiction gives her to make things up - a freedom she no doubt embraced after criticism over her conflation of multiple people into a single person in The First Stone. Much of Frey's indignance now seems to stem from the absurdity of how low the bar has sunk when it comes to standards of truth. And he has a point. To know whether an image is counterfeit, now we have to hope it includes hands (notoriously difficult for AI to master). Ours is a world where social media, absent of checks and balances, is the only growing source of news media. A world where whole journals are compromised by the mass generation of fake science - and where we swallow wholesale the documentarian claims of "reality TV", while knowing it is scripted. In such a world, what's a little fuzziness around the exact reasons a couple found themselves without a home and walking the cliffs of Devon? The contract with a reader is an emotional one - to believe someone has lived through the story they are telling involves a different kind of investment of self: a deeper empathy, a willingness to sit with pain or joy or fear that was real for the writer. And that is worth honouring.
Graziadaily
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Graziadaily
‘I Interviewed The Salt Path Author – I've Been Forced To Reconsider What She Told Me'
It was the ultimate tale of triumph over adversity: the mother who, homeless and with a seriously ill husband in tow, undertook a 630-mile walk and became a national sensation. Raynor Winn's 2018 memoir The Salt Path became a book club hit, shifting over 2million copies, and in May becoming a Hollywood film starring Gillian Anderson (opposite Jason Isaacs as the author's other half, Moth). But cracks have begun to emerge in this 'unflinchingly honest' epic. An investigation by the Observer earlier this month found that the Winns are in fact Sally and Tim Walker; that she was questioned by police after allegedly embezzling £64,000 from a former boss, and that the circumstances in which the pair lost their home - which they had always maintained was the result of a bad business deal with a friend – were not as they had depicted. Rather than being homeless, the report found, they have owned a property near Bordeaux since 2007. Winn – or Walker – has denied many of the claims, describing the investigation as 'grotesquely unfair, highly misleading and seeks to systematically pick apart my life.' The most heartbreaking, she added, was 'the suggestion that Moth made up his illness' (each of her three bestsellers charts his battle with corticobasal degeneration or CBD, a fatal neurological condition). The fallout has been unabating. The pair has been dropped by the CBD charity they fundraised for and lambasted by the owner of a cider farm they were invited to live on after he read The Salt Path, who says he feels 'gaslit.' The release of On Winter Hill – Winn's fourth book, due out this autumn – is on ice; her live tour dates with a local folk group cancelled. The eye-watering allegations currently engulfing the couple have hit fans hard. Social media is awash with the devastation of those who bought into this seemingly authentic story and now feel duped; who uprooted their lives inspired by the Winns' travels, and who turned two unlikely then 50-somethings into a major success, possibly under false pretences. I too have been forced to reconsider Winn's words anew. Two Julys ago I boarded a train for the small Cornish town of Lostwithiel, ahead of the release of her third book. It was a hot Friday afternoon when we met, Winn collecting me from the station and driving me up to the Duchy of Cornwall Nursery, where music and loud chatter abounded beneath the blooms. The woman whose emotional turmoil had poured across her pages was far more reserved in person: the rawness I had expected from someone who had battled so much unbelievable misfortune was absent. As we spoke, I struggled to learn more about her life than had already been recounted in her books; Winn repeating some of the anecdotes I'd read. On leaving, I couldn't help feeling our encounter had been somehow unsatisfying: that everything beyond what she had already written was somehow off-limits. Moth's illness was on my mind then, too. I had looked forward to meeting the man who had so spectacularly defied the odds of his disease (those with CBD typically live for six to eight years in a progressively deteriorating state; he had by then been diagnosed a decade earlier, and in each of the books undertook months-long walks that would test even the fittest among us). But ahead of the interview, the location shifted from their home to a solo meeting with Winn elsewhere. The photoshoot also got postponed. Given the lows of his condition – the agony, bowel problems, memory slips and despair – and the apparent healing powers of their walks, I had mulled whether living out in the open had triggered a decline they were unwilling to share. Yet the images that did eventually get taken showed him looking well; ditto those taken alongside Isaacs around the time of the film's release, where he appeared more dashing, perhaps, than the Hollywood actor enlisted to play him. On this, and much else, I have been asked the same question over and over since the scandal broke: did I speculate then that something might be amiss? To which the answer is, plainly, no. Medical miracles, though rare, do happen. Some people aren't born raconteurs; interview locations change. While I understand the anger that so many are now grappling with, I also feel for the Winns – that their story, which remains entirely real to them, has been so publicly pulled apart. Their publisher is sticking by them, for now. Whether readers can ever really trust Winn again is another story entirely.
Scroll.in
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- 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.
Daily Mirror
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
The Salt Path readers are fuming and demand refunds after 'true story' controversy
Bookshops offer refunds for The Salt Path, as author Raynor Winn is accused of lying about and leaving out key elements of the South West Coast Path story - and readers feel 'conned' Bookshops and online stores are offering refunds for The Salt Path, as author Raynor Winn is accused of lying about and leaving out key elements of the South West Coast Path story - and readers feel "conned." Winn has been accused of not being completely honest in her account of the memoir - which is about a huge hike around the South West Coast Path. Angry readers of The Salt Path are demanding refunds and leaving the once-loved book scathing reviews after author Raynor Winn was accused of lying. The "true story" has now been contested, although the writer maintains that it reflects her and her husband's journey "accurately". But readers are now asking for refunds as some have said they feel "conned" and "disappointed". Others have flocked to the book's Amazon page to leave negative reviews, since the accusations came to light. Moving circumstances were detailed in the book, that more than two million people have read, but now Winn is facing claims that it is not a true story - and some key elements were omitted. Readers have been leaving one-star reviews on the Amazon book page for the book, as well as requesting refunds en masse. It all comes after an investigation into the "true tale" by The Observer newspaper. However, Winn continues to defend the book and the account of the real-life experience herself and her husband endured. The newspaper investigation looked deep into the backgrounds of The Salt Path's protagonists, Winn and her husband, Moth. Their real names are Sally and Tim Walker - and though the book detailed them being forced out of their home in Wales, this the investigation argued was not true. Instead, the exposé alleged that when an investment in a childhood friend's business went wrong, their property was repossessed. Further, Winn is accused of stealing tens of thousands of pounds from a former employer, for which, the Observer writers, that she was later arrested. Allegedly, the couple then failed to repay a loan taken out with a relative to repay this "stolen money" which had been agreed on the terms that police involvement would be avoided. However, after failing to repay, it's claimed that this is the reason the couple lost their home. For more stories like this subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Weekly Gulp, for a curated roundup of trending stories, poignant interviews, and viral lifestyle picks from The Mirror's Audience U35 team delivered straight to your inbox. Despite the investigation's claims the couple have defended the memoir's contents. Raynor told The Mirror: "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.' Readers have been left fuming, with Amazon reviews of the book demanding refunds. One reviewer said they felt "completely conned" and another wrote they "didn't want to read it anymore". Others mentioned the investigation into the author's The Salt Path had left them really "disappointed". Questions over Moth's rare neurological condition, corticobasal degeneration have also been raised - as life expectancy after diagnosis is up to eight years, the NHS reports. However, Moth has been living for 18 years since he was told he has the disease - which is similar to Parkinson's - yet he has no visible symptoms. The Observer's investigation contacted neurologists who specialise in corticobasal degeneration - and one told the newspaper that his illness "does not pass the sniff test" in their opinion. But the couple continue to defend the book - which has also been made into a major film - and the story behind it. Help us improve our content by completing the survey below. We'd love to hear from you!
Buzz Feed
15-07-2025
- Health
- Buzz Feed
The Salt Path Author Raynor Winn Breaks Silence On Controversy Surrounding Her Book
The author of The Salt Path has spoken out for the first time since her book became the subject of scrutiny and controversy. Over the weekend, The Observer published a report which cast doubt on the legitimacy of some of the claims outlined in Raynor Winn's 2018 book, which was marketed at the time as a memoir. In Winn's writing, she speaks of how she and her husband Moth walked the 600-mile length of the South West Coast Path, in South West England, after being made homeless. She also speaks of Moth's struggles with the neurodegenerative disease corticobasal degeneration (CBD), with which he was diagnosed shortly before the couple was made homeless. However, The Observer's piece raised questions about a number of parts in the book, including exactly what led to the couple being made homeless, and specific parts of Moth's illness. Posting on Instagram for the first time about the matter on Wednesday evening, Winn wrote: 'The last few days have been some of the hardest of my life. Heartbreaking accusations that Moth has made up his illness have been made leaving us devastated. 'To combat these vile and heinous accusations, with Moth's permission, and on the advice of his neurologist, I am releasing excerpts from three clinic letters, showing he is treated for CBD/S and has been for many years. This is deeply personal information that no one should ever be forced to share, but we feel we have no choice in the face of this unbelievably hurtful false narrative. The redacted sections are for the personal privacy of Moth and the doctors involved.' Winn also released a longer statement on her website, which read: 'Over the past few days, I have had vitriol poured on me from all quarters, along with threats directed at me, my family, and our children. It has been incredibly hard to remain silent, something I've had to do while waiting to receive legal advice. That legal advice is ongoing, but I can now speak up. 'The Observer article [is] grotesquely unfair, highly misleading and seeks to systematically pick apart my life. But, as our walk along the Salt Path taught us, when life has ground you into the dirt, you need to stand up, turn your face to the wind, and continue, unafraid. So that is what I must do.' She continued: ' The Salt Path is about what happened to Moth and me, after we lost our home and found ourselves homeless on the headlands of the south west. It's not about every event or moment in our lives, but rather about a capsule of time when our lives moved from a place of complete despair to a place of hope. 'The journey held within those pages is one of salt and weather, of pain and possibility. And I can't allow any more doubt to be cast on the validity of those memories, or the joy they have given so many.' Winn added: 'It's important to say, the Observer were offered the opportunity, by my lawyers, to discuss in detail the allegations made against me to correct their inaccurate account and to be guided on the truth, on the basis that the discussion would not be made public. 'However, they chose not to take it, preferring to pursue their highly misleading narrative.' She also responded directly to specific allegations outlined in The Observer's piece, most notably claims that Winn embezzled money earlier in her life before being made homeless. '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,' she wrote. 'Mr Hemmings is not Cooper [a character in The Salt Path ]. 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. 'Mr Hemmings made an allegation against me to the police, accusing me of taking money from the company. I was questioned, I was not charged, nor did I face criminal sanctions. I reached a settlement with Martin Hemmings because I did not have the evidence required to support what happened. 'The terms of the settlement were willingly agreed by both parties; Mr Hemmings was as keen to reach a private resolution as I was. A part of that settlement was that I would pay money to Mr Hemmings on a 'non-admissions basis'. This is why we needed the money back from Cooper that we invested and I come on to that next.' Read Raynor Winn's full statement on her official website here. Since its release in 2018, The Salt Path has inspired two more books, with a fourth in the series reported to be in the pipeline. Last year, it was also turned into a film, starring Gillian Anderson and The White Lotus star Jason Isaacs as its central couple. A statement provided by Winn's legal team to The Observer said: '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.'
