The Salt Path Scandal: Have the apparent lies discredited memoir as a genre?
After The Observer investigation landed this weekend, accusing Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path, of mis-representing important facts, where does it leave our relationship to memoir writing?
All weekend my phone has been pinging with messages of shock, dismay, hurt - in response to the allegations in the excellent investigative piece in The Observer, which exposes author, Raynor Winn as a liar, and which throws into question the premise of her memoir, The Salt Path, and therefore also the books that followed it, and the film, recently released.
The Salt Path is a memoir about a transformative journey and overcoming hardship, which has touched the hearts of millions. The story follows Raynor Winn and Moth, who embark on a 630-mile trek along the South West coastal path, after their home is brutally repossessed and Moth is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Only The Observer revealed that, rather than being the vicim of a scam, Raynor Winn - otherwise known as Sally Walker - apparently lost her and her husband’s house after she embezzled tens of thousands of pounds from an estate agency she worked for, which followed with criminal allegations, and a family friend’s loan to pay it off, which was then set against the house. In short, Sally stole £64,000 from her employer, was bailed out with a loan by a family member, which they were not able to pay back, and so lost the house. Also thrown into question is Moth’s diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare and incurable neurological condition said to be both degenerative and terminal, which he ‘miraculously’ seems to have recovered from.
Among numerous comments on my social media threads, claiming it wasn’t a surprise, that people had their suspicions from the way the book was written glossing over certain important facts, and questions around how did the publishers not know? - whose responsibility was it, anyway? - most of the comments sprung from feelings of being betrayed. How the story had resonated, how readers had felt moved, and now they felt cheated. Raynor Winn and Penguin sold The Salt Path as a memoir. In memoir there is an unspoken contract between author and reader, that what is presented is honest and truthful - otherwise why else would you call it a true story? In this very public case, that contract has been breached. Among the comments on my social media threads were those questioning what this would do to memoir as a form. Does it throw the whole genre into disrepute? How will we trust a memoir veracity after this?
This question of truthfulness comes up all the time with memoir, mainly because memory is unreliable, and two people can remember the same events very differently. But I want to make a point here between innocent and thoroughly-human misremembering, and twisting of the facts for your own benefit.
A lot of the journalism around this scandal has been using the word ‘embellishment’ in relation to what Sally Walker allegedly did, but I would say a more appropriate word would be ‘misrepresentation’. ‘Embellishment’, as I understand it, means to decorate something to make it look more attractive. It’s a soft word. In relation to creative nonfiction, I would apply it to using fictional technique to write nonfiction stories, to turn experience into a scene, to add colour to bring it alive. I wouldn’t use it in relation to changing one key fact for another, which completely changes the story being told.
As
and I discussed in our live Substack on Sunday, if Sally Walker had told the truth about how their house had become repossessed, that (if we are to believe the allegations) it was due to a fault in her character, that she had struggles around money, that it has got her into a lot of trouble, and that by facing a criminal conviction and losing their home, she had hit rock bottom. That embarking on this trip of a lifetime, she had come to understand herself better. That it was not actually Moth who needed to embark on a journey of transformation, it was in fact her - to come to terms with her true and faulted nature and to redeem herself by returning to the basics of living, and getting in touch with community and with nature. If this is true and Sally Walker had been honest about it, we readers might have found this book even more satisfying, because it would have felt human and real.But as Anna pointed out in our live chat, if she had admitted to all this, the cheating, the lying, the potential criminal conviction, she probably wouldn’t have got a publishing deal in the first place. You can catch up on my and Anna’s chat here:
Yes, this scandal might make publishers even more cautious than they already are around publishing memoir. I often hear that editors might reject a memoir if they think it will need a hefty lawyer’s read, which might make them vulnerable to anything potentially libel, and perhaps this will be an even more sensitive area moving forward, but it should also bring these kinds of debates into the mainstream. What are the parameters one must abide by when writing memoir and nonfiction? What is embellishment as opposed to lying? How much can we lean into fictional technique when writing memoir - What is the role of the imagination?
What I come back to in this debate about The Salt Path, is that memoir must be honest, otherwise why not simply call it fiction? And this honesty extends to the way we present the facts, the way we deal with memory and its fallible nature. The best memoirs are bold and courageous in their willingness to be bare and open to exposure, to draw attention to the human condition’s vulnerability and faulted nature. When reality and truth are such slippery notions, memoir must dig deep into its subject, ‘to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers,’ as James Baldwin wrote, to touch the nerve of personal truth, however complex and shifting that might be – or at the very least, it must try. The best memoirs evolve from their authors being wholly truthful with themselves, however challenging that might be. And being honest with the self means understanding the ‘feeling self’, and what those feelings reveal.
In my attempt to expand on this, I have included an extract below, from my forthcoming book, INTO BEING: the radical craft of memoir and its power to transform (published 7th October, MUP).
This short extract below is from the chapter, Snow in August: when memory collides with the imagination
For those of you who worry about getting the facts right, you can’t do better than read Joan Didion. In her famous quote, ‘Perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow,’ she boldly follows her ‘feeling’ self, and is explicit in her twisting of the facts. The emotion is the important thing here, and her honest connection with herself, a wholly subjective rendering of the feeling that summer was dead. She writes this in her essay, ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, where she questions those details she has collected, privately, and how if she had been hung up with recording the facts alone, it would reflect ‘an interest in reality’ which, she tells us, she simply does not possess. Didion is a writer, after all, and writers are daydreamers. Writers honour their imaginations.
Didion keeps a notebook to ‘remember what it was to be me.’ And by sharing this aspect of her personality with us, her reader, she invites us in. We admire her for her honesty and her willingness to present herself as human, complex, faulty; after all, she tells us, ‘keepers of notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.’ Her arch humour and willingness to dissect herself is indeed refreshing.
Didion writes that in her recording of memory or what has moved her, she tells what others would call lies. But she is not pretending they are anything but, and here is the crux. In sharing the unreliability of memory, or the misremembering, she makes it the subject of her piece, but she also invites the readers to be complicit. Didion opens the intimate, private nature of the notebook to her audience – she treats them like a friend – and her audience is touched that they are trusted to such a degree.
This acceptance of memory’s fallibility is common in the more thoughtful memoirs I have read, those that raise fundamental questions about the slippery nature of memory and storytelling. After all, however close a piece of writing is to pure fact-based nonfiction, claiming to convey the truth, it still manipulates by creating a linear narrative compressing time, even using dialogue (which is not the same as conversation). Those memoirs that draw our attention to the artifice of storytelling are more truthful, perhaps, than those biographies which claim to replicate the factual, ‘the real’.