The False Path: Thoughts on recent controversies surrounding The Salt Path

By the time I launched Hooked on the Horizon in 2021, Raynor Winn’s bestselling book The Salt Path was into its fourth year of print, had sold millions of copies, and been translated into some 20 languages. It was enjoying an almost unfathomable level of success by any book’s standards, let alone one that operates in the nature memoir genre, the genre which I had just joined.

As such, when a reader left a five-star review for Hooked on the Horizon pronouncing it was “probably the next Salt Path”, I couldn’t have asked for a better one-liner to help me access an audience that Winn had tapped into. Grateful and touched, I immediately pasted the quote into the book description on my product pages, and I am sure the small connection to that multimillion-selling success helped to nudge a few more sales over the line.

Anyone who has braved the news over the past month won’t be surprised to hear that I have now removed this once-glowing quote from my product pages (although, I should say, I remain very grateful to the sentiments of that kindly reviewer). Since The Observer published its investigative article and cast doubt over the integrity of Winn’s books, the idea of being “probably the next Salt Path” now suggests something entirely different.

Full disclosure, I have not read The Salt Path, nor the two books that followed in its wake, nor have I watched the recently released film. But I understand that, for the benefit of those in the same boat, the book begins with Winn and her partner, Moth, losing their home as a result of what she has called “a bad investment”. Having put money into a friend’s business, its failure led to the calling in of this large sum, ultimately resulting in a legal dispute of which Winn writes: “We lost. Lost the case. Lost the house.” And so The Salt Path finds its feet with a tragic case of poetic irony, whereby the protagonist’s act of good will is leveraged cruelly against them.

Winn and Moth’s circumstances worsen further when Moth is diagnosed with Corticobasal Syndrome (CBS), a rare neurological disorder for which there is no cure or treatment. The pair then embark on a journey along the South West Coast Path and – as a nature memoir is prone to do – The Salt Path tracks the way in which the world offers them salvation from homelessness and sickness alike. Crucially, The Salt Path is published and billed as “an honest and life-affirming true story”.

But that appears not to be the case.

The Observer’s investigation is ongoing, but at this stage there are two allegations made against Raynor Winn (whose real name is, in fact, Sally Walker), one for each of The Salt Path’s cornerstones. Firstly, that their financial misfortunes were caused not by being wronged, but by doing wrong. It has emerged that the real reason they lost their house was not at all because of “a bad investment”, but because Winn embezzled £64,000 from an employer over the course of several years. On being caught, Winn managed to get a loan from a wealthy family member and strike a deal with her (now previous) employer, in which she repaid them the full amount in return for the employer not pressing charges and signing a non-disclosure agreement. But when her family member’s business failed a few months later, the loan that rescued them was called in by a third party. It is in these circumstances, entirely different to those depicted in The Salt Path, that their house was repossessed.

The second allegation relates to Moth’s neurological disorder. CBS belongs in the same family as Parkinson’s disease, and is a devastating condition in which sufferers can endure tremors, loss of control of body and speech, and eventually develop dementia. A typical diagnosis gives six to eight years to live. Winn’s three books to date suggest Moth has now lived with CBS for 18 years and remains capable of walking hundreds of miles with a backpack and a tent, enduring not only the vicissitudes of the British climate and landscape but also that of his condition. More presciently, all three of Winn’s books heavily imply that at the end of their long walks Moth’s symptoms have improved and he is much better for their journeys. The template, it would seem, is: Moth ill, Moth walk, Moth better.

It is true that Winn notes early in The Salt Path that Moth’s experience of CBS seems atypical: it progresses slowly and appears to cause him less discomfort than it might in others. In light of the investigation by The Observer, Winn has made Moth’s medical records public on her website – no doubt an anguishing decision to have to make about a deeply personal and sensitive matter – and they do show that Moth has indeed been diagnosed with CBS. Confusingly, however, these medical records date from after their first walk took place, and as such the records raise as many questions as they answer. Did Moth have CBS during their walk, or were his symptoms backfilled into the narrative? Is it physically possible for a CBS sufferer to walk 630-miles, wild-camping and carrying their lives on their backs? And, most crucially for her many readers who either have CBS themselves, or friends and family with the condition, did the long walks truly help Moth’s symptoms?

Winn states that she is not offering medical advice. But in writing, as in all forms of creative expression, the explicit is seldom as important as the implicit. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining,” wrote Russian novelist Anton Chekhov, “show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Winn has held a piece of broken glass up to sufferers of untreatable neurodegenerative conditions and given them a glint of hope that nature and walking can heal. But this does not seem to be the light of the moon, so much as that of a carefully positioned artificial light which has served to sell millions of copies of books, secured lucrative publishing deals, and seen Gillian Anderson wheeled out to play Winn on the big screen.

Of course, nobody expects memoirs to be the exact and exhaustive accounts of the stories they are retelling. One doesn’t have to ponder it for too long to realise that nobody would actually want that at all. In Art of Travel, Alain de Botton makes this point in typically amusing fashion by describing in painful detail what a travel writer might mean by the summarising sentence “we journeyed through the afternoon.” The reality of said afternoon, de Botton posits, would involve a thousand details the narrator could have shared with us, from the digesting of lunch, to unexplained pangs of anxiety, to the flight pattern of a circling fly. When we read accounts of personal experience, we trust the author to draw out the moments that are poignant to the narrative arc that they are building for us. We not only permit the omission of certain elements of their experience, we wholeheartedly demand it. By the same tenet, we demand that the commission of untrue or fictitious experience is absent. The Observer puts this another way:

“Our reporting has found sins of omission and commission in The Salt Path. Leaving stuff out is run-of-the-mill for a memoir, but the sin of commission – inventing important passages of the book – is not.”

I once wrote a blog called ‘In Defence of Truth: The Elephant in the Room’, in which I sought to demonstrate how the postmodern movement has ushered in a post-truth world. We are now so far into this epistemological wasteland that we don’t even question whether we are being lied to: we expect it. From politicians to service providers to influencers, the rot, we are sure, is real. Not even scientists or doctors are safe. Perhaps I’m biased, perhaps overly romantic, but the memoirist seemed one of the last defenders of a world where truth was fundamental. What does it say of the state of truth if the most successful nature memoirist of the last decade, the author of “an honest and life-affirming true story” as the publisher would have it, has distorted the foundations of their story to the point of almost being unrecognisable?

Not all readers will feel aggrieved or cheated by recent revelations, and for many the content of the book is not as important as the hope that it instils. After all, if the implicit trumps the explicit, that can cut both ways. Regardless of the reasons, Winn and Moth did endure and overcome hardship as they walked the winding and windswept footpaths of the coastline, and their story will remain one of inspiration for many of the millions who followed their journey. Indeed, none of us read a book in the same way, and the readers who take no issue with memoirists taking artistic license to its very limits are welcome to that opinion.

I suspect there are at least two groups for whom Winn has crossed a line. Firstly, and most importantly, sufferers of CBS and similar conditions, along with their families and friends. Many readers with the condition have taken from her books that they should have walked more, and those who have lost loved ones feel guilty that they didn’t encourage them to do so too. This guilt resides even when it would have been physically impossible for the person to have taken these walks given the limitations of the very condition they are battling. Of course, I am no spokesperson for this group and I know that not all sufferers of CBS and similar disorders feel this way – for some The Salt Path remains a beacon of hope – but it would appear they are in the minority.

As for the second aggrieved group, I count myself among their ranks: memoirists. For those of us who have gone to painstaking lengths to stay true to our stories, it feels a profound injustice to discover that a fellow writer has built great success on foundations of mistruths. The nature of books like Winn’s The Salt Path, or my Hooked on the Horizon, is that they detail experiences that take place in remote parts of the world where it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for anybody to verify specific events. (Having said that, The Observer is now attempting to investigate the extent to which Winn and Moth actually took the journeys the books depict, and there seems to be questions surrounding this too.) Indeed, the temptation to not only embellish scenes in a memoir, but also to invent details to enhance them such that they become more dramatic, emotive, funny or spectacular is strong. After all, who will know? Or, perhaps more poignantly, who will care?

Judging by the overwhelming reaction to the news of Winn’s fabrications, it would appear that many people still do care. It would appear that, at least when it comes to the memoir, the truth still counts for something.

This is welcome news for those of us who believe that to write a memoir is to enter into a moral contract with a reader. I hope to write many more nature memoirs in the years ahead, and I would like to pledge to you now my commitment to the truth in all of my accounts, both past and future. It is a sad sign of the times that such a pledge need be made at all, but in a post-truth world we’re going to need to start saying the quiet part out loud.

Thanks for reading, and have a beautiful day.