Toppling idols

On the the lines we draw, and the lies we tell

[Contains mild spoilers for my two books.]

This essay was prompted by the current controversy surrounding Raynor Winn’s book The Salt Path, but I don’t think I need to go into very much detail on the dispute itself. It’s been extensively covered in the papers, and Substack’s app has been offering me endless think-pieces on the matter, so if you’d like to explore the contours of the discussion, there is plenty of material.

A completely different path, somewhere in the Italian Alps

I haven’t read The Salt Path, but to give you a brief overview (gleaned from what I’ve learned online), it’s a bestselling book, recently made into a film, that tells the “unflinchingly honest, inspiring and life-affirming true story” of Raynor Winn and her husband walking the South West Coast Path after becoming homeless, and learning that he has a life-limiting neurological condition. A recent Observer investigation has found out that a major factor in the Winns losing their home was the fact that Raynor (real name Sally Walker) had previously stolen £64,000 from an employer, and taken on a large debt in order to repay this. The article also calls into question her husband’s CBD diagnosis, and cites a number of neurologists who claim to be “sceptical about the length of time he has had it, his lack of acute symptoms, and his apparent ability to reverse them.” The Winns were also technically not homeless when they did their walk, as they still owned a property in the south of France.

Raynor Winn has since published a statement on her website, in which she calls the Observer article “grotesquely unfair” and “highly misleading,” and refutes some of its claims.

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Anyone who’s ever written or published a memoir will have been thinking about this story over the last two weeks. I doubt there is a memoirist in existence who hasn’t massaged the facts a little. And before anyone feels accused, a selective approach to facts is completely necessary if you’re writing about your life, because otherwise there is just too much of it to squeeze into 90,000 words.

In order to create a narrative that won’t bore or confuse the reader, authors have to elide or remove characters, shave down context, telescope encounters, simplify explanations, and sometimes lightly rearrange the timeline. If they pedantically insist on including every single detail, it’s likely that much of the emotional power of what they are trying to say will be lost.¹

Here are seven things in my books that weren’t completely true: