I don’t disagree. I think this is an account the author never expected to be so successful, and didn’t expect to have people crawling all over with a microscope — rather like films in the days before you could freezeframe and read phone numbers and see tiny detail, and before peoole could get together to share online. (Matthew McFadyen once said at a Spooks thing that he’d absent-minded typed in his own phone number into a mobile his Spooks character was using in close up, and fans took screen shots and shared the number and he got hundreds of fan calls and had to change his number…)
I imagine the deceptions and omissions were cumulative over time, not some conscious attempt to hoodwink.
If, as RW claims in The Wild Silence, she originally wrote it as a present for Moth, to jog his memory about the walk when he seemed to be forgetting it, then there was presumably no need to lie, probably no need to include how they lost the house at all.
I imagine that her editor said ‘The reader needs more explanation of how you became homeless,’, and that this probably was added later, during the editorial process. By this stage RW knows it is going to be published, though not how successful it’s going to be, and has to come up with a backstory that doesn’t detract from the reason Michael Joseph bought the book and gave her an advance — the story of a plucky duo who lose everything because of their own trusting nature, and one of whom has just discovered he is dying from a rare disease, who walk the SWCP out of desperation, endure hardships and find hope.
If she tells the truth to her editor or agent at this point, she’s in breach of her contract. So they concoct the tissue of half-truths, switched timelines etc thst is the published version of TSP. And that hardens into ‘truth’ over the course of the promotion, and the interviews, features etc that the book’s success gave rise to. And had to be sustained in the sequels, the film adaptation etc.
If the publisher’s due diligence involved some form of check on Moth’s medical records, any of those letters would have done, even though the timeline is ‘off’. After all, very easy to say ‘We were homeless, we didn’t keep old documents.’
Moth’s Illness may have seemed to the legal read the key thing to be checked, as the court case was only ‘backstory’. And he clearly has some comparatively rare condition, which is progressing atypically. If anyone said ‘But the medical documents don’t match the timeline of the walk, it’s easy to grasp that homeless people don’t keep neat files of past medical correspondence, and old letters were destroyed by damp when stored in a friend’s barn, or whatever.
But yes, memoirs are by their nature selective and often compress events for dramatic purposes, so I think I’m far less shocked than some people. Or just around the writing process too much.
Or no, it’s just that I don’t need to believe the Winns/Walkers are nice or good people. I know a lot of writers, and some of them are beyond awful. Not embezzlers (or not thst I know of), but certainly at odds with their likeable narrative voices and funny, self-deprecating interview personae.