Thread 9: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

The Observer The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...

2nd Observer https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-whats-in-the-book-and-what-the-observer-has-found

3rd Observer https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-the-truth-behind-the-blockbuster-book-video

4th Observer ‘I felt I was being gaslit’ – the landlord who helped Ray...

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Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement Raynor Winn

New posters welcome. It would be helpful to read at least the four Observer items above before posting.

To all - Please be extremely cautious when it comes to naming or implicating people and addresses not in the public eye or with no direct connection to the story, and around the understandable health speculations, especially where details are unclear or still emerging. Please do not engage with visitors who seem to have their own agenda and seek to derail. Avoid @'ing and quoting them as this will only encourage them back to the threads.

We have done amazingly well together - in the main that is, not mentioning any names but you know who you are! - for eight threads so far. I can't be on the threads as much as I'd like so all help with keeping our discussion ticking along in a healthy and civil fashion is very welcome.

No saltiness. Keep to the path. Thank you.

But Amanda Owen was already well known from the tv series before the books, therefore it was financially worthwhile using a ghostwriter — that would make no sense with SW, a complete unknown.

I don’t think it’s ghostwritten. The Dal dy Dir extract strikingly resembles some of the more ‘elevated’ ‘communing with nature’ writing in TSP.

And I think saying Moth and her daughter had no idea she could write is a figleaf to cover over SW’s obvious determination and ambition to publish TSP.

It’s not a bad thing to be determined and ambitious, obviously, but it doesn’t fit with SW’s ‘humble, unworldly child of nature’ narrative if she were to tell how many agents and editors turned it down first, and how many rounds of revisions there were with her PRH editor. Maybe the first draft was genuinely written for an increasingly forgetful Moth (though I don’t think so), but for it to be published will have taken a lot of focused work with an editorial team, aimed at a commercially viable product.

You also see this in the fact that SW never mentions keeping notes during the walks for the two subsequent books, where she was a wildly successful author with a contract for further books. Many travel writers are upfront about taking them. Simon Armitage is explicit about taking voice notes on his phone during the day, then writing them up for hours wherever he’s staying at night. Dervla Murphy, often trekking in remote, dangerous places, several times has baggage stolen or had to abandon them, but is explicit that the one non-negotiable thing is her notebooks, which stay in her pockets all the time.

But SW’s thing is very much ‘I’m an accidental author, not a career one’, and she purports to be only on these walks for the sake of Moth’s health, not because she has a contract for a book which requires a walk to structure it.

Be good to have a correspondent who holidayed there. Anyone?

It’s a 2-bedroom barn conversion, with a crog loft that might be usable as another bedroom. According to TSP, they did have bookings when the house was repossessed, but repaid those people before setting out on the walk.

@Spindleweed The Dal dy Dir extract strikingly resembles some of the more ‘elevated’ ‘communing with nature’ writing in TSP.

This was my guess - but I could not confirm it as I have not read any of Izzy/Sally/Raynor's work. Her interviews do sound as if she is, at least, just paraphrasing the book - if not directly quoting?

I got into this discussion with a reference to the RSL Bland prize - as it is being used to market the book. It may be technically within the rules, but, it is possibly still a cheek to accept £10,000 for a first novel (even though the first one was a flop)?

Thanks. I noted the bits about needing to cancel bookings. So holiday letting may have been their income generator post 2008. Was Moth in his gardener job at that point?

I'm also intrigued by her reference in the book to being drawn into Moth's 'eco-warrior life'. There's no further detail about what this actually involved, what particular protests etc. Seems like another signal that Moth is a Good Person but without much else to support it.

The photo is definitely taken on one of the Abersoch beaches. Bear Grylls owns the island on the right.

A small holiday let, in the middle of the Llŷn (away from the beaches) would not make much, perhaps clearing £5,000/year profit.

There are few hotels in Abersoch, though some upmarket B&Bs. There is an old, established one called the PorthTocyn, and there was one called the Whitehouse which closed in 2004.

I was invited to an event last week which would have been full of people who knew the Hemmings, stupidly I declined before I realised what a wonderful source of information it would be.

‘Eco-warrior life’ is such a vague term that it’s meaningless really. Certainly reflects the general impression I got when reading TSP that neither of them had ever really progressed consistently in any kind of career, and that they bought the small holding imagining some idyllic lifestyle where they wouldn’t need to be in full time employment to pay the bills. I also felt when I read it that RW had always been rather in thrall to Moth. It felt to me like she was the dominant personality who drove the decision making in their lives, and that she viewed a
Moth as some amazingly gifted and special human (without any actual evidence to support that view!)
To be clear, this is just my opinion from reading the book.

’in thrall’ is perhaps not the right term, because that implies he was the dominant one influencing her. But I definitely felt she seemed quite in awe of Moth.

Thanks for that clarification. Agree the timing isn't clear.

The brother is on Blogspot in the summer / autumn of 2013, writing about living in a caravan & doing up the Chateau; his family don't seem to be living there yet as he's waiting for them to come for the summer & still doing lots of work on the house.

I’m still a bit obsessed with the 2025 consultants letter.

I think the odd phrasing of the 3rd paragraph which so many people have picked up on, is because he’s very very politely trying to point out to them that he doesn’t want them to give people the impression that walking can cure a normal case of CBD while they promote the film.

“I was keen to aknowledge in our discussion that his clinical story has been unique….” reads to me that he’s unhappy about the narrative they are publicising so he made a point of raising it during the consultation. I don’t think it’s the endorsement of them that it’s possible to take from a surface reading of it.

That's the feeling I get too. The mum of one of my friends was like this about her husband - referred to in slightly awed tones as if a)he were some kind of mysterious demi-god and b) we all naturally bought into this cult (even people like me, her dd's friend who had never actually met Husband, because engaged family man he was not.) I was about 14 at the time so peak cringe radar and boy did she set it blaring 🤢

They moved there in 2008 and opened it up to the public in 2013 according to this.

https://www.sudouest.fr/lot-et-garonne/lagruere/restaurer-un-chateau-un-projet-de-vie-a-part-entiere-8735929.php (you'll have to use Google translate unless you understand French!)

[ETA - the blog posts in 2013 appear to be excerpts from his book "Stopcock". I'm guessing the story is based on his renovation project given the themes.]

Ah, thanks, I hadn't seen this. I'd just assumed that the blog posts were contemporaneous

Agreed. I wasn't suggesting she had a ghost writer and think the same. Just pointed out that it's not unheard of for a non-celebrity to have one if the story is compelling enough. OH was a bad example. I think I was meaning The Red Shepherdess (who had a ghost writer too).

Yes, def Abersoch area. It looks to be from Ty'n Towyn aka Quarry Beach given the perspective of the islands.

I just did Google translate: ‘a bricklayer specialising in catering’ !!!

Your editor or agent is the one who enters your book, so that would have come from Jen Christie or Fiona Crosby rather than SW — I’ve never looked at the T and C, but it may be that a previously self-published novel wouldn’t count, so you could still be a debut author.

The entry criteria says that self-published works count too

That’s Google being Google. It’s a ‘mason who specialises in restoration’.😀

Then I suppose SW didn’t fess up about being Izzy Wyn-Thomas.

Not sure if flagged but Chloe H said on X in a reply the ‘paper got too full this week’ on this story. So next week.

Oh thank you for updating! I thought that might be the case.

The original EPC on the Walkers' house dates from 2 Dec 2008. EPCs became compulsory from October 2008 if you were selling or renting a property. So this suggests that the cottage was being rented out from at least Dec 2008.

I agree with both your posts and what I find easiest to envision is her being sort of on a quest to maintain his interest in her and also keep him tied to her. In the few clips I’ve seen, she is so socially awkward (and this fits with TWS too) that I can well imagine he seems to her to be way out of her league- charming, charismatic- and perhaps never fully committed, perhaps never quite as happy to be a twosome as she was and wanted to be? I can imagine her continually feeling she needed to come up with more ways to please him- restoring old farms, “eco activism”, whatever that means, climbing, walking, and eventually subsidising his interests and desires by embezzling funds, or, indeed, using their story to write a book. Whether he’s been complicit in creating her insecurity I don’t know, but I could also imagine a situation where he pulls away emotionally and she comes up with a new idea to draw him back in. And this dynamic could be manipulated deliberately by him, or a byproduct of their different characters and traits.

The derogatory remarks about others throughout TSP and the blameless persona are imo often/ always indicative of low self esteem. It's sad that by her fifties she appeared not to have conquered those feelings. Age can often bring a certain confidence and letting go of past insecurities but not in everyone.