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...

Thread One ^www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5368194-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?^

Thread 2 Thread 2. To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film? | Mumsnet

Thread 3 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5369425-thread-3-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Thread 4 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5370609-thread-4-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Thread 5 Thread 5: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film? | Mumsnet

Thread 6 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5372494-thread-6-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-
husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Thread 7 www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5373425-thread-7-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Thread 8 www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5375023-thread-8-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

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.

To be fair, the cottage was for sale for a very cheap price in 1992, judging by other houses advertised in the newspaper. This may have reflected that it needed a new roof etc. My parents lived in a similar Welsh village at that time, and they often saw English couples fall in love with old cottages, move there, start doing them up, then run out of money. A holiday let also has such a short season

Exactly. MN isn't a media publication. I'm a journalist too and I wouldn't be printing insinuations or anything without robust certainty...nevertheless I think a lot of what has been discussed here does add up. If it doesn't, then there's a heck of a lot of explaining to do.

But I don't think she was at college in Leicester, was she? I assumed she meant a local FE college near where they both grew up, where she could have been studying for A levels (or something else), and where he could have been doing something practical, as he was a couple of years older so presumably not doing A levels.

I was vaguely assuming it was Melton Mowbray, which certainly used to have a group of FE colleges where you could do courses in horticulture, construction and the like, but it equally might have been in Staffordshire, where her parents' farm seems to have been. Raynor says in TWS that one of her parents' initial objections to Moth was that he couldn't drive, and she was certainly still (by her own account) living at home with her parents until they got married, so I'm assuming it was all very local.

Almost certainly a week or so ago it would have been “get your own story out there”. The sad face Daily Mail classic ;) But a lot of people are not comfortable with that, of course, even if they were promised copy approval.

to be fair, even someone who has written about their own life could feel like it’s a different kind of boundary to cross (because you aren’t in control). And in their case … I’m not sure that at this stage it wouldn’t just reignite the story. Probably “keep your heads down” is the best it can get for now, if nothing further happens.

I suspect that they've been told to keep quiet and keep their heads down to wait and see what else comes out. There's no point in getting up on your hind legs to issue rebuttals for this and that and explain other things if someone else is subsequently going to come along and blow your 'explanation' out of the water.

I would keep my head down and stay out of the public eye for about a year to eighteen months. Make sure nothing else is going to surface and work on my story (which will be an 'exclusive' for someone) which manages to put a positive spin on most, pour forth genuine remorse for 'mistakes' and probably set up a new series.

But that's just me.

I agree but it must be nigh-on impossible to prove they didn’t do it. It’s always harder to prove a negative. Sure, you might find some decent evidence that the timeline was a bit wonky or that it would have been really hard to get from xx to yy in a certain time, but purely from a journalistic pov I think you risk looking extremely petty if it comes down to that kind of minutiae

bit different obvs if you find a witness who says “yeah I drove them in my luxury camper the entire way” of course!

See: the Johann Hari approach. And subsequent bestsellers …

I don't disagree with your larger point, and absolutely the story, like all stories not being bolstered by new revelations, will absolutely wane, but I think there's a difference between the kind of speculative but plausible tentative conclusions non-journalists can come to on a thread like this, and what any reputable journalist could publish in an actual media outlet.

I don't personally have much interest in the whole Gangani house raffle backstory, who wrote the 'bios' on the website, whether the photo is of a younger Sally Walker or her daughter etc, but other people do. I am amused by some of the same tropes appearing to be in 'Izzy Wyn Thomas's' novel as in The Salt Path. I'm interested in how the messiness and frequent nastiness of real life gets 'tidied' into more appealing form for publication, and I'm very interested in how the myth of their 'loveliness' came to take hold so strongly, because when I read TSP, what struck me was how RW had not in fact made herself sound at all nice, but as angry, sneery and bitter.

I think I'm less outraged by the CBD claims than many, purely because I think you'd have had to be very naive to believe them.

And yes, I admit I'm very interested in where you go from here in their position. Stay out of sight and live on the proceeds from the books and film deal? Lie low for a while longer and then monetise further and attempt to recuperate your reputation with a 'warts and all' account of what really happened, according to you? Also interested in what her agent and editor decide to do.

But as far as the (alleged) embezzlement goes….

Surely an innocent person doing book keeping (badly!) - if the situation arose that money was missing, surely the first thing you’d do is get someone independent to go through the books and audit things. Hell, you’d pay for this independent person out of your own pocket if necessary because you’d know you hadn’t done anything wrong and that the money must be accounted for somehow.

why would an innocent person run off and get a 100k loan at an extortionate interest rate and putting your house up as security, in order to pay off the missing money and avoid further questioning?

Losing their house is and how that came about is fundamental to TSP. Without that backdrop, the book wouldn’t have a fraction of the impact. This isn’t some minor detail, it’s absolutely key.

I think it comes from an interview with The Independent in 2018, which suggests (but doesn't explicitly quote her) that Sally/Raynor said as much:

Moth – real name Ray, his nickname is a hangover from his ecological activism in the 1980s and 1990s – you will recall, was given two years at best after his diagnosis. How is he doing now? “He’s just completed a degree,” says Winn happily. “He studied at the Eden Project, doing horticulture and landscape design. He’s not as well as he was when we started walking, but when you think he was originally told he wasn’t going to last two years…”

www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/the-salt-path-book-journey-walking-coast-path-cornwall-devon-homelessness-a8502256.html

That's exactly what I'd do. I'd keep a very close eye online and in the media for exactly what people were registering as inconsistencies, likely untruths etc (and if I were the Walkers, I would absolutely, at some point, though maybe not just yet, be reading these threads and cut and pasting stuff into a Word document for notes) and crafting another book, possibly called The Real Salt Path. If my publisher were on board with that, obviously.

This would not in any way be the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God etc, but it would set out to be a relatable and broadly apologetic account of the circumstances that led to the omissions and half-truths of TSP. Which I would expect to be along the lines of 'We were financially irresponsible and overstretched ourselves, I did something unforgivable and stole money from someone who trusted me, and then everything snowballed. When I wrote TSP, I massaged the timeline of Moth's diagnosis and made us sound more destitute and friendless than we were because it was a better story, and I almost came to believe it myself. Lying so much was a horrible strain when the book did so well, and I always knew it was going to come out someday, particularly once the film option was actually actioned. When I see myself sitting next to Gillian Anderson on TV, I look like a deer in headlights, because we already knew The Observer had a story...'

If Michael Joseph at PRH decides to keep her on for one last book, then in her shoes, I'd couch the whole 'semi-apology' in another walk.

What if (pure speculation of course) the 'warts and all' account is actually far worse than the allegations in the original Observer article? ie

• the original investment into the property company was a fraction of the loan taken out to repay the Hemmings
• there were other loans taken out from family members which were never repaid
• the court case did not play out as described in the book ( no money to pay lawyers to defend them in court) and the time between the court judgment and the bailiffs appearing at the door wasn't 7 days
• they tried to sell their house in 2010 and set up Gangani in 2012 in another attempt to repay the 18% IR loan so they knew for a long time that they were going to lose their home
• RW did have writing experience before TSP and penned How not to Dal dy Dir
• they never hid under the stairs like frightened mice with the bailiffs at the door as described in TSP but did a runner at 2am before the bailiffs arrived the next day
• the 500 miles walkies inspiration for TSP was entirely made up and inserted subsequently
• the CBD diagnosis in 2013 was made up and was an exaggerated version of their visit to see a neurologist in 2015

Yep, with frequent amounts of breast-beating and 'mea culpa' and wondering 'how we could have been so stupid'. Get everyone sympathising and on board and rewrite history that way.

• they never hid under the stairs like frightened mice with the bailliffs at the door as described in TSP but did a runner at 2am before the bailliffs arrived the next day

We know this bit is true, don’t we?

Not necessarily - the bailiffs could have come round more than once

I thought I heard on the Observer podcast that they were given a year to pay off the debt and then 6 months notice of eviction. But haven't gone back to check so could be wrong

The Observer alleged that in 2010 the Hemmings loan was transferred to creditors after the property firm went bust. The creditors then took the Walkers to court and in Feb 2012 the judge ruled in favour of the creditors and that the Walkers would have a year (ie until Feb 2013) to find the money or their house would be sold to recoup the creditors' money.

The real Salt Path: what’s in the book, and what The Obse...

If she really is a pathological liar admitted responsibility for serious wrong doing/the embezzlement won’f be possible.

In which case there remains a mistruth because TSP says the bailiffs came to change the locks and they were caught/seen.

However, all does all rest on whether the neighbouring farmer's account of them fleeing at 2am and bailiffs smashing their way in in the morning is accurate.

It's not a big issue either way IMO. Just another minor inconsistency that contributes to the pile of others.

Agree @Localres that there may not be any more big revelations - the person who originally tipped off the Observer is still anonymous.

Some of my thoughts are: that it's quite an audacious con that they've pulled off although I accept, like others have said, that they never thought the book would be a bestseller. The character analysis here is very good re the sense of entitlement and ignoring the harm they've done to others. The Salt Path isn't well-written in my opinion but I do like that SalRay has stated that drink and drug addictions often develop after a person becomes homeless, rather than being a cause of it. She's not the first to point it out but it needs saying.

I do hope that this won't lead to publishers being reluctant to take on authors who have got an unusual but truthful story to tell. After this and Belle Gibson checks probably will be made about illness and disability in non-fiction writing.

Mud sticks as the old saying goes. How many people are going to believe any 'mea culpa' she comes out with, however artfully it is contrived?

Yes, very interesting - not least because (for me, at any rate) the 1 rating reviews are generally much more eloquently written and articulate than the pages & pages of gushing, repetitive and cliché-ridden 5 ones. They actually give reasons and examples for their low rating, rather than trotting out the Emperor's New Clothes-esque bandwaggoning. I really do wonder about folk who claim it's the best book they've ever read, and can only wonder just how many books are on that list...

The writing is ok/quite good in places IMO & it’s obvious from the writing Ray is intelligent & very well read. Is it a brilliant example of a memoir, prize winning nature writing, etc? Should she have won a prize for a first novel if this isn’ t her first novel? I do worry we’re losing sight of what really great writing looks like. So few read widely now.

Why not? 'Mea culpa/what really happened' books come out fairly regularly, even by those who have been convicted and done prison time.

She repaid the embezzled money, so no one's going to bring a case for that. The Walkers would need to take legal advice on whether the creditors who bought the debt from the relative who lent them the money to repay the Hemmingses could bring a case if they weren't able to recoup all the money owed when the house was sold because of the repayment of the mortgage having priority. Ditto on money owed on the French property or other outstanding debts.

RW has a big existing readership, some at least of whom will continue to buy what she writes, if she continues to hit the notes they like in her (spousal adoration and communing with nature), and others who were unaware of her work until the film and/ or the Observer story may buy it too. Her current publisher will have a decision to make about whether they want this to appear under their imprint or not, but it's perfectly possible she would find another publisher to buy it. Might need to donate proceeds or a percentage of them to charity, but that might be a canny decision to potentially protect future earnings from other books.