Thread 10: 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...
Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement Raynor Winn
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New posters welcome. It would be helpful to read at least the four Observer items above before posting. There are currently 10 items on The Observer website The real Salt Path | The Observer

To all - No saltiness. Keep to the path. 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 - from experience - this will only encourage them back to the threads. We have done amazingly well together for nine very interesting, very serious and very silly threads so far. I can't be here as much as I'd like so all help with keeping our discussion walking along in a healthy and civil fashion is very welcome.

Keep calm and eat fudge.

Thank you

Lolita is a novel. So not comparing like with like.

Thanks all who replied - I've just been checking myself but too late to edit and add to my post. Shame that RW was so snippy in TSP about the Eden Project beforehand: page 198:

Apparently there are lots of opportunities to be had when faced with a big white hole in the ground. You could let it naturalise: fill with murky green water and grow scrub around, then call it a heritage trail; or you could create another Eden and fill it with plants from across the world, plastic biomes and millions of visitors at twenty five pounds a pop. You could of course put all that spoil back into the hole and re landscape it, but that would be just too obvious, and no tourist is going to pay to walk over a meadow with a leaflet that says 'You'd never know it, but this used to be a mine'.

(Well, you're certainly not going to pay to walk over / use anything, we get that much..)

You make a good point that it’s probably the publishers who added the ‘unflichiningly honest’ tagline. I wonder if they used that because of the openness and candidness of the writing? I mean this in terms of the many unpleasant details and experiences mentioned in the book - e.g. the stealing, wild pooing, many unflattering self-descriptions etc, and RW doesn’t seem to cover herself in glory in the book, which is the opposite of what you expect from a memoir.

important to remember that Penguin have stated that their due diligence included a contract of factual accuracy. While they no doubt created the tagline, they’re basing it on what the writer has confirmed contractually with them.

I think it's level of selection, omission and shaping that's the problem with TSP though, particularly with things that are at the very core of the premise. If it hadn't been sold as a "true story" and gone on to be so successful off the back of that then it's unlikely any of this would have mattered, much like most other non-fiction books that have a degree of shoehorning.

That said, I do feel we get glimpses into the real Sally Walker from passages in TSP like this one (I was reading it after going back to the Babbercombe/Abbotsham mistake a PP mentioned):

"All I’d thought about in those days of planning was leaving Wales, running away, forgetting that we’d lost our home, that our family was spread all over the country, that Moth was ill. I once heard a lecture by Stephen Hawking, when he said, ‘It’s the past that tells us who we are. Without it we lose our identity.’ Maybe I was trying to lose my identity, so I could invent a new one."

😳 what have you been doing with him?

So it's Stephen Hawkins fault. He told her to do a runner from the bailiffs.

I must point out that since 1970 we have had the original & genuine long distance coastal path 186 miles round Pembrokeshire in South Wales.

This is what's been happening on Portland (Dorset) - the filling in (of some) and rewilding of the old quarries to create nature reserves. As lovely as they are becoming, it's not something people would pay to visit.

Having said that, though, there is an underground former mine that's hopefully becoming a big visitor attraction (with a required large injection of investment monies) within a few years. It's been on the cards, with different investors (Eden Project Iirc) for the last 20 years or so. Fingers crossed this one happens. Portland needs something positive (after Bibby Stockholm and the proposed waste incinerator).

Yes, well put. And, I feel, even in the nature writing, there is the echo of the 'exceptionalism'.

in hindsight, knowing what we know now, this kind of passage has extra layers of meaning! And also in hindsight, it makes more sense why in interviews RW has always stuck pretty closely to the script. I guess on some level, even if subconsciously, there must have been a fear of the truth being exposed.

as a pp said, I can just about get my head around the catastrophising when she first knew something was wrong with Moth, particularly if she has health anxiety and the sort of temperament that goes from 0-100 quickly. But carrying on that narrative, once it must have been obvious Moth wasn’t in terminal decline but was actually improving, doesn’t sit easily with me.

and I don’t think there’s any coming back from the embezzlement (assuming this is what happened.) it’s such a calculated, malicious crime when you’ve been put in a position of trust by someone.

I feel theres a (limited) potential for some sympathy if RW were to come out now and say ‘Yes, I did feel my world was falling apart when Moth got unwell, and yes I do realise now that whatever he’s got is mild and not the catastrophic diagnosis I first believed.’

but as for the embezzlement- no. I don’t see any coming back from that.

I do think part of the sense of betrayal felt by some readers, though, is in part due to the fact that this book was read by people who don’t usually read much or at all.

As a result, these readers have a much more credulous take on what memoir might mean in terms of condensing, rearranging, embellishing material etc, and that ‘unflinchingly honest’ as a marketing tagline might not be a guarantee that everything in the book happened exactly as written.

It’s a more extreme example, but I once inadvertently did the adult bookish equivalent of puncturing the illusion of a child who still thinks Santa Claus is real. A chatty new junior at my London hairdresser, many years ago, seeing me reading while my colour developed, said she didn’t read anything but Katie Price’s books, both the autobiographies and the pony books, but that she really loved them and read them over and over.

Being polite, I said I’d never read them, but had met her very nice ghostwriter more than once (she died terribly young since then). The junior asked what a ghostwriter was, and I could see her starting to look upset, but by the time I realised it was too late to back out and change the subject. She’d had no idea, apparently, that KP didn’t write her own books, and what she’d really loved was the idea that this woman she idolised was really talking to her, and sweating over notebooks to write it all down just for her in some completely unmediated way.

I think there’s something similar going on here for some readers of TSP, who felt they really knew Raynor and Moth, and now feel as if friends lied to them.

Hmm it doesn’t seem like much fact-checking was done by Penguin though.

It seems like a very flimsy strategy - and a huge risk - for Penguin, as a major and respected publishing house, to market something as ‘unflinchingly honest’ when the main due diligence seems to have involved just taking RW at their word.

I don’t mean at all to be judgemental or holier-than-thou by saying any of this, but it’s just something that seems very strange.

I appreciate it would’ve been quite difficult to fact-check the book for all the reasons that people have mentioned here, and Penguin obviously sensed it would benefit them because it would make a lot of money. But why take the risk of publishing a money-spinner like this at the expense of your reputation or the reputation of your authors? This whole thing obviously makes Penguin look bad, as well as the Walkers.

@FightingTemeraire

I think you're right about a lot of readers of the books.

They're not a difficult or complex read, and they don't go deep into any subject, so are very accessible.

Which, had they been a true account by a decent person, would have been a great thing!

The more people reading about the outdoors the better. A lot will have started exploring a bit because of them.

@Fandango52

A review on Amazon mentioned that the book had got the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall wrong.

If that's the case, then even on easily verifiable facts it fell down.

A contract is a bit more binding than just asking someone ‘is it true?!!’
If a writer is in breach of contract, the publisher can take action.

@FightingTemeraire @FurryHappyKittens This is one I wrote earlier:

TheBrandyPath · 20/07/2025 23:16

"Am I being unreasonable to feel disappointed after reading this in the Observer...."
The title of this thread was what brought me here to learn about this. I have been aware of the Winn books and thought they were being packaged and marketed successfully. I had started to become irritated by the all-pervading influence and wondered why I felt this way.
The honest question, at the top, made me curb my cynicism - I want visitors to appreciate the SWCP and did it matter what brought them here? Now I have learnt that it is not written that well, there are mean spirited opinions of individuals, and readers certainly don't get much for their money at a public event.
The answer to the question in the thread title has to be "No, it is very reasonable to feel disappointed." If there is no confidence in the facts of: falling on hard times. through no fault, and suffering greatly from a terminal illness - this book has little to offer.

But they’re only doing exactly what other publishers do, though — it’s not anything that isn’t generally done. Memoirs don’t generally get fact-checked, and the legal team will be primarily interested in checking whether anyone who appears in the book is potentially identifiable and might have grounds for legal action because their reputation has been damaged etc.

The standard contract puts legal responsibility for the truth value of the book squarely on the author.

The disclaimer at the start of TSP says that, apart from some limited cases where names or details have been altered to ‘protect the privacy of others’, the author ‘has stated to the publishers thst, except in such respects’ the contents of the book are true’.

And there’s a carefully-worded bit straight from the legal department about how ‘any medical advice in this book is based on the author’s personal experience and should not be relied on as a substitute for professional advice’. That’s pretty much explicitly ‘Don’t come running to us in outrage if walking the SWCP doesn’t cure your CBD.’

If PRH based their 'unflinchingly honest' comment on merely a signed contract saying it was true without doing any checking at all, then some of the blame must lie with them. I mean, if someone offered me a huge advance for a book that was already written and the money from which would help me out of a huge hole (albeit of my own making), then I'd sign on the dotted and work out what to tell everyone later if it came out that some of the truth was somewhat massaged. And then when the sales were huge, I shouldn't think anyone much cared how much was true and how much was fabricated.

And yes, @TheBrandyPath I know Lolita is a novel. But the fact is that the contents are morally deplorable. People still buy and read the book. My point was the morality of the author not factual correctness.

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat If PRH based their 'unflinchingly honest' comment on merely a signed contract saying it was true without doing any checking at all, then some of the blame must lie with them.

Very much so. And, I would think, with the go-betweens, the agents.

I’ve just checked my copy and can confirm that’s true (they’re out by a year). Although it could actually be that the pub quiz question (if the pub quiz ever happened) was actually wrong? Lol.

I agree with you by the way - I’m as confused as you are (if I’ve understood your post correctly) about why Penguin would either take the risk of publishing something like this and not fact-check it to within an inch of its life or just decide it wouldn’t be possible to fully fact-check it so they wouldn’t proceed with publishing it. I’m not at all connected to the publishing industry, so have no idea how it works, but in hindsight, their decision to publish it without robust fact-checking seems strange.

Haha I know! But it’s looking more and more like Penguin didn’t do much fact-checking at all, isn’t it?

And I wonder if that is what this will come down to. PRH saying to RaySal 'you signed a contract to say that this was all true', and the reply being 'It is MY truth. Anyway, define what is true? Is the salt that issues from the sea in the foam true? Are the flies which hover over the discarded poo piles, wearing their glossy jackets of disgustingness true? Anyway, you should have checked.'

Thanks. This is really insightful.

I found it interesting that @gattocattivo says in the post from 11:32 that the contract is more binding than just taking the author’s word for it - which does seem a bit amateurish - and also that the publisher can take action if the author is in breach of contract.

We don’t know the details of any of the negotiations or contracts between Penguin and the Walkers, of course, so don’t know the approach they took.