Thread 12: 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 - 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 eleven 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.
No saltiness. Keep to the path.
Will our life-size cardboard cut-out Simon Armitage keep his head?
NB Timeline coming in the first posts of this thread for reference.

@PistachioTiramisuLimoncello All of us have different interests in life, that is what makes it interesting. And we often don't see why someone is interested in something that doesn't interest us. This is the case with this. We are interested in this, you are not. No right or wrong about that.

Started reading LL this afternoon (preloved copy). First off, credit where it’s due. She writes the emotions well- her fear and desperation. I’ve seen terminal illness including Alzheimer’s, and I’ve sat with death, and I’m madly in love with a wonderful man who I have every reason to expect to outlive; and I feel her writing quite viscerally. I wish she had written a novel with this skill, so that I could fully fall into it; with the backstory we now know, I wonder how much is real for her.

Next, some timing. She starts the book in January in a lockdown, so 2021. They start the trail in May, leaving the farm in the first week of May (p.37). On p26 of my copy she describes a DAT scan measuring dopamine receptor cells, which shows Moth with a reduction in these. She doesn’t date that scan, though.

Their first stop is Dave and Julie’s house (2 nights) and they offer to keep them company on the Pennine Way. At this point Raymoth both insist they will be lucky to walk as far as Fort William.

Then I think they start walking probably 4 days after leaving the farm. So I guess by the 10th May, depending on which day in the first week they leave.

I thought the mantra for every walking group ever was that you go at the pace of your slowest member? So this was either an extraordinarily unprofessional and disorganised group or... you know... made up.

It is incredibly unsafe to try to make a group hurry along and end up with a straggling unfit back marker. One slip on the part of the last person in the group can be fatal, and nobody might even notice they've gone until it's too late. Which is why you keep unfit and slow people in the middle of the group and don't allow them to get too far behind.

I’ve only just started reading TSP and am obviously reading fully aware of the controversy.

Of course, the unpleasantness is very obvious including the ‘smug’ consultant who delivered the devastating news.

What I find really strange is her physical fitness. 8kg is certainly not a heavy pack. She’s only 50 but she is struggling with aches and pains after the first day - strangely enough she writes more about her own physical discomfort that day than her terminally ill, infirm husband’s condition.

For context, I walked the Minehead stretch 4 years ago. I was just over 50, not a couch potato but certainly not particularly fit. I’m not sure I’d even describe it as particularly strenuous - hilly and hard but not physically-wipe-you-out exhausting.

I was also very unimpressed by her reasoning she could not get a job because she had to spend every precious minute with Moth. It’s another example of how special and exempt from the norm they are. Most people with a seriously ill loved one would like to stop work and devote themselves to spending time with them but don’t have that luxury.

She doesn’t want even pretend it’s because he needs care or help just that she wants to be with him.

I'm not suggesting they should have done such significant background research though. The flaws in the story are plain to see by many who read it without requiring the Observer investigation, and one would expect a literary agent to notice them too. The book should never have been published, yet somehow it was, so I think it's very reasonable to look at all the publishing hoops that needed to be jumped through to throw light on how on earth it happened. Either there was some understanding of the story's flaws that were deemed acceptable to bend or the people involved were incredibly gullible. Also, agents do often take an active role in helping shape manuscripts in order to increase the chances of a successful pitch - it's not just editors at the publishing house.

I just think you’re coming at this as if you’re an investigative journalist who scents a story or a prosecutor putting together a case, rather than someone in the publishing industry, though. The average literary agent gets large amounts of fairly unexciting pitch letters — when they pull out one from the slush pile that makes them say ‘Hmm. Interesting’, they’re not going to be primarily checking whether the author of this mild-mannered walking memoir has an undisclosed criminal past, any more than most of us check out our clients for evidence of criminality.

Welcome @UpFromSomerset

You're quite right to be annoyed that the book is still being promoted as non fiction.

I think, once they've been scrutinised in their entirety, very little of them will be in any way true!

The book is sold as ‘unflinchingly honest’ and a true account. The truth matters, especially when a text presents an illness with a possible means to slow it or even cure.

I'm not suggesting that she's making up her 'Greenham protest 'credentials , but I think she'd have been a bit young - given her background -for being in the entrenched protest camps she perhaps would like everyone to believe.. she'd have been about 20 when Greenham protests first started in 1981and a few years older when they were really entrenched. ...The first few years it was very much a small group of women camping out and ( I'm a few years older than her and was young and a bit scared when I first went on protest rally there ). It was not really a place you just could visit unless you were prepared to join and camp out with them, nor was it really much on the radar or more than a niche group of women protesters until it had been established about a year .
.. Greenham amassed traction when the newspapers got hold of it , and of course vilified the women as being unsavoury/, lesbians /hippies /bad mothers etc . The first big CND rallies started around 1983 /4/ and that's when there were mass protests. I went on a couple and some were a bit scary but also quite well organised . ( They even organised dedicated car parking! ) ...Apparently, Sally met Tim early 1980s according to the MN timeline . So I think if she did go , it would have been to some of the organised perimeter marches, that I went on ( rather than a mass invasions of the site which actually happened rarely) .. rather than the tough women's camps she would wish us to believe.. Of course I have no proof either way. But given that she seems to see herself as a person breaking out of her chains after she met ' eco - warrior' Moth however it seems quite unlikely, but of course does fit in with her narrative of ' the outsider' ..

@PistachioTiramisuLimoncello

i'm invested because I have read the book and I've walked around a quarter of path in stages so far and plan to finish.

I'm also intrigued by people who can literally make a fortune out of a pack of lies. The brass neck of it.

Also in the town I live I know a lady who believed them and found Moths story inspirational in the face of her own declining health (same condition). I hadn't seen her for years but I bumped into her and her husband outside a shop last year and they were telling me they were going hiking to try to stall her decline.

I don't know them well enough to know what has happened since then and I don't want to pry but the idea that they put so much store into this fabricated story absolutely enrages me.

I'm bemused by anyone posting on the 'who Myleene's ex cheated with' thread but there we go!

Another (hopefully new) inconsistency for the list @AldoGordo ?
In this picture that has been posted before and is supposed to show SW on the SWCP (don't know the original source) there is a frying pan hanging on her backpack - a regular kitchen style pan.

But in the TSP packing scene she writes:
A self-inflating mat, the tiny gas stove, a gas canister, a stainless-steel pan with a handle that folded over to clip the lid shut.

That is clearly a VERY different pan to the one shown in the picture - the book version is one you'd take on a long hike, and the picture version looks more suited for a weekend trip.
Which confirms the idea they are passing off their holiday pictures as evidence for an episode of homelessness.

I'm also sceptical about the self-inflating mat - I used to own one and it was one of the most unneccessarily weighty and bulky camping items ever, taking up half of the packing space. What with them being so conscious of lightweight packing, I call BS.

I disagree and I think you are missing the point. I am coming at this with common sense and a belief that truth matters. An agent will work closely with an author, especially a new one, on editing their manuscript. Even Penguin has an article on its website that quotes an agent saying this:

“I think the situation can vary as to whether the author is a debut or an established author with an editor in place,” Felicity says. “If the former I tend to do a number of rounds of edits with the writer until I am very happy with the book. These edits will cover plot, pacing, character all the way through to sentence structure or spelling errors I pick up."

https://www.penguin.co.uk/about/company-articles/what-is-a-literary-agent

With such closeness to the plot and potential twisting of the truth, they should therefore have an ability to raise questions about the "true" story, especially if it sounds too good to be true from a publishing perspective, not merely change the facts to fit a compelling plot. If they do, they are complicit. If that's "just publishing" then there's a serious problem. No one needs to be a lawyer or journalist to pick up on significant discrepancies, especially of the kind and quantity in TSP. You may disagree, and thats fine.

A propos of nothing in particular, I wanted to mention that it was decided a while ago that it's not a good idea to engage with drive-by scolders.

Growing up as the daughter of a tenant farmer on a large country estate

is untrue and thus makes me doubt the veracity of her Mum and Dad going all Thomas Hardy on her thus

When my parents tried to make a match between me and a farm owner’s son

Im te toed to respond ‘With Moth, obviously!’ but will refrain.

@Laska2Meryls — I tend to imagine that, under the spell of Tim, and as an incredibly sheltered teenager who, until they went camping in the Highlands, had never spent a night away from her parents, and who had been brought up with such strict ideas of good behaviour that she was shocked at having the nerve to walk through a remote campsite in her bra because her shoulders were bleeding from a borrowed rucksack, because it’s ’not nice’ to have anything other than your arms out in public, they probably went to a couple of marches or sit-ins, and that was enough for her to feel completely committed to what she saw as Moth’s free-spirited politics.

@Hyenana

Great name for a band 'The Drive-by Scolders'.

I also like 'Embellished Bollox'
(can't remember who gave us that gem!)

I imagine it was more ‘Why are you so hung up on that scruffy weirdo with the plaits and his knees out through his jeans and not a nice, respectable young man like X, with 400 acres coming to him?’

Rather than something out of Fiddler on the Roof.😀

Books can be fiction

Of course, @PistachioTiramisuLimoncello. And when they are they are sold as such. This was sold as non-fiction.

Agree re Greenham. I have a close friend who spent a LOT of time at the Peace Camp in the 80s. She is very positive about it but it certainly seems to have been a challenging and at times dangerous environment and I think SalRays involvement may have been rather more limited, ie the odd protest rather than extended time there.

I'm not suggesting that she's making up her 'Greenham protest 'credentials ,

I don't know why not, most of the rest of her tales are one by one being proven to be fiction!

Totally agree. It's only when it comes to publication that veracity matters. Agents don't publish.

I think it's far more likely she saw it on the news, and "supported" from afar.

An agent will work closely with an author, especially a new one, on editing their manuscript.

This is a very recent development and it's still not necessarily the case that agents do this. They do it if necessary to make the book easier to sell to a publisher; if they can sell it without editorial input, they do so.

Can't claim to have come up with the DBS phrase, I think that might have been @DisappointedReader ?
But there's been enough of them to form a band by now 😁