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.

And yet Ros Hemmings claims he quit his gardening job in 2004, although we don't know if by choice or if he was sacked.
We also don't know what he did after that - did he possibly try to set up a renovation and upsell company with his brother in France, and the Village du Dropt project was a first attempt that then went south?

I've often wonder why they apparently never tried to sell that land, even when they desparately needed money and tried to sell the house they were living in.
Did they still think it would gain value?
Does having a property in France give one access to medical insurance there, for treatment that his UK doctors shouldn't know about? Sounds far fetched...

In TSP she writes that they had paying guests, families coming to stay. I can’t remember for how long for though, I’m sorry. In the book and film she portrays herself as having to cancel those bookings.

Thank you, I might be looking carefully at my receipts if a previous paying guest. Also as someone said before embezzlement feels like an unlikely gateway offence but who knows?

Yes. Her mother appears in TWS as an emotionally-absent, late Victorian, highly conventional woman, who is continually telling her daughter not to do things and who hates her son in law — as a cliché. The only thing that individualises her in a tiny way is her friendship during WW2 with a land girl who becomes a lifelong friend. No idea if SW is consciously coding the friend, Glin, as lesbian (cropped hair, men’s jackets, free spirited alternative to the mother’s Victorian upbringing, and Sally’s father stays out of the house while she visits), but other than that, her mother is a Repressive Cliché. It’s clear she’s not interested in her. Her deathbed is an opportunity to reminisce about her childhood on a farm, establish her credentials as attuned to nature, and fill in some space before the publication of TSP, the cider farm, and the Iceland walk.

Interesting. I’d observe Ray also as a ‘emotionally absent, highly conventional woman’ too. She’s actually the embodiment of the lower middle class values she despises, perhaps (?) Despite child of nature stuff. NB: Ealing comedy locals & cliched dialogue. ‘You’re nothing but TRAMPS!’.

@CoolBath I see what you mean but these fantastical claims have clearly been issues for quite a lot of readers as well as writers/walkers like Oscar Burton. Some of the early reviews have noted how incredible the story is to the point of not making sense.

The book came out in March 2018, so 18 months earlier would be September 2016 - I said summer because @GogleddCymru said even 18 months would be short for a first author draft.
I remember the amount of the advance was discussed before - 10,000 maybe? Which would at least nicely top up Tim's student allowance and pay for the Iceland trip in 2017 which some PPs said can not have been cheap.

I agree… interesting thoughts about their holiday business now.. Discrepancies are everywhere, truth is false. What a rabbit hole this has turned out to be!

Her dialogue is awful, although the stuff she presents herself as saying is generally almost as awful and as deeply unlikely as what others say. The one that blew my mind was the conversation she has in TWS with a doctor when her mother has just had a stroke.

‘Your mother’s just had a stroke, a total anterior stroke. It’s severe and still progressing.’

Whereupon SW represents herself as saying

’’Still progressing? But she’s in hospital. Just give her the drugs to stop it. […] What about all the adverts? You know, ‘act FAST’ and save the person. She’s in hospital — how much faster can it get?’

Hardly surprising that the doctor’s expression is ‘between sympathy and exasperation’.

Same for most of the other medical consultations. Medics are clichés with ‘smug, tight lips’ whose offices are ‘emotionless white rooms overlooking car parks’. I mean, I obviously get the power dynamic and horror of being given bad news by an expert who is in good health, but can she really respond to any medical opinion with identikit chippy aggression? She represents herself as telling the consultant at Tim’s CBD diagnosis that he’s ’got it wring’ no less than three times.

Does she actually say these things or just think it makes her look endearing or something?

It does sound ridiculous, hard to imagine even the biggest jerk acting like that in front of customers.
Another funny thing: she describes the man as 'the owner' but if you were to sit in a café and witness such a scene, how would you know that man was the owner and not the manager? But if you're the author you get to decide for yourself who the characters of your fictional tale are. I think our Sal might be giving herself away here by acting like the omnicient narrator instead of someone witnessing a scene without further background knowledge 😁

@CoolBath I think you’ve nailed it with ‘endearing’.

Her nature writing is ok but the rest? Mediocre is generous, IMO. Lots commenting here write better & they’re not trying. It’s sad we’re losing sight of what really good writing looks like. The really good writers I know also seem to have the smallest egos & no capacity for self promotion.

@mycatismyworld

'If he'd stuck to what he's good at ,the mortgage on their cottage would've been paid off in a few years leaving him all the time in the world to tit about curating his image'

I've been thinking that the moral of the story is, apart from not stealing and not telling lies; be happy with what you have, don't be envious of what others have (especially siblings) and live within your means.They seem to have been quite fortunate as a young couple, purchasing a home in Wales, having children and the ability to work. Others were, and are, worse off with fewer choices. As you say, they could have paid off their mortgage, had the income from the holiday barn and could have lived well without all the literary deceit. That's if there is morality present of course. Anyway, this must still be embarrassing for them until it fizzles out.

I am guessing you have a wealth of publishing knowledge - would you have taken this book on if it had landed on your desk? Of course we don't know what first draft looked like but must have been considerably less polished than final book and final book is already bad.

I think this is part of the anti-authority schtick. Miserable mean old doctors think they know it all but they don't and we'll show them, with our badly prepared plan to walk hundreds of miles and our inadequate noodle diet, how you REALLY face up to a terrible incurable condition. There is hope! Rebel! Fight back by embezzling money and stealing fudge!

I brought up the idea he might have started the BSc, found it too complicated and then switched to the HNC which would account for the missing year - I also liked that idea because it chimes with my impression of his personality.
Someone else then brought up the idea of an Access year before the proper start of studies which many people found convincing.
And then another PP said Sally had posted something about 'Mothman BSc' in 2018, which would either show it was the BSc or she kept a good eye on the narrative.
But since he's never had to work since then he never had to show his qualifications, so who knows.

I’m not in publishing, and I know very little about non-fiction, more about literary fiction, though not on the editorial side.

But yes, I can see why an agent took it on, and an editor bought it and thought it might sell.

Nothing to do with the writing quality (I think the homespun ‘humble everywoman’ level of SW’s prose might actually be part of the appeal), but a strong hook, and a fresh take on the ‘nature brings a kind of redemption from heartache’ story that had had a bit of a vogue in preceding years, the ‘ordinary person in an extraordinary situation’ thing, with a bit of ‘reporting from the frontline of an ongoing social issue’ on homelessness.

ETA that I imagine her PRH editor (and possibly her agent) thought she would probably be a ‘one and done’ author. She had this one story and wrote it up. But when it sold well, and events were full of people asking ‘What happened next? Is Moth still alive?’, it suggested there was an appetite for more books to follow up. That’s where we appear to get the ‘Moth must be taken out on book-worthy LD trails beyond his current capabilities’ narrative after the ‘retreat into an uncomplicated green life’ in TWS doesn’t ‘work’.

" The only moments in our lives that count for anything are those when we do the right thing, when we don't have to look down at the table but can raise our heads and look each other in the eye. Nothing else matters".
Upthread Fandangoe recommended Alexei Navelny's memoir to me (thank you!)This is a quote from his book on Amazon.
It is so utterly apt for RW. No amount of perceived success can ever ever replace a clear conscious.

Of the moral is, crime pays (or a very good idea/making most of a very difficult situation pays), to the tune of 3-4 million. You’ll need a very (?) thick skin though…

She certainly claims he graduated with a BSc in 2018, shortly after TSP was published (in TWS). But she also represents him as convinced he’s failed his finals because his phone keeps buzzing with messages from his classmates congratulating one another on their results, and he’s worried because his ‘letter didn’t arrive’.

In 2018 pretty much no letters ever went out to students’ home addresses, and either way, you’d think it would occur to Moth to text a classmate on what was almost certainly a class WhatsApp and ask how they knew their results. (Apparently everyone but Moth showed up in person to get them.) I think that’s pure ham.

Plus it sets up the idea that he’s not now going to do a teaching qualification in the same conversation. He says he can’t work on screens and ‘thus CBD thing has gone too far now.’

Whilst I agree I can see him being the only one not to turn up. It adds to the mystique.

Just popping by (hrtft yet) to say that the publishers must have known her real name. You are paid directly into your bank account and so they need to know your real legal name (or, at least, the legal name the bank account is held under) in order to pay your royalties.

So PRH must have known that 'Raynor Winn' wasn't her real name. You can't set up a bank account in a pen name so they knew who she was. They didn't check her out, that's all. Unless royalties went into Moth's account? Just in case? But then I'm not sure publishers can even pay you into someone else's account, even if you ask them to - HMRC will want to know where the money goes.

Possibly I misunderstood and falsely got the impression she posted something on Insta or FB when it was really just in TWS.
Which would make it far less convincing because when writing a book she would clearly think about narrative consistency and not leave loose ends.
And when the description sounds so unrealistic and also conveniently explains why Tim can unfortunately never work in this job, it does not necessarily convince me he really has that degree (although we know for sure he did study and was good enough to win a gardening competition - or possibly to insert himself into a group of students who were that good.)

I wonder if SalRay (and MothTim, and I still find his change of surname odd) changed by deed poll so they are/were indeed their new, official names. New bank accounts and much else could then be opened in those names.

But wouldn't she have said that instead of that convoluted 'I use both my official name and my nickname and maiden name alternatively' explanation?

I suppose that could have raised questions as to why they'd changed officially, especially MothTim. I still find it utterly bizarre that a spouse goes by their other halfs pen name and can't think of one other instance where that has happened.

I mean, I'm pretty certain it would look really odd if eg JK Rowlings husband changed his name to "Dr Neil Galbraith" after her Strike pen name.