Thread 13: 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's original exposé: The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...

The 12 Observer reports currently available online: The real Salt Path | The Observer

Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement: Raynor Winn

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

Threads 2-11: Links all in the OP of Thread 12

Thread 12: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5384574-thread-12-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

New posters joining us in the genuine spirit of our civil discourse welcome. It would be helpful to read at least some of the Observer items above before posting. There are currently 12 interesting items on The Observer website and linked to above.

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 twelve 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 our usual reasonable and respectful fashion is very welcome.

Have the sales or thefts of fudge gone up recently?
Will Simon's head ever turn up?
Has the shed of doubt yet burst at the seams?
Will the old charabanc hold up as a tour bus for our hip new band The Drive-By Scolders?
And finally, how much salt can we possibly cram into a giant pinch?

Keep to the path. No saltiness. May the fudge be with you.

I know it's highly likely that SW wrote HNTDDD. But having lived a hermit like existence on the Llyn peninsula for 20 years the plotline involving City accountants, Indian hoteliers and Eisteddfod mums doesn't exactly seem to match SW's milieu. It's a long way from working as a p-t bookkeeper for a small estate agent in Pwilheli to writing a pacy international thriller!

Maybe she drew on her experience working at the White House hotel for the Indian hotelier angle, her bookkeeping experience to conjure up the world of City accountants and going to county shows for the Eisteddfod angle, but it still seems a fairly leap of imagination for a first time novelist.

Yes I think you are right. SW has dug an enormous hole for herself with her rebuttal statement and its difficult seeing her getting out of it.

Interesting that the price of TSP appears to have been cut by 50% on Amazon!

The Salt Path: The prize-winning, Sunday Times bestseller, now a major film featuring Gillian Anderson : Winn, Raynor: Amazon.co.uk: Books

Additional thoughts about embezzlement etc:
Mainly gleaned from TWS and because someone asked for the Psychology correspondents’ views.

Disclaimer: “other Psychology correspondents are available” 🤣

• In the childhood mentioned above - she develops a defiant side that doesn’t obey rules. Her parents” rules seem arbitrary and unfair to her (there’s a whole host of no go areas in the farm and she goes there anyway)

• She knows she’ll be punished for breaking the rules but it doesn’t stop her doing what she wants. Besides, the punishments often suit her (being sent to her room where she can read). She learns to play the system.

• TimMoth is a rule breaker too - they skive off college to go rock climbing - plus all the eco warrior stuff. Seems she is really attracted to this side of him. (Amongst all the other reasons she’s attracted to him).

• So add this to the hostility she feels for other people (which really seems quite extreme) and the hostility she expects to feel from them (ditto) and you get someone who really isn’t going to feel too strongly about taking money from people. Even more so if that money is going to fuel some project with her idealised Mr TimMoth and their life together.

Well, ‘homeless apart from our French ruin’ and ‘terminal diagnosis, though not exactly as claimed.’ aren’t particularly snappy

@ShrinkWrappedInSeattle so backing up people’s ideas about their exceptionalism?

I wonder what their kids are like.

In terms of nailing down the chronology of TSP, I wonder how much more Chloe H can unearth.

• A lot of the people encountered on the walk are likely to be untraceable (all the Aussies and Americans)
• The mystic at Culbone church was blind so wouldn't have seen them even if somebody can track him down
• can some of the cafe owners remember the dates when Raymoth were supposed to have been there?
• can somebody track down Dave and Julie and get a link to their FB page to see if they were where they are supposed to be in TSP?
• what about the man with the tortoise and members of the cast of the Cambridge G&S society who appeared at the Minack?
• And the elusive Grant? Will he emerge from the woodwork or is he a figment of SW's fertile imagination?

Finding the psychology correspondents' insights very interesting, thank you. I realised that lots of the really weird decisions and reactions in TSP and TWS make sense as the decisions of a scared & defiant little girl. Maybe even part of the attraction of the books is watching an adult lean in fully to what the child in them wants (I know I had the thought several times while reading "yes I've felt that way, but of course you can't act on it because you're a responsible adult...oh, you have?")

One is arty and seems to live a quiet life in an adjacent career. Her name is out there if one cared to dig. It came up for me when I clicked a link posted earlier about an article. And fitted with the career SW let slip to an audience member (who’s a friend of mine) at a q&a she did at a screening of the Salt Path. It’s unclear whether the name SW gives her in her writing is first or middle name. Sorry - being obscure because I don’t think I should be explicit. But my point is the daughter has a career and probably just wants to plough her own furrow. Indeed it’s clear the children had little or no support post 18 from their parents.
Not sure about the son.

Their adult children quite possibly asked not to be in the books, or to be in them only minimally, which I respect. What has always struck me, though, is that SW appears to want them to live out her idea of ‘free spirits’, and to be made uneasy be any indication they’re not that way inclined, as when their daughter ‘appears to have turned into my mum’ and she worries that their son, whom she thinks should be bumming around surfing, is too focused on finding a job and a flat.

There's a bit in LL where they talk about how the son 'drops in to help in the orchard whenever he can' and will be able to take the dog for a month (and the rest..) while they do the ever-lengthening walk, plus will come and pick them up from Fort William if they're nervous about the trains - ie if Covid seems too much of a risk still for public transport. So he seems to give them a fair bit of help in a role reversal sort of way. I can imagine they might be regarded with 'ah, they're off on one of their impractical schemes again, better try to help where I can'. I can see why children of those parents might focus on securing their own houses, professional advancement etc given that they won't be getting any advantage from nepotism, business contacts or the bank of Mum and Dad.

I actually think SW is doing the right thing (by her lights) by staying quiet. I think the only thing she can do now is to shut up, wait a couple of years for this to blow over, change her name (again) and go on to live a background kind of life. I don't think we'll ever get an apology, but continuing to live a high-profile and high-earning lifestyle would be rubbing salt in a lot of wounds, so banking the money and working a croft in the wilds of Scotland out of everyone's way, would be her best bet, if you ask me.

It's a shame because I think her nature writing is good, so maybe she could bring out some books about crofting, to help those who want to get into it. Or fiction. But she'd have to change name again, I think her reputation will precede her otherwise.

Another example of her hypocritical attitudes. She blames her parents for being controlling but seems to be equally insistent about how she thinks her own children should live their lives….

Except for the fact that a book about one of these impractical schemes paid off handsomely, and their children can presumably expect generous inheritances/handouts!

I think it's a bit of Saffy Monsoon syndrome. If you have "child" parents who lurch from disaster to disaster requiring much bailing out, maybe your rebellion is into a more stable form of life, because having seen the alternative, you don't want it. This seems perfectly sensible to me.

Their children seem to have supported their parents more than their parents have supported them tbh. And the whole scandal must be a real headache for them. The daughter’s professional instagram isn’t public. Which is unusual.

True, but they do have to put up with their parents' eccentricities in the meantime. They'll be earning their money!

It does.

I have child parents (not Walker types, but cowed children, frightened of the world, terrified of anything new or strange), and it certainly meant I decided very young that I was not going to live like that.

How old would their children have been when SW was questioned by the police about the theft and ‘vanished’ ? It’s impossible to know how much, or at what point they knew something was going on. I suppose it’s possible they knew nothing until it became clear, after a lot of court proceedings, that the house was likely to be repossessed. Which was clearly a gradual matter, not a sudden shock.

Though god knows how it then feels when one of your parents’ harebrained schemes pays off and they’re suddenly rich beyond their wildest dreams, off an appealing package of omissions and half-truths, with you as a minor character. I feel for them.

I think the eldest would have been at university by then? The younger one around 17?

@Gouache as to how it must feel for the children that their parents have gone from rags to riches…. God only knows when those riches have come about through crime and deception. I would
suspect it must feel extremely difficult, especially if they stand to inherit from their ill gotten gains.

Eldest would have turned 19, youngest would have turned 18.

If my mother had been a thief and a liar and I was only just finding out about it, I would be completely shocked. It’s a huge thing to have happened.

Well, the children will have been aware of some stuff, but who knows what, exactly. And it can be very hard to arrive at the ‘truth’, especially when there are competing narratives.

I found out something about my own parents just this year — nothing criminal, or not exactly, but something from the past that involved them not acting on something, and that has left me reeling. I haven’t felt ready to talk to them about it yet, and I am quite sure that if/when I do, they will dismiss it completely and wonder why I think it’s a big deal. SW presumably has her own narrative of the missing money at the Hemmingses.

Does anyone have a guesstimate as to how much the Walkers might have earned? Perhaps our resident author might know?
we’re always told writing doesn’t make you rich. But TSP has been a phenomenon

I don’t think it’s really possible to guesstimate, and I’ve seen wildly varying sums thrown around. Low millions, I’d imagine. But I have no clue about what kind of money we’re talking for the film rights.