Thread 14: 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 13 Observer items currently available on their online 'The real Salt Path' page: The real Salt Path | The Observer

3 more from The Observer:

‘Hope is extinguished’: CBD patients respond to Salt Path...

The real Salt Path | The Observer (The Slow Newscast)

‘We thought: it can’t be the Salt Path couple – they’d ha...

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?

Thread 13: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5386458-thread-13-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 16 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 thirteen 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.

Are we all becoming Hyperglycaemic from all the fudge?
Have shares in Cadbury's gone up?
Can we remain cheerful in the face of such shameless glumwashing?
Will I need to fill up with much petrol this thread for the drive-by scoldings?
Will our Chloe H get exclusive interviews with the disgruntled peregrine, tortoise and Hollywood rabbits?
What has our Simon A got to say about this, preferably in verse?

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

Yes, spot on. If you are walking you would have extreme detours to make without those ferries. This is a big thing on the south coast - especially out of summer season.

Apropos fictionalising real life and interviews. Edward St Aubyn wrote five great novels based on his early years and young adulthood, only presented as novels and not memoir. He is a wonderful interviewee who can speak to any passage the interviewer chooses. I suspect this is because he has done some serious work on himself.

Has anyone seen salwhatshername speak live at a book festival?

And if walking was cure, why didn't they just walk?

That's the absolute bollocks point I gave up the book. Drivel, fantasy rubbish.

Thanks. Was curious to know if there was a mention of a dog on the ferry. The Parsons photo of it matches up with RW's description of the boat, but there's no dog in the Parsons' pic. Nothing unusual.

Well, there is that strange admission of guilt for not walking the Taw Estuary - taking the bus to W Ho!

But, to the best of my knowledge, never expressing any guilt for anything else?

Tbf, they hadn't realised the cure at that point. That bit is when Moth is struggling and soon after has his pregabalin withdrawals. He's subsequently a new person.

Oh all right .... I hadn't realised that was a 'watershed'. We're getting to know this incredibly well, aren't we? I think you're like me and never actually read it!

The good bit is repurposed Mary McCarthy, though!😀

Some of you may know Mary McCarthy for saying of the memoirs of her political adversary, the playwright/ screenwriter Lilian Hellman, ‘Every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”.’

(A volume of LH’s memoirs about people who’d influenced her included a story later filmed as Julia, about an anti-Nazi activist LH (who was Jewish) had supposedly courageously helped in 1930s Germany. A woman called Muriel Gardener who had close connections to LH’s lawyer (who might have seen her then-unpublished memoir) said LH had misappropriated her life story, that she had never met LH, and later journalistic investigations demonstrated that the funeral home LH said she had gone to to collect Julia’s body did not exist, there was no record of her travelling on the transatlantic ship she said she’d been on, and there was no evidence that ‘Julia’ had ever existed.)

LH sued Mary McCarthy for libel, and it was still going on at the time of LH’s death.

(Just as some context for previous memoir scandals.)

Anna Delvey the NY society scammer seemed quite seriously unwell to me. I don't know the Belle Gibson story but she sounds same. I do think some serious scammers are deluded/ very unwell. I don't put SW in that category though - she seems more of a masker of hidden behaviours, recaster of truths, needs to be seen as blameless - but I'd say all prob borne from low self esteem which itself is not a healthy thing.

@behindahill

'Drivel, fantasy rubbish.'

I was discussing TSP with a friend who hasn't read it and she had no idea about the absurdities of shoplifting, old comments, Simon Armitage, not paying for camping, the almost-mythical tortoise etc. We laughed at them not realising that the tide comes in. She has no interest in walking but will now look out for a copy in a charity shop.

Well, that makes a certain amount of sense to me. Pregabalin is prescribed for a variety of conditions including epilepsy, anxiety and nerve pain, and like all drugs it will have effects other than the desired ones. If endorphins from exercise were helping Tim deal with pain, or he was just in a better patch, then it’s not at all unlikely that when the drug cleared his system he felt livelier and clearer.

I had a university friend years ago when I was a postgrad who was dealing, in her 20s with a chronic, painful condition. No medical treatment helped, and the pain clinic was focused on helping her manage symptoms, with the recognition that apparent solutions only ever worked for so long. Sometimes exercise brought relief. Sometimes she found cold water helpful for pain. My last contact with her was just before she left the UK for a hot, humid climate which I hope helped in a longer term way.

I read it last year, plodded my way through it. Without fudge sadly.

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fbestofthe80s.wordpress.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2010%2F03%2Fflock.jpg%3Fw%3D144&tbnid=kL9bjFWr941oFM&vet=1&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fbestofthe80s.wordpress.com%2F2010%2F03%2F16%2Fthe-flock-of-seagulls-haircut%2F&docid=U3TmBnvzKG7n7M&w=144&h=271&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim%2Fm4%2F2&kgs=1980d8a8e80b8ec9&shem=isst#vhid=kL9bjFWr941oFM&vssid=_F3-caIKTMta5hbIPhKve8AE_52
Moth,is
that you?

😆 Didn't Prince Andrew say immediately after his Newsnight interview that he'd thought it went quite well? 😂

Afternoon, dear rabbits. In the absence of our Fudge Correspondent and to get our strength back up, here we are:

WRT interviews and interviewers talking about books - I've usually found that anyone interviewing me about my books (sadly never been interviewed by an Australian yet) has wanted to find a new 'angle' so as not to produce the same interview as everyone else. So they do like to try to throw in something unusual and I am only too happy to run with it as I LOVE talking about my books and the process of writing them, and what motivates my characters. I actively WANT to give that interviewer something new, as everything different, every alternate angle, gives the whole thing a lift and, often, new publicity.

So I can't really understand why SalRay wouldn't want to riff off some of the more unusual things that happened or enlarge on some of the events. Unless, of course, they didn't actually happen...

I write fiction which does make it slightly easier, but there are elements of my own life in my books which I am happy to talk about. It's shutting me up that's the knack they need...

Well, the film appeared to be newly released in Australia, or about to be -- the interviewer says he's seen it, but that most listeners won't. IMDB says it opened in Australia on May 15th.

I don't know if CH ever gave any dates for when she'd initially contacted SW, her agent/editor etc? Because, from what she says about being advised to go straight to SW with her questions when she started the investigation (was it by her own editor?) it must have predated all the film publicity.

Agreed. Plus it's a sunk cost now - they have presumably paid RW the advance, paid for the cover artwork etc, so they may as well publish it and make what money they can from it - including from 'reading for the controversy' readers like me! (Will be looking out for the earliest second hand copy I can bag). Though I suspect some damage control editing may take place. If you're reading this, editorial dudes, it's Okehampton not Oakhampton, ok?

I think it was reported that the Observer had approached SW to speak with her from around January/ February time so she must have known by the time this podcast was recorded that she was being scrutinized.

The weird thing is that she also shows this 'almost word by word repetitiveness' when talking about how she first saw Tim in the college canteen, dipping a Mars bar into a cup of tea (which I have heard so many times by now I tend to perceive a double entendre in it 🍆🍵) so does that mean that story is also made up, or is she just a horrible public speaker? 🤔

Won’t Ray/Sal rewrite a lot of the new book if it is published next year, knowing that everyone will be scrutinizing it/picking it apart? There’s plenty of time to completely change her story.

The presenter says the film is just about to be released. I'd imagine that this post-dates the letter dated 25 Feb 2025 that Sally has shared. Interesting then that while the letter uses the term CBS instead of CBD, and "extremely indolent" SW makes no attempt in this interview, or any other that I'm aware of, to share the news that things have changed.

Yes. Surely there must be stories and experiences on the walk that didn't make the cut but still worth sharing. Everything I've seen always refers to what has been written already in the 3 books. We never get anything that's outside of what she's written, which is very odd given these books are about her life, not some character who only exists in novels.

I wonder now if the contact from The Observer could have been the prompt for the video consultation with the consultant on 25 February 2025? Possibly not, as the timing would be tight. But I'm not ruling it out completely.