Thread 16: 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 14 Observer items currently available on their online 'The real Salt Path' page: The real Salt Path | The Observer

More from The Observer:
‘Hope is extinguished’: CBD patients respond to Salt Path...
The real Salt Path | The Observer (The Slow Newscast)
I will link to two more Observer videos in the first post of this thread.

The Observer YouTube Channel: The Observer UK - YouTube

Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement: Raynor Winn

Thread One ^www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/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: 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: 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?

Thread 14: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5388981-thread-14-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 get the background from at least some of the Observer items above before posting. There are currently a number of 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. Remember, even Hollywood rabbits attract the odd flea. 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 fifteen 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.

Yes, it really is Thread 16.

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

She didn't leave review, just the single star.

Morning all. I hope you're well today. A dawn start here thanks to the birds pecking noisily at the putty around the bedroom window. Another sign that Autumn is here early this year. Just doing some catching up.

I think there were 2 FB posts by the son. The first in July before they set off from Minehead when Moth was recovering from the Angels experiebce in Glastonbury at Jan's house nr Yeovil. He went down to Newquay for some body boarding with his son. The second FB post was on 17 Sept and involved a lift to Bristol.

There is no actual review just a star rating

Ahh, that makes sense. Why Bristol?
Thanks for posting the Jennifer Bridge article. Sums up exactly how I feel too and how I fell for the "normal people overcoming bad things" narrative. If they had shown any remorse, explanation or made attempts to make good, I'd probably still give them the benefit. Just this radio silence...makes me even crosser and question absolutely everything!

Why Bristol? I will defer to somebody else on this thread on that one.

That was going to be my question — thanks, @WhoDaresWinns.

TW's sister Janette lives (or did at the time of TSP) in Bristol. My suspicion is she is the friend called Jan from Yeovil, and thus where their van was actually kept.

Absolutely. But honesty is a moral category. Not one relevant to advertising, an industry whose job involves selling things they don’t need to the public, whether that’s fast food, fridges, skincare, or ‘feelgood’ books.

A book can absolutely be honest or dishonest, but that’s on the author — advertising/marketing surrounding that book is aimed at making someone pick up that book from a table in a bookshop rather than the other books adjacent to it. SW signed a contract to say TSP was what really happened, so that’s what marketing went with. They weren’t looking for proof or problems, any more than skincare advertising worries about the 20% of users whose rosacea wasn’t improved by RandomCream.

Would TSP have sold equally well if SW had made no such claims about blamelessness for losing their home? If she’d been frank about narrowly escaping criminal charges? I think it might. If TW’s illness had been presented as ‘some worrying symptoms not yet diagnosed’? Probably not. Not because I think the actual book would be substantially changed by either, but because it would have been far less marketable, and may not have been picked up so soon or at all.

Jenn Ashworth’s The Parallel Path (novelist walks Coast to Coast path after Covid to get away from caring responsibilities, with a dying artist friend writing to her about his own dying at every stop, while her own physical symptoms turn out to be something serious) is a much more ‘honest’ book, in the sense of being a thoughtful, often challenging and uncomfortable read, where the protagonist doesn’t present herself as in any way admirable, doesn’t finish the walk, and doesn’t give the reader any neat resolution. It’s excellent, by a critically-acclaimed novelist, and was respectfully reviewed.

But I had only vaguely heard of it before someone recommended it on a previous thread, despite being a wide reader who routinely reads the broadsheet book review pages, the LRB/ TLS, browses in bookshops, keeps up with new releases etc. It didn’t have a ‘hook’, it isn’t ’feelgood’, the cover is unmemorable. It’s a difficult sell.

Welcome back. I recognise the name and remember your posts, thank you.

As the OP of this series of threads I think that, as well as posters being unable to name change during a thread, they should be unable to name change during a series of threads like this. It would allow for better continuity and cut down on duplicitous and disingenuous posters. As I always say in some way in my OPs, there are those posters who pop up from time to time to labour the same tired agenda, to defend their own interests, seek to derail and to take us on a distracting detour. We can waste pages of a thread and our time repeatedly responding to one poster, quoting and @'ing them, often on issues we have covered before in over 15,000 posts. On one occasion we worked out the percentage one poster had taken up of a thread and it was high.

I do understand that some genuine posters have chosen to name change between threads, that is their right and is often for very good reasons. I've been grateful to the ones however who have felt able to either give us the hint in an early post about who they used to be or PM'd me. It is very easy to remember our own previous names by looking at past threads.

I have chosen to keep the same name for sixteen threads for continuity and so that everyone knows they are communicating with the same person. I find it is better to actually 'do what it says on the tin' in life and on here.

Thank you and agreed! FWIW I only changed my name for fun, having not known it was possible, then forgot because it would only come into effect in future threads. But I changed it to resemble the form of my former name so as to hopefully remain recognisable.

You did indeed and you subtly let us know, thank you @SimoArmo

As you say, in TSP it was "Jan from Yeovil", so an example of name and location changed to protect "Jan's" privacy - that's obviously perfectly OK and doesn't invalidate the non-fiction category.
But the homeless couple actually start their epic walk in Taunton (it's alluded to by RW in the text) as Jan drops them off there in *her little van (i.e. Jan's) in the pouring rain. The walkers don't know where to board the Minehead bus, don't know on arrival in Minehead where the SWCP starts. So they walk down the Avenue there, past OAP's scoffing cream teas! Oh - I've forgotten the loud American couple also on the bus, who are also walking the SWCP but can afford "luggage transfer" and to stay at B&Bs. Pity poor us who can only afford pot noodles/fudge for sustenance and a flimsy tent for shelter.
IMHO it's 90% fictionalised, their predicament highly exaggerated, to extract maximum reader sympathy.
*Were there 2 little vans or just one?

I think this early post may have been missed if anyone would like to take a look and comment?

Isn't that what the Advertising Standards Authority is all about? Making false claims via advertising is a pretty serious matter these days.

I completely agree with you. I think the only reason we are having this 16 threads worth of conversation is because this book is being touted as 'unflinchingly honest', and the amount of honesty is in question. And the areas in which the dishonesty are most manifest are quantifiable - in that the house was not lost through the Walker's trusting nature, and that Tim's illness was not a death sentence. It's not the walk part of the book that's being called into question, it's the USPs. Because when you go into those in detail, the book stops being a searing expose of how the homeless are treated and an investigation into extensive exercise as therapy, it becomes the story of a rather dull walk.

Knowing SW, Julie probably works for the council.

😂
I had wondered about that myself!
FWIW I’ve looked at some of the counselling registers but not found any obvious matches yet.

The core principle of the Advertising Code is that advertising has a responsibility to be "legal, decent, honest and truthful" - I'd argue that honesty is policed more thoroughly in advertising than it is in memoir writing...

😀

Its perfectly possible, as she describes her somewhere else as a fearless campaigner for the underprivileged, and as SW appears to think that what counsellors do is ask endless questions, and congratulates herself on never having gone to therapy, I’d be surprised if she knew the first thing about what might go on in a therapy room.

Publishers’ marketing and publicity can only work with what they’re given, though. If what they get is a synopsis, that it’s non-fiction, and the assurance usual with memoirs that it’s substantially true (and it’s often is), it’s not their job to do a Chloe H undercover reportage deep dive— bear in mind they often haven’t even read the book they’re blurbing!

For all they know Moth was staggering along trailing a portable IV drip, and the Winns lost their house because they spent all their money on a hedgehog rescue. They won’t have been consciously contravening the Advertising Code. (I don’t suppose anyone put an ‘unflinchingly honest’ type tagline on Boris Johnson’s memoir…)

I imagine they will need to rethink a lot of things if they reissue it, but at the moment their legal position is that our author has acknowledged that the book does not pretend to account for her entire past, and refuted the allegations that ‘Moth’s’ illness was faked…

Walter J. C. Murray | Copsford | Little Toller | Slightly Foxed shop

This made me smile - I thought it must be the French property. Instead it is recommending the nature writing of someone who lived in a derelict property!

I was BlueHorses on the last thread, and I've been on, I think, the vast majority of the previous threads. I'm not going to be varying my usual policy of approximately weekly namechanges. I post on a wide variety of threads on here and find this a safer and easier practice than only name-changing for threads on sensitive or identifying material. I am not a troll, nor am I a duplicitous or disingenuous poster with a covert or overt pro-Walkers agenda.

I don't think TSP is a case for the Advertising Standards Authority, either. Much more elaborately falsified fake memoirs haven't substantially changed the publishing industry in the past, and I'd be surprised if this one did.

This Publisher's Weekly article, sparked off by the lawsuits brought against Doubleday for James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, contains an account of a 1991 court case brought against the publishers of an encyclopedia of mushrooms by a pair of readers who used it to identify the mushrooms they had foraged and were poisoned. A California court found against the plaintiffs, and said the publishers had no duty to investigate the accuracy of the book's contents.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/soapbox/article/11098-a-million-little-lawsuits.html#:~:text=So%20far%2C%20the%20suits%20related,misrepresentation%20and%20deceptive%20business%20practices.

US law thinks 'free expression' prevails, even when the publication in question caused actual harm to a reader.

Interestingly, though, it's apparently more complicated when it comes to advertising, including book jackets and press material etc.

(I know this is US law, rather than UK law, but as far as I'm aware, John Murray, the UK publisher of A Million Little Pieces, didn't even pay out on the terms Doubleday did in the US...)

Returning from the One stop, I found a family of council-house-types had taken over my home. The Judge wouldn't believe that the house had been in my family since my ancestor, King Roger the Ready's mistress, was gifted it. Naturally, I decided to walk round all 130 roundabouts in Milton Keynes, finishing in Bedfordshire. I ate discarded chips and rats that I killed. In Luton, a wise Pitbull told me that 'though you are old you are yet young'. At the end my bunions were healed.

I am writing a blisteringly true account of my walk for Dodo Books. Send me £200 with your suggestion for a title and if I choose yours, you'll win my house, with servants in situ.

6 weeks on from CH's Observer exposé what would I like to see, bearing in mind nothing supplementary is imo likely to alter the trajectory of the original article unless of course somebody can produce evidence of a CBD diagnosis in 2013 as described in TSP:

• statement from Polly verifying the accuracy of events described in TSP.

• statement from Dave & Julie attesting to the accuracy of events described in TSP as happening in July 2014.

• statement from Anna of Polruan confirming the fact that she first met Raymoth in Sept 2014 and agreed to let them rent their flat in West St, Polruan some few weeks later.

• statement from their neorogolist as to why he still believes TW is suffering from CBD some 18 years after first symptoms observed, despite the fact that this appears to counter all other confirmed cases with patients suffering from CBD.

Do I think any or all of the above will be willing to go on the record to verify the true course of events?

Call me cynical, but I suspect the answer is no. Self interest trumps absolute truth. Hope I'm proved wrong.

Of course, if everything described in TSP is honest and accurate, then surely individuals depicted in TSP would be happy to interact with the media and confirm the veracity of events.

Silence speaks volumes imo.