Thread 18: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

Hello all. I've simplified the opening post as I don't think we need to keep reposting all the links, timelines and so on at this stage of proceedings.

The Observer's original exposé: The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...
First thread: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film? | Mumsnet
Links to threads 2-16, the other 20 Observer articles and videos to date, Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement, our timeline and sources can all be accessed in the OP and first few posts of Thread 17: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5403285-thread-17-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 are welcome. It would be helpful to get the background from at least some of the Observer exposé items before posting.
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 drive-by scolders 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 17 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.

Now three months in, if these threads could wear slogan t-shirts they would be Mark Twain's often misquoted 'The report of my death was an exaggeration'. Applications in writing from correspondents seeking supply parcels of fudge and cider will be tolerated.

Here we are again
Disappointed as can be
All good pals and jolly good company
Strolling round the path
Happy on a spree
All good pals and jolly good company

Never mind the weather, never mind the rain
Now that we're together, whoops we go again!
Whoops, we go again
La-di-da-di-da, la-di-da-di-dee
All good pals and jolly good company

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

She does give the appearance of being a “writer”, as long as you don’t question in depth (when she was asked which books influenced her/she was reading, she barely named one well-known book) which is exactly what manipulators and con artists do. She does enough to create a veneer but there’s no real depth.

If you don’t question anything then you wouldn’t know. If you don’t have your own knowledge base, you wouldn’t know. Her talent is aping others.

I wonder if book #4 will ever be published?

Yet they supposedly had a library in the house they had to leave behind. She might be afraid of giving any other writers credit and of people looking deeper at them and finding plagiarism and paraphrasing in her books afterwards. She was happy to mention Paddy Dillon as inspiration and Mark Wellington of 500 mile walkies in her books but they’re too niche for a lot of her readers to recognise similarities and therefore safe. So she thought.

Maybe we need to discuss autofiction

Autofiction: What It Is and What It Isn’t

@LetsBeSensible If you don’t question anything then you wouldn’t know. If you don’t have your own knowledge base, you wouldn’t know.

Yes, this. I have never thought ordinary readers should feel bad about enjoying the books. But, as soon as you look at details more closely and think about the attitude behind events .... well, things don't hold up to any scrutiny.

I feel the author is wholly responsible for what they have written. I think there is responsibility with the professionals, as well, especially for the subsequent books.

I have been very interested in the contributions made, to explore these issues, on this thread.

The only one I would ever read by her would be: On Bitter Pill

Where she would come totally clean about everything - it would be a very large volume ..

I wouldn't put it past her to be considering monetising this as a 'chapter' and spinning more bullshit.

I think she'll be desperately wanting to put the narrative back in her favour.

You are absolutely right in her case. But both @Uricon and I were imagining books that were about delulu memoir writers who think the truth will never catch up with them. Sadly, there seem to be a few of them around.

Not Sal specifically. Because this does happen and it's how writers can get pushed into producing books that aren't as truthful as the public imagine. I have no doubt at all that Sal will be hunting around for someone else to blame but, in her case, the absolute facts of her embezzlement, attempt to cover it all up by borrowing to repay and losing her house as a result and Moth's continued existence despite being told not to plan for a long gone Christmas will forever stand as contradiction to any defence she comes up with.

I completely understand that but imagine her promoting the next book ....?

She has proved to be particularly adept at publicity, I noticed. Teasing further projects .... giving an audience a 'and I can now reveal', etc.....

Doubtless SW is still sticking to her official rebuttal statement and claiming that the encounter with the Parsons in Aug 2015 at the FAC doesn't disprove that they did the walk as described in TSP in 2013/4.

That is why it's so critical that D&J come forward to either corroborate SW's account in TSP or confess that actually they didn't meet them until 2015 or maybe 2016.

Also, IIRC, the other half of the dynamic duo was said to be a literary encyclopedia who never wrnt anywhere without a book in his pocket (albeit supposedly the same book).

Yes, I can imagine many memoirs have some work to make them "flow" better but this is different. I also remember what Louisa May Alcott said about Little Women "what I wrote was the truth but not all of the truth". It was based on her own family (but you could argue stands as pure fiction as it is written)

The founding premise of TSP is at least one total lie, the truth hasn't been used selectively but completely rewritten to give them victim status. There have been autobigraphies and memoirs written by some very wild characters which seem fundamentally more honest that Salray's writing. Maybe if her starting point in the book had been "we made a lot of financial mistakes that hurt not just us but others" she might have got away with it, I don't know, but I don't think her ego and sense of victimhood would ever have allowed her to do that.

I am wary of talking about Penguin Lessons because of possible ongoing enquiries, but a narrative involving an "inspirational teacher" completely falls apart if said teacher is later exposed as an abuser of his pupils, at any point in time.

I’m about half way through Landlines and keep thinking the dialogue with the walkers they pass doesn’t ring true. Often people they meet launch into poetic speeches about the power of walking or nature or the loss of home. Whereas in real life people usually have short chats discussing the weather. Has anyone else found this?

The Amazon review below always makes me chuckle!

Yes. That is an excellent example of @LetsBeSensible If you don’t question anything then you wouldn’t know. If you don’t have your own knowledge base, you wouldn’t know.

The reviewer grew up in Devon and is, admirably, fearless in calling out the inauthenticity. I feel many other people were held back from saying too much by the health issue.

Well, SW cannot write dialogue to save her life, so I think some of the issue of it not ringing true is simply that.

I know what you mean about the LL speeches, but for me they’re no more unbelievable than the ‘Ugh, HOMELESS!’ or ‘Ooh, Mr Armitage, we won’t tell a soul you’re undercover!’ exchanges of TSP, or the frankly incredible discussion about homelessness, rough sleeping and reintegrating into society she and TW supposedly have with a group of homeless men in Truro in TWS. Or Bill Cole weeping with gratitude on his first visit to the cider farm after the Walkers start their healing magic. Or the Big Issue seller who has magically kept a back copy because SW’s article inspired him with its majesty.

I think that with any dialogue written by SW, don’t think ‘Did this actually happen?’ because the answer would seem to virtually always be ‘No, of course not, don’t be silly!’

Think ‘What effect is she going for here?’ How does she want this encounter to makes you feel about our heroes?

I think what you’re noticing on the walk in LL is that she doesn’t know what effect she’s going for in encounters with other walkers.

It can’t be ‘Ugh, you’re HOMELESS?’ or ‘Ooh, Mr Armitage!’ and it can’t be ‘Aren’t you lucky to be able to take all this time off?’ or ‘Nice kit!’ because she clearly doesn’t want to give the impression that the Walkers are what they in fact now are — well-off retirees doing a LD walk for leisure, via GPS, hotels, car collection services, buying new kit online at will etc. It obviously can’t be them staring enviously at other walkers eating large restaurant meals, because they’re almost certainly richer than most other walkers.

Hence people they meet in LL speechify a lot about nature, because she can’t ‘cast’ them as callous homeowners othering the homeless, greedy pigs tucking into big plates of food, jobsworths trying to make them pay for campsites, ferries etc. She can’t give them anything to say about the Walkers.

She’ll still leap at any opportunity to make the Walkers look like victims (the cafe that won’t serve them indoors because they’re not local, SW’s bloody boots), but as this is clearly a walk done to give SW another book, while it’s supposedly done to snatch a deteriorating TW from the jaws of death, she has to up the jeopardy by making Dave and Julie shocked (as in TWS) by TW’s deterioration and gravely concerned about his ability to do the Cape Wrath trail.

Brilliant post @KettleSmocks 👏🏻

At the time of reading I thought why on earth are you wearing ill fitting boots?! She had her explanations of course. I think she didn’t want to hurt Moth’s feelings? But what a hair shirt! What a cross she is always bearing!!

Re: the agents, Graham Maw Christie

Previously, we have wondered about Jennifer Christie - who still has Raynor Winn uppermost on her Linked In.

This time I looked at the founder member - Jane Graham Maw. This is how she started out:

Freelance Ghostwriter
1997 - 2006 9 years
ghost writer of celebrity and misery memoirs

Nail on head @KettleSmocks , brilliant post.

😀

She’s like the murderous albino monk in The Da Vinci Code who self-flagellates and wears a barbed cilice, reciting ‘Pain is good!’

(I also think the long-drawn out boot agony may be another beat borrowed from Cheryl Strayed’s Wild — but in Wild, the stakes are way higher as CS is totally penniless, alone and walking in a remote area, and thinks she just has no choice but to wear the painful boots until a fellow-hiker points out that the company will replace them for free by post. (And in fairness to CS, she took proper advice and tried on lots before buying. Not like SW who doesn’t wear them or break them in ahead of the CW trail, which is just stupid.))

I’m surprised SW didn’t borrow the high jeopardy moment from the Wild prologue where CS’s boot falls off a cliff into inaccessible forest far below when her rucksack topples over onto it on a rest stop, so she’s barefoot, completely alone, in wilderness, and already minus several toenails.😀

Well, quite. I wouldn’t take new shoes on a holiday for a week without breaking them in first, yet SalRay fails to test the most key bit of kit for her trek…

Simon A has boot problems towards the end of Walking Away, they start falling apart, he searches in vain for a cobbler but in the end resorts to glueing them together which works for a bit. I suppose ordering replacements and having them sent to his next stop would create another set of issues as not broken in.

They are unceremoniously abandoned when he goes over to the Scillies and can change to alternative footwear, as he's not really doing much walking there due to the back issue.

Salray's martyrdom seems entirely self inflicted and down to poor preparation. As my old Nan would have said " I suppose it gives her something to moan about" which as we know is a crucial literary device for her.

Maybe we should have a caption competition at this point!

Moth celebrating the news that he and Ray have just been chosen to appear on Celebrity Strictly Come Dancing!

"Moth on hearing Simon Armitage has been mistaken for him"