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.

The thing is though, that she had no idea that TSP would be anything like the money spinner it became. It looks as though Sal just sat back and waited for the money to roll in, whereas most authors have a day job, and surely she needed to start earning as Tim couldn't possibly be expected to work in his condition? And if TSP had bombed they would still have been in the same position as they started!

I agree…. But then they might have grounds to sue her if that’s not true.
Incidentally, if it did turn out to be a cobbled together group effort, could she lose that prize?

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 think it is worth setting out that in SalRay's defensive rebuttal - one of the people to contact was her agent.

The agents still have her listed to book, from them, on their website.

They have shown solidarity by not saying anything since the deception was exposed. They chose not to respond to Chloe. They have not commiserated with the reading public, or filmgoers.

They have maintained a deafening silence.

The Christopher Bland one? I suppose she could argue that ‘Raynor Winn’ as a collective was a first-time author.

But I agree with PPs that this is definitely a one-woman job.

The notes of self-righteous self-pity, nature-loving underdogs against the world, and the particular quirks of her style just keep repeating — and they’re already recognisably there in the extract from HNTDDD.

And I genuinely think the clunkiness of the writing and the banality of a lot of the thinking is part of its appeal, for readers who don’t want to be impressed by someone extraordinary doing something physically well-nigh impossible. If you don’t want a Patrick Leigh Fermor or a Dervla Murphy or a Wilfred Thesiger or Cheryl Strayed, you might be more comfortable with ‘utterly ordinary person forced into walking by circumstances”.

Yes, I think so too.

With no references at all (except bad ones) it seems like she didn’t bother to apply for any for that reason. She might have considered crowd funding on social media and spun the same story from TSP to garner sympathy and handouts …. But that would have attracted attention. She claims that she never set out to write a book for anyone other than Moth but was persuaded to do so by their daughter. If Penguin had rejected it, who knows what she’d have done. She might have sought work where she could steal again.

Wonder whether Graham Maw Christie will be shifting Raynor Winn from Nature Writing/Memoirs to True Crime!

True crime books feed our curiosity with the morbid. They often blend investigative journalism, psychology, and gripping storytelling to reconstruct crimes, explore the minds of criminals, and examine the impact on victims and wider society.

Eligibility criteria for the £10,000 Christopher Bland Prize for Literature:

• The Prize is open to writers aged 50 or over at the time of publication, for their first published work of fiction or non-fiction. Proof of date of birth will be requested at the point of judging.
• The writer must not have had published by a trade publisher, or self-published, a book of any kind or under any other name prior to the publication of the work entered into the Prize. This includes collections of poetry or short fiction, or academic non-fiction

Well she most certainly was not eligible for the Christopher Bland prize.

“a book based house raffle”
The organisers of that prize really should be investigating this. She probably won that prize out of pity, not merit and the merit should and needs to be given to an author who deserves it.

I raised this earlier. If all it takes to be a 'first book' is to change your name - well, count me in! I'm over 50, if I do a quick name change and sub my next book I ought to be in with a shout. I'll discount the thirty previously-published books as they obviously aren't written by me, look, I have a completely different name!

It was, iirc, a £10,000 prize. And I suspect all she had to do was sign something to certify that TSP was her first book. If I'm in with a shout at ten grand I'll sign anything you like!

But her agent would have sent the MS out to several editors at one go. If PRH hadn't bought it, it's perfectly possible someone else would have. SW doesn't say there was an auction (ie multiple publishers all wanting to publish it), but then she wouldn't -- it would risk making her look successful or sought-after, or like something other than the eternal bumbling, steadfast underdog image she's so stuck on. There may have been several publishers interested.

That scene in TWS where she goes in to meet the PRH team always irritates me wildly.

Everything from the 'country mouse pining for wild winds and nature on the Strand' pose to continual references to the looks and elegance of 'the literary agent' (why not 'MY' literary agent? And why not use her name?) and the editor, to focus on 'the glass and steel building', the glass door, the 'stale office air'.

I mean, what would she have preferred, for Penguin to have its headquarters in a daub-and-wattle hut on Dartmoor?

I can absolutely understand her being slightly nervous (you don't meet a commissioning editor who wants to buy your book every day, and she was off her usual terrain), but she is simply misrepresenting the situation by pretending this is like some kind of job interview or viva that she may yet fail:

If I blew the meeting, as I expected to, and Penguin decided they didn’t want to publish my book, then what would I have lost?

If you and your agent are at the point of meeting an editor, there's nothing to blow! They want to publish your book! They're not auditioning you against a bunch of other writers or giving you marks out of ten like a Strictly judge! And her agent would have told her this.

But she's addicted to representing herself as the poor little underdog, so she glumwashes even the triumphant moment of selling her first book by focusing on everyone else being small and elegant, by remembering the courtroom on the day they lost their house, and all the books they apparently lost in the eviction, and on the fact that, according to her, the first thing her future editor says to her is 'We need to change that title'.

Similarly, she undercuts the joy of getting her first copies of TSP by waiting to open the box until after a struggling TW arrives home full of woe about his studies and a 'huge weight' apparently pushing down on his neck.

(And then she does exactly the same thing with TW getting his degree results, where he is apparently unaware of the mechanism by which he gets his results, and, despite apparently being in touch with his classmates (if his phone keeps buzzing with texts from his classmates celebrating their results, what was stopping him asking them how they'd found out?), just hanging about thinking he's failed, and then taking a phonecall from his tutor:

He turned the phone on to speaker, pale and still. Years of work waiting for an outcome.

Which again is bollocks. Even if his degree had final exams, he will have known exactly how he was doing all along via continual assessment, projectwork, tutor feedback etc. No one does 'years of work waiting for an outcome' with absolutely no idea whether they will pass or fail.)

But clearly it would have been against the plucky underdog brand for her simply to be excited and happy her book was being published, or for TW to be reasonably confident he'd passed his degree, or even to ask his classmates how they found out their results.

I still think she had no way of knowing how successful TSP would be. It might have gone the way of so many memoirs or 'my life outdoors' books and sold a fair amount to the fans of such things, but it's still not enough to give up the day job if you want a steady income. She was pegging A LOT on the book going mega.

I fully agree about her faux naivety though. And repeated use of the words 'literary agent' always make me cringe. It's just an agent. Or use their name. We're not going to suddenly think you mean your theatrical agent, Sal.

He turned the phone on to speaker, pale and still. Years of work waiting for an outcome.

It's such nonsense, isn't it, @FishwivesSalute ? I was at university a very long time ago when the results were posted on your tutor's door, well they were at my place anyway. I was the other side of the country by then and had arranged with a friend to check them out when he got his, I then rang him. We ALL knew exactly how it would be done and when and were very invested as it was down to Finals and 2 long essays that we didn't have results for.

(Looking back it was a slightly mad way of going about it but we all managed to find out somehow!)

I mean, what would she have preferred, for Penguin to have its headquarters in a daub-and-wattle hut on Dartmoor?

😄

Just catching up on some older posts as have been away from my desk -- it's actually interesting to think about whether TSP would have had a much more ordinary trajectory for a first book by an unknown, if PRH and the other big publishing houses had passed on it, and it had come out with a small independent with a tiny publicity budget, less distribution capacity and perhaps without the resources for Angela Harding's cover art.

I mean, it might absolutely have become a pure word of mouth success (it's certainly happened before with 'small' books published by indies -- just thinking of Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, published by Galley Beggar. which has a total staff of two, because it's in front of me on my bookshelf), but I do think that part of its success was the fact that it was so well publicised, purely so that it was on the radar of people who aren't habitual readers. It was everywhere, which is reassuring to non-readers that they're not about to embark on a difficult or challenging read, or to step out of their comfort zone in any way.

Oh, she didn't, but then I assume they had financial resources she doesn't mention anywhere, they weren't just living on Moth's student loan.

I think it's perfectly possible she did have various casual jobs, too, just as I'm sure she had other jobs during the period at 'Polly's' in TSP, but chose to omit them because a Child of Nature may bag fleeces, but she does not shelf stack in Asda, or answer phones in a call centre.

Thank you for sharing these invaluable insights into the publishing world @Vroomfondleswaistcoat and @FishwivesSalute
You’re absolutely spot on as always with your analysis of these moments in the book.
There’s a certain irony about not mistaking a literary agent for a theatrical agent though. Maybe it’s a sort of Freudian slip, the sort of thing one might keep reaffirming if one were inventing a version of themselves on paper.

If that were true, I’m sure some of those employers or colleagues might have come forward. I’m pretty sure she wanted to hide out and keep her head down during the period in Polruan, because of her secrets.

It's likely that they actually had cash squirrelled away for a rainy day & were never penniless not to mention having support from friends & family. The were well off enough to take a walking holiday in Iceland when ostensibly they had no income except benefits for years.

Although I can entirely imagine SW getting great misery mileage out of the grey office-worker sheepfulness and stale air of working in a call centre, staring out through the windows at a glimpse of horizon, or wistfully glimpsing birds and clouds while she is scolded by her jobsworth supervisor for not selling enough double-glazing or repeatedly hanging up on customer complaints or whatever.

And while everyone else is in the canteen at lunch, SW is too Shy Child of Nature to bear with their cheery gallows humour about the customer who issued death threats because they wouldn't refund him for a futon, and instead dashes out to the grounds and finds a tree to stare up into, imagining herself free and back on the path...

This is what I suspect too, that they actually had money hidden away.

All authors I know that aren't financially supported by a husband or partner or parent have a day job. Because being published is a rocky affair, royalties can be very variable too. Also, and I don't know about PRH, but they are generally paid six monthly. My publisher is a rare case who pays monthly, which helps with budgeting enormously (although my language when doing my tax return is a thing of wonder). So they would have had to live on an advance (which, being a first book, will probably not have been large), and then earn out that advance before seeing any more money. So they could have lived that first year after TSP's publication on as little as £15,000. Obviously after that the earnings will have gone up but - what were they living on in the meantime?

Reading back through passages in TWS for the first time since the truth came out, I am sickened by the outright lies. It’s no bloody wonder that Bill Cole was so shocked and felt gaslit.

@FishwivesSalute I mean, what would she have preferred, for Penguin to have its headquarters in a daub-and-wattle hut on Dartmoor? 😂
I've gone on a hunt for wattle and daub on Dartmoor - as one does when there are massively more important things to do - and I found that there are 'potato caves' on Dartmoor. This example might be another possible place for a meeting. It says there's lot of headroom. This website is rich in possibilities for other options.

https://dartefacts.co.uk/dartefact/combeshead-farm-potato-cave/

I'm not imagining her doing anything where she'd come into much contact with anyone else, but she might have been doing something casual, cash-in-hand and seasonal, like cleaning holiday lets somewhere other than Polruan.

That's a brilliant website. I am definitely not procrastinating.

(I kind of want a potato cave of my own now. I could start a small publishing house in it if it has enough headroom.)

Gosh, she really missed a trick there! That experience would have slotted right in to her existing format. She could have expressed her disdain for the other workers too and made some bitchy judgements based on class and intellect. Throw in some reverse snobbery as well to befuddle the reader even more.