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.

All authors are a brand - it's one of the things that we are frequently told; once you've got more than a few books out there, you are a brand. So being 'branded' (told/encouraged to write 'more of the same') isn't particular to SW, the success of TSP will have made PRH keen on sliding her down the route of writing 'the same book, only different', and signing her for two more books is just them attempting to consolidate the money making potential of TSP. I can imagine this being quite difficult if, as SW seems to have done, you've used up all your 'tricks' in the first book!

(I'm on an eight book deal. It's the publisher's way of tying you in, and not unusual.)

I understand that. My point was more nuanced but hard to convey. It's that she seems to be solely a brand in the eyes of PRH. Whether that is true or not, that is how it seems to me. Whereas writers like Robert Macfarlane for example are seen as both authentic authors with a level of autonomy as well and brands.

Ah, my fault, I am still so incensed by any mentions of her name that I lose all ability to read nuance and just start chewing the furniture.

I think you are right that PRH 'branded' her, but I think this is because she doesn't have the skill or writing ability to become a general nature writer like RM. She's a one trick pony, and PRH extended that trick as far as they could.

She can’t even read her own work well and I’m at a total loss about why Gigspanner approached her.

Is it at all possible that you’ve re-read the same piece with fresh eyes and picked up comments that didn't register during the first read?

Which decisively ended any discussion on this topic - as was firmly stated:

"Mistakes were Made"

I think it was to secure a wider appeal - more ticket sales - to be able to pay more musicians.

Gigspanner is three blokes. She tours with Gigspanner Big Band which looks like twice as many.

I think the big difference (well, one big difference!) between SW and Robert MacFarlane is that her first published book (if we exclude HNTDDR) was a ‘terrible double whammy that happened to us and how we overcame it via walking’ book and, by definition, a one-off.

When it did unexpectedly well, there was the obvious opportunity for her agent and publisher to try to capitalise on that success, by asking for another book which replicated the same appeal and which told what happened next — all the media forTSP focused on ‘Where are you living now?’ and ‘How is Moth?’ And that’s all the book had as its USP: ‘What happened then?’

SW admits herself that she struggled to write TWS, and I think the book shows that. It’s very bitty and piecemeal, and we know it contains at least two things that were dropped in from completely different timelines, her mother’s death and the Iceland walk, and that the cutesy bit about erecting their tent in the Polruan flat because she couldn’t get used to sleeping indoors, is likely total invention, based on how short their periods on the path actually were and their missing year before TW started his studies. It’s a ‘difficult second album’ sequel that would never have been published had TSP not been a wild success.

LL clearly sets out to rectify the comparative lack of walking in TWS by them doing a walk specifically to give SW something to write about, but under the guise of improving TW’s deteriorating health.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that SW wrote a book about a ‘bad thing that happened to us’, and these are usually, for obvious reasons, one-offs. People go back to their lives afterwards, not seeing themselves as ‘writers’. But the Walkers didn’t have a life, certainly not a working life, to go back to, and SW seems to have always wanted to write, and, given the appetite of her readership for ‘what happened next?’, a one-off book got ‘stretched’, not entirely convincingly, into a ‘brand’ that involves a degenerative disease, spousal devotion, some rather clunky nature writing and walking.

@KettleSmocks - I wanted to follow up your post above by showing how people, who read TSP, really did care about Moth. I tried to share this article before, but it was removed twice, I think because the heading is about health. So I can't put in the link. It is a group of librarians in Maine, USA.

When I copied some of it into here - I then thought: "that can't be right". Look what this American librarian calls Tim, in 2021:

Winn and her husband, Moth Walker, had become important to me.

Having relished Raynor Winn's memoir which details her trek along the 630-mile South West Coast Path in England with her husband Moth in a breathtaking account of how immersion in nature helped restore him to health after a terminals CBD diagnosis, I found myself a few months ago with a suddenly consuming need to know what happened to Moth when his medically projected lifespan had expired. A little searching led me to discover that I'm hardly the only person who has Googled "What happened to Moth?" An early.....review of Winn's follow-up memoir The Wild Silence begins, "Immediately upon finishing Raynor Winn's 2019 memoir, 'The Salt Path,' I went to the computer and called up Google. "What happened to Moth?" I typed. I needed to know; in the course of reading that powerful book, Winn and her husband, Moth Walker, had become important to me." (Nora Curry
Jul 10, 2021)

Maybe it was prophetic?

It's correct. She really does refer to him as Moth Walker. The blog post is dated 21 July 2021 while the oldest snapshot that I can find on the Wayback Machine is dated 20 July 2024 but it definitely refers to Moth Walker long before CH revealed the truth behind TSP.

<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240720133625/camdenpubliclibrary.wixsite.com/booktalkbythesea/post/the-wild-silence-or-what-happened-to-moth" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20240720133625/camdenpubliclibrary.wixsite.com/booktalkbythesea/post/the-wild-silence-or-what-happened-to-moth

I'm sure somewhere we've got an article extract (I think it was from a Saudi magazine?) where she expressly says that she thought he only had a couple of months to live? That kind of contradicts her knowing that he had CBS in an indolent version, doesn't it?

Agreed. It’s incredibly difficult to keep up with all of Walker’s varying statements here there and everywhere. She is basically a liar and a schemer, so everything is always going to be in a state of flux. Nothing can be trusted.

She does seem to go from 'Moth was very ill and the walking cured him' to 'he has a mild condition and I never said he was very ill'. I think it someone lined up all her interviews and graded them from 'not ill' through to 'two months to live' I would think pretty much every single degree was covered.

Now that sounds like a good project for mumsnetters ….

I did think about offering, but I've got this grout to clean...

Absolutely. She’s so full of denial.
The articles and Google searches for “what happened to Moth?” are exactly why they should be honest about it now.

”As I’ve explained many times in my books, we will always be grateful that Moth’s version of CBS is indolent, its slow progression (P15 The Salt Path) has allowed us time to discover how walking helps him. Others aren’t so lucky.”

I know I’ve posted this bit before but I’m posting it again because she is conflicting the message in her books and the conversations they had with real people, where she was writing dialogue for herself in the most histrionic of ways and both were giving literal deadlines for his life in order to escape/excuse responsibility.

If you'd just been given 2 years max to live, then why would you apply for a 3 year degree course? Unless you'd been given the all clear to do so by your neurologist as your condition was so indolent?

Looking more carefully at the librarian who says Moth Walker, had become important to me.

I realised she was quoting an even earlier article from 2 April 2021.

Review: 'The Wild Silence,' by Raynor Winn

Apologies, this is like peeling an onion. (I linked to the Maine librarian's article, twice about a month ago, but the Mumsnet editors removed it, while they looked at it, and never reinstated it.)

I've understood it now. So for four years the family firm was up there:

Raynor Winn (Alice Walker/The Minnesota Star Tribune) = Moth Walker

I don't know how it works but this newspaper had a photo, to go with the article, and the caption attributed it to the usual photographer, the daughter.

The book editor encourages us to:

Read this lovely book. Go to Google and check on Moth. And then go outside and take a walk.

Oh, well spotted. So do we think that the journalist extrapolated 'Moth''s real surname from the surname of their daughter, to whom the photo was credited, and whose identity was known to the journalist, presumably because the newspaper needed to ensure whoever took the photo was correctly credited?

Though that would make more sense if it wasn't just a book review, but an interview with SW, who might have happened to express a wish to use her daughter's photo of her.

Yes, I wouldn't know the normal procedure for The Minnesota Star Tribune to use it - I notice they caption themselves, as well, presumably because they have paid for the right to use it.

As I’ve explained many times in my books, we will always be grateful

Hmm. My view is that gratitude - for Moth's recovery or for anything at all - is in pretty short supply in her books. But nice try at rewriting the script after the fact.

No, SW puts me in mind of the kind of person whose eyes are always sliding sideways to check whether everyone else isn't getting a slightly bigger slice of birthday cake. Always a bit aggrieved, always very aware of their 'underdog' status, will find a way to rejig every encounter in a way that makes the other person more powerful and herself the adorable, vulnerable one.

She finds a way to undercut any moment that risks painting her or the two of them as in any way 'on top'. You notice it particularly in TSW and LL, when they're not quite such obvious underdogs, and she has to work harder to make them seem so, by deliberately undercutting every scene in which they could be seen as powerful or triumphant with a scene that makes them victims. There's a flashback in the middle of the triumphal moment when the PRH editor tells her they want to publish her book to the courtroom where their house was repossessed. When the first copies of TSP arrive in Polruan, TW's symptoms are unusually bad.

It's interesting that the real surname of Walker was known to this journalist years back. I think it's correct to say that Chloe H. said that the key to finding out about the WWs past was to know their real names which she said was provided by the anonymous source.

Re Moth Walker - my guess is that the Minnesota Star Tribune was just printing a press release provided to it by Penguin's American publicists. I somehow doubt that the MST journalist interviewed SW.