Thread 19: 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 ...

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?

Thread 18: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5422393-thread-18-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. Over four months we have done amazingly well together for 18 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.

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

"I'll fight anyone who says I'll make it to Christmas 2021!"

Do you really mean “appealing” or is that a typo for appalling?

They already are appalling, I thought making them easier to relate to might help!

Are there any particular quotes from that article which stand out? I can’t move past the paywall.

Try this link

RAYNOR WINN relives the incredible coastal walk from The Salt Path | Daily Mail Online

I suppose it’s possible she tried, but given that her comic moments in TSP as published are limited to a few excruciating Simon Armitage gags that limp on far past the ‘momentarily mildly humorous’ stage, maybe she could see herself that it wasn’t her forte? Plus she can’t do dialogue at all, which would limit the Comic, Bumbling Couple potential, I think.

I mean, given that none, or very little, of TSP as published bears any resemblance to RL events insofar as we understand them, but is a tissue of fiction, reinvented timescales, omissions and handwavery, SW may have contemplated lots of different approaches by adding or leaving out different things — fiction (her first love, by the sound of it), comic mishap narrative (TW’s later illness not featuring, and possibly house loss not featuring), a lyrical (or comic) meditation on marriage and midlife, a nature book, a pure ‘walking the SWCP on a budget’ book, with no add-ons) etc.

Presumably it took the realisation that she could retrofit TW’s condition to the walk to make it take the shape it finally took?

RW's webaite has a page about TSP. It seems to be the same as the blurb on Penguin's website, but with a few small differences. "Unflinchingly" isn't there, or the reference to being without money.

I don't think she tried at all. I just think this is the book that ought to have been written, but I don't think she had the skill for. The lack of humour and lack of original spin on descriptions, where everything is described in terms of cliche and well-worn phrasing is the giveaway there. But if she'd taken advice and maybe some writing lessons and given it the spin that I talked about it would have been a better, more honest book and it would still have sold.

I'm quite tempted to write the proposed book myself now. Only I'm on a deadline and haven't got time to do the South West Coast Path. Maybe I'll take the dog through the woods and make the rest up...

Thank you @NaughtyNoodler yes, sadly I read a lot of articles like that. That’s Raynor Winn, not Sally Walker the evil twin.

If Anyone can write that story, you can. Try doing it simultaneously or record it while out walking with your dog! 🙏🏻

That article certainly clearly restates certain things that have been called out now @NaughtyNoodler .

What I found interesting is the byline which is ' BY KAYON RAYNOR -MAILONLINE REPORTER' (Not shouting , trying to reproduce accurately!)

This seems odd because Salray is a published author, this is being represented as written by her, why does someone else get a byline? I'm pretty sure when 'public figures' write something for the Mail it goes out under their names. Strange to me.

The weird thing is that there is actually a Reuters journalist called Kayon Raynor! (1) Instagram

That’s quite amusing, @NaughtyNoodler — I think she should probably have thought a bit more about Hughes’ ‘Thrushes’ before quoting it, because I don’t think she understands it. His thrushes are terrifying, predatory forces of nature who ‘bounce and stab’ and devour without thinking, whereas for TH, even humans at their most self-forgotten in a task cannot be that single-minded (with the possible exception of Mozart).

SW seems to take the poem as an a weirdly self-help-y admonition against human overthinking and procrastination, and thinks that we should all live like the thrushes. ‘Bounce and stab— that’s all it takes.’ She says ‘However, a decade is a long time for humans to ‘bounce and stab’.’ It’s not clear what she means, or thinks she means. Is she suggesting their walk was an animal instinct to get back to nature, that they’ve been trying to recapture ever since?

Though the piece is still implicitly set on the cider farm (they’re living according to the cycles of nature, Moth is pushing barrows of logs around, she’s putting the kettle on the Aga) by the time this piece was published in January 2023, they’d already left.

(Also, in this version, the meet Anna ‘on a beach’, rather than in the less romantic surrounds of benches outside a cafe on the edge of a holiday park. Get your story straight, SW!)

Though the piece is still implicitly set on the cider farm (they’re living according to the cycles of nature, Moth is pushing barrows of logs around, she’s putting the kettle on the Aga) by the time this piece was published in January 2023, they’d already left.

Thanks @WellSurely, that's what I thought too and was trying to fix where they could be when this piece was (or wasn't) written by Salray.

Excellent analysis of how she kind of misses the point of T Hughes poem as well.

Maybe she’s actually covertly advocating for an ‘everyone for himself, it’s fine to lie and steal if it’s to ensure your own survival’ approach.

Saying that she’s really Ted Hughes’ thrush, unthinkingly bent on killing to ensure its own survival, but that this is fine, because nature is all healing and lovely, innit?

Only Hughes’ nature poems definitely don’t think nature is all lovely and healing and a nice, decorative background to moments of self-growth. This is the guy who makes a snowdrop threatening and war-like. 😀

Coincidentally, because of the constant reference to nature, I had been reminded of Ted Hughes and the realistic 'red in tooth and claw' writing.

It is more apt for Sally's methods - rather than the fluffy bunnies style. I was thinking of Hughes' Pike, which strangely is from the same era as Snowdrop.

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.

Sal is a pretty awful liar. The lies and inaccuracies start from the first two pages of TSP. At Portheras Cove she blithely states "we'd walked 243 miles". It's 243 miles from Minehead to Portheras Cove but she admits later in the book that they skipped the 24 miles between Braunton Sands and Westward Ho! I suspect this wasn't the only section of the Minehead to Land's End section of the walk that they skipped!

Oh yes ...

We sat on the bus; it was a strange sensation to move so quickly, covering a distance that would have taken us hours on foot in just a few minutes...

We got off in St Ives, an hour before dark, on the wrong side of town from an open headland.

I hate to say it (or do I) but I genuinely don't think she's particularly well read. She seems to be very superficial, both in her analysis of TH and in her own writing; when half of good writing is subtext and the reader having to read between the lines. There's none of that with Sal, it's all very 'you're not getting any analogy from me...'

Evening all, apologies for a lengthy absence due to bereavement and a holiday without much WiFi or data.

I’ve just read the DM article and wish I hadn’t. If I hear “It (diagnosis) turned out to be anything but” or “a financial dispute with a LIFEtime friend” (how she says it in interviews) one more time I think I might become slightly deranged and have to seek refuge in the Shed of Doubt. Wouldn’t it be great to challenge her to tell the origin story of TSP using different words?
Obviously this would not be possible - the script must be adhered to.

Speaking of mindless repetition, as others have commented, it’s also FULL of the usual SalRayChildOfNature buzzwords we’ve come to expect (peregrines, blackberries, horizons etc etc) but in addition, she uses “headlands” SEVEN times in just a few paragraphs. How does she not notice these things? I’m not an author but whatever I write - blogposts, social media stuff etc - even comments here - I check how it reads and sounds.

I’m now going off to huff and puff indignantly for a while. I may be some time…

Oh, I don’t think there’s any doubt whatsoever that she’s not well read, or a particularly attentive reader of what she has read. But of course that’s part of her shtick — ordinary, folksy old me, with mad hair and no talent, who never set out to write a bestseller, just an aide-memoirs for my dying husband and never intended for other eyes. She depicts herself as a voracious child reader, but doesn’t seem to have continued into adulthood.

She doesn’t seem to have read any nature writing, or anything that would let her question the way she constructs nature in TSP. It all feels very naive, though clearly it works for many readers.

And yes, no subtext. Everything’s right out there. Laid out on top like a pizza topping. Maybe that’s why her dialogue is so clunky. And why her accounts of people dragging their dogs and children away from them and saying ‘Ooh, horrid drunken tramps’ or ‘Gosh, you’re so OLD, old hitchhikers!’ never ring true.

What is it about headlands....?

The winds gusting to force eight, threatening a storm ten. Roaring in from the Irish Sea with unstoppable fury. Each pulse lifting in strength as it clears the headland, crushing down on her with dragons breath, anadl y ddraig. Driving her from this patch of land, reminding her that it should never have been theirs.

headland and patch of land (from the preface of HNTDDD). A couple of her favourite expressions, also found regularly in TSP

Something in me was changing season too. I was no longer striving, fighting to change the unchangeable, not clenching in anxiety at the life we’d been unable to hold on to, or angry at an authoritarian system too bureaucratic to see the truth. A new season had crept into me, a softer season of acceptance. Burnt in by the sun, driven in by the storms. I could feel the sky, the earth, the water and revel in being part of the elements without a chasm of pain opening at the thought of the loss of our place within it all. I was a part of the whole. I didn’t need to own a patch of land to make that so. I could stand in the wind and I was the wind, the rain, the sea; it was all me, and I was nothing within it. The core of me wasn’t lost. Translucent, elusive, but there and growing stronger with every headland.

Sunday 7 Dec. Something brewing?

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Something brewing?

Your last posts seem to have silenced us all @NaughtyNoodler, unless my MN thread is not updating, something is brewing and it's more than a cup of tea :)