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!"

Sal's target audience...Nailed.

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn – Gnome Appreciation Society

Force 8 isn’t even that strong, there’s another four Forces until you top out. Certainly not strong enough to drive someone out… however, she may have been picking up on local ire if she was profiting from owning her patch of land and driving up house prices in the area to the point that ordinary people from that area can’t afford to live there (like my OH, who grew up not far from Pwllheli). That might have been the dragon’s breath she was feeling.

An interview with SW. She says that she wrote TSP so that she would remember it.

outdoorswimmer.com/featured/swimterview-raynor-winn-author-of-the-salt-path/

PS: If the link doesn't work, when the "404" page comes up type "Raynor" in the search box at the top of the page. The interviewer usually does a wild swim with the interviewee, but unfortunately SW could not swim because of a recent operation. Here are two extracts from the text:

"At a complete loss, thinking things couldn’t get any worse, Moth is diagnosed with a rare neurodegenerative disease and told he would die. “They gave him two years,” says Raynor. “And we were told most of this time he would be in decline" she says. "

"I started to write it, just so I could remember it, because it felt like something important to me. But once I got back onto the path in my head, it was like I was walking the path again and couldn’t stop myself. The writing just ran out of me.”

Another interesting interview. https://katherine-may.co.uk/season-3/raynor-reup

According to the transcript, RW says (among other things):

"at the time rhey sais we'd probably be lucky id it was 2 years, most of that would be a rapid decline into poor health"

And

"Moth had found that actually walking improved his health in ways that he'd been told were utterly umpossible."

Apologies if these have been posted before.

In the book, the repetition of the word 'blackthorn' got on my nerves very quickly.

Did SW signal all along that TSP was based on a pack of lies? Are we, the gullible reading public, the real mugs in this story?

Hiya everyone, I've been tied to the back of the charabanc on roller skates since the very beginning.
I don't think I've read this particular article here..
https://lithub.com/nature-is-not-going-to-cure-you-on-raynor-winns-fabricated-memoir/

I'm usually around stirring up a nice pot of ire, but I've been away for my birthday weekend without the time or ability to pop over here and get annoyed about the CB prize all over again.

But I'm back now and my blood pressure is rising already just catching up...

I'm glad you are well @Vroomfondleswaistcoat and many happy returns. I've been doing a spot of winter caravanning this weekend, which requires many pots of hot tea, nowhere near as hot as some of your pots of ire get though :)

Catching up with the posts, I'm a bit worried about your blood pressure @Vroomfondleswaistcoat and the fact that@SmallWoodlandCreature is hanging on to the back of the charabanc on their roller skates, I think we should haul them in quick when we get the opportunity.

It just read this and the author is clearly very angry. She has every right to be angry about the whole narrative that 'nature cures', of course. But she talks about Penguin's 'choice' in publishing TSP et al without acknowledging that the reading public also has a 'choice'. We don't have to believe everything we read. Even if we are being told something is true. How many memoirs have been proven to be fake already - even when we were told they were true? So there is an element of reader-choice in this too.

For those who are ill and desperately want to believe in a cure it must be a hard choice to make, to disbelieve someone saying that they can help themselves by long walks or whatever. But sometimes when something seems to be too good to be true - it is. And a publisher slapping the words 'unflinchingly truthful' on a book doesn't mean that book really is true.

It will be interesting to see if this 'true doesn't mean true' message continues to resound or whether it is all swept under the carpet the next time someone comes along with an inspirational story that sounds like a miracle.

Interesting thought@NaughtyNoodler, it is rough when you have been deceived, but anyone reading TSP in good faith shouldn't feel like a mug, this deception you highlight as an example of Salray's ability to reinvent themselves, is commonly seen in Brit expats, they move to another country and create a new backstory for themselves. I don't think Salray did encounter the prejudice from people they came across, I think that she used it as a device to explain why they hadn't told people they were homeless. This whole truth and redemption thing that Salray talks about, the transformative nature of their walk, what transformation? as we have established many times it didn't transform Salray into an honest and truthful woman, just the same dishonest woman, only richer.

I agree. I had read that piece before. I think someone linked it on here, but maybe months (and many threads) ago. She’s of course got every right to be angry about ‘nature cures’, and the fact that she had to fight for years to get a diagnosis of her condition, and that apparently, while on a PRH mentoring programme for underrepresented writers she was told that her work needed an narrative arc that highlighted recovery — but, on the other hand, her work has also been published by a major UK publisher (Sceptre, which is part of Hachette), and has won awards, and been longlisted for others, she’s had an academic career teaching writing, a previous career as a poet, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

I haven’t read her book on illness and nature, but it’s presumably not been a bestseller as TSP has, and I think @Vroomfondleswaistcoat is right. Polly Atkin is in fact complaining in part about the choices of the reading public, who chose feelgood ‘yay, cure!’ over her presumably more complex narrative about nature not magically curing her, and, more widely, complaining about widespread societal ideas about disability. I don’t think she can pin all of that on Raynor Winn.

What’s interesting is partly, I think, generational — she sees herself as a disabled writer, not a writer who happens to have a chronic illness. But of course SW isn’t a disabled writer, or an ill writer. It’s TW who is the ill one (taking TSP at face value for a moment.) Even if TW had had a firm diagnosis of CBD before starting the walk, as TSP claims, he’s not the one writing. His experience on the path is being recounted by someone else, externally. It’s a very different ballgame, even before we factor in the lies, omissions, retrofitting etc.

@WellSurely Absolutely. Distancing herself from the actual is something that Sal is very good at. She reports on Tim's recovery at one remove and she writes a lot in the passive voice, as if things just 'happen'. As though she's not really there.

And, unfortunately, the reading public wanting a 'happy ending' and positive narrative action is a tough lesson that many writers learn. There is a market for the 'I suffer every day and it's not going to get better' writer, but only really either in the 'I have the same illness and I feel like that too' market, and in literary fiction, neither of which market is as large and lucrative as the 'darkness turns to light' one. Publishers want to make money and books where everything turns out all right in the end will outsell struggles with adversity where it doesn't all end happily by a factor of hundreds to one.

Just trying to be devil’s advocate for a minute, and trying to think of ‘recent non-redemptive illness’ non-fiction books that have sold well. Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations was huge here (about her leukaemia and other illnesses), as was Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self (about infertility) . Both award-winning memoir/essay collections. Probably didn’t sell anywhere near the magnitude of TSP, though.

Another one I found hugely impressive was Chloe Cooper Jones’ Easy Beauty, about having sacral agenesis, a missing bit to her lower spine, which affects her height and mobility. Deeply uncomfortable, remorselessly intelligent read. I think it was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

But not warm and fuzzy at all.

I think in some ways it’s just not comparing like with like. Even aside from TSP not being a memoir from the POV of an ill or disabled person, it’s a bit like comparing an intensely literary contemporary novelist to a Mills and Boon. They might both be writing about romantic relationships, but the intention and the reading experience isn’t going to be in any way similar.

Oy, it's usually ME that's playing Devil's Advocate on here! Get out of my chair...

Yes, you are right, there are 'sellers' in the low-key 'no cure' market but nowhere near the volume of sales of TSP. Happy endings sell in the populist market because readers want to be reassured that everything (in the book, as well as in life) is going to be all right at the end.

Now, now we’ll all just have to cram tighter together on every seat the Charabanc of Disenchantment (which I always imagine as parked glumly in the Land’s End car park in a gale). 😀

Yes, you’re right. It’s a populist/less populist market thing as much as anything else. Mass market successes generally don’t traffic in inconclusive endings, messy compromises or ‘well, things continued much the same and I still had problems’ stuff.

Though I’m always interested that Google throws up ‘Did Moth die?’ as a frequent search in relation to TSP.

Hope you had a great birthday @Vroomfondleswaistcoat !

It's December folks! How many sleeps until the documentary?

Fabulous birthday thanks @Uricon2 and I hope your health is on the up.

We are all trembling with excitement on the back seat of the charabanc, under the blanket of despair, awaiting reports on the documentary from all of our reporters in the field. Or in the Sky, I suppose.

Thanks @Vroomfondleswaistcoat , it's still a bit tricky but hoping that yet more and different beta blockers and if needed digoxin will help. I think it's made me even more intolerant of Raymoth and their ridiculous nonsense and how the 'cure' was presented. My issues are scary enough but hopefully controllable, but there are genuine people with horrible diagnoses who were presented with false and quite possibly dangerous hope.

I do want to highlight that it’s not just the disabled, unwell ill person who may be taken in, though.
Yes the reading public has a “choice” whether to believe in an account of a “miracle cure” but for disabled people this creates a burden when other people around them believe it.
Not least that SalRay’s tale of TimMoth’s cure capturing the zeitgeist, I have seen people say they felt disappointed in themselves that they weren’t well enough now to even try walking as a cure. People around you will pressure you to try. It can quite easily lead to people saying you’re keeping yourself ill if you don’t try.
In fact it’s almost worse if you are disabled, see right through it and dismiss it yet everyone around you thinks the new clothes the emperor has on are delightful.

@LetsBeSensible Yes the reading public has a “choice” whether to believe in an account of a “miracle cure” but for disabled people this creates a burden when other people around them believe it.

Thank you for that insight - which is painful to contemplate.

I do find it insensitive that the Penguin CEO, when asked about TSP, said:

".. we have gained the trust of readers through the quality books we put into the world...... In a world where anyone can publish anything online, books remain essential as authoritative, expert and human-crafted content."

He chose not to address any meaningful issue that has arisen from the deceit. Further, Penguin continue to market this material as if it is true. Is there no consideration for those who were stolen from? Is there no ethical concern towards the continuing distress to those suffering serious neurological conditions?

That’s an interesting piece @SmallWoodlandCreature , thank you. I do a fair bit in the “wellness industry” (awful name) and there is a lot of toxicity there too. Cultural appropriation, blaming people for their ailments, and toxic positivity without any real acknowledgement of the messy and ongoing nature of the work people have to do to overcome their problems- for many people selling retreats and “healing” it’s just “love and light” and walk away, if you don’t have a full and swift recovery you aren’t trying hard enough. So this writing resonated with me for a lot of reasons. It also makes me feel a bit guilty that I like to use fiction as an escape, and I rarely read books which make me feel negative emotions these days- not unless I know what’s coming.

Anyway, I hope you can climb up these knotted bedsheets to get aboard the charabanc properly. There’s still some cider and fudge left up here- although we should probably steal some more before the documentary is released.

There is cider, but not blackthorn, as @AzureStaffy has had enough of that.

It's interesting that even in her rebuttal statement regarding one of the most serious allegations in CH's article (that Moth didn't have CBD at the time of the walk in 2013) SW seems incapable of sticking to the known facts. Instead she makes a statement about CBS/CBD which can be disproved simply by referring to the PSPA website. Perhaps she was desperate or maybe she still doesn't understand the fundamental difference between CBS and CBD:

Corticobasal Degeneration, CBD (as I’ve described this condition in my previous books) is now more commonly referred to by neurologists as Corticobasal Syndrome, CBS. CBS being the clinical diagnosis which describes the symptoms observed during life, while reserving CBD for the disease observed at post-mortem. From here on I’ll refer to the condition as CBS.

The key point that the article on the PSPA website makes is that although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably they aren't the same thing. Although CBD is the most common cause of CBS it doesn't preclude other neurological diseases from causing the same symptoms. As far as I can see, CBS and CBD has nothing to do with symptoms observed during life and post mortem other than the fact that a post mortem can determine whether CBD was the cause of CBS.

The important thing to note is that Corticobasal Syndrome can also be caused by other neurological conditions affecting these parts of the brain, for example, Alzheimer’s disease, Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), and stroke, which can lead to a range of symptoms that vary from person to person.

It really begs the question, that with Moth's CBS progression and symptoms being so indolent and atypical, why wasn't CBD ruled out at a far earlier stage?

CBD Vs CBS-Understanding the Difference Between CBD and CBS