Thread 26 : To feel disappointed - and disgusted and vindicated now too - after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 25 IS FULL

Please see the OP of Thread 25 for all the links to The Observer's reporting and podcast series, our threads one to 24 and so on.

After 25,000 posts there are still new things to discuss:
BBC Sounds - Secrets of the Salt Path - Available Episodes
If you are posting about a podcast, please start your post with the episode number you are commenting on, for clarity and to help others avoid spoilers if they wish to do so.

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. The Observer's excellent podcast series The Walkers (link in Thread 25) covers most things.
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, 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. For over 8 months we have done amazingly well together for 25 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.

As ever, as we embark on our 26th thread riding the community charabanc, keep to the path, no saltiness, eat fudge and drink cider.

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 25 IS FULL: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5485730-thread-25-to-feel-disappointed-and-disgusted-and-vindicated-now-too-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

This has interested me too. I can understand people not speaking up (maybe they don't want to admit they got sucked in, or maybe they don't think it's fair to say anything) but the sheer lack of anyone wading in to say 'hey, I don't think the Walkers are as bad as they are being painted/the situation has been misunderstood/Sal made a lot of mistakes and she understands that now' is illuminating. Not one person coming in to bat in their defence or on their behalves?

Yes, it is interesting. Resounding lack of friends and 'loyal' family saying anything positive or even neutral in the media, or on their own social media. Oh, apart from the nephew who posted on LinkedIn about them being compulsive liars trailing destruction in their wake.

Mind you, hard to think how you could possibly spin lies, substantial thefts, scams, and a fabricated illness and make it sound in any way positive or 'not as bad as The Observer makes it sound'?

And you can't go with the 'Look, Sally did awful things, but I'm sure she's sorry now' approach, because it would involve Sally having to admit to having done awful things.

The family members who spoke on the Observer podcast were clearly still furious and disbelieving and hurt on behalf of their relatives who were stolen from and/or on their own behalf from having been cruelly fictionalised in the case of 'Anne'. Ditto Ros Hemmings and her daughter. BC was too hurt and confused to want to engage with the podcast at all in person, but even with an actor reading his words, that came through.

The only 'positive' voices are those who had a one-off encounter or a fairly superficial relationship with charming TW. Like Jason Isaac.

Oh, another Insta post. Sunset tent with accompanying platitude.

Yes I realise that I used weak examples in my post. But NOBODY has said anything like 'Sal was my friend for ten years and she was always nice and kind and generous to me' or anything like that. Not a word even in slight support.

I agree that it would be a hard sell mitigating what she's done, but even if I murdered someone I can think of at least half a dozen* people who would stand up to say how shocked they were, how I always seemed such a nice person, how they couldn't think what must have happened...

*All right, maybe not half a dozen. But some.

OC confirmed that she hadn’t been contacted by anyone who wished to speak in defence of the WWs. She said she was surprised at this.

“Wide horizon” is another of her stock phrases. Yawn.
I’m curious about “the gentle relief of knowing there is nowhere else you need to be tonight” - neither of them seem like people whose lives have ever been rigidly controlled by timetables, responsibilities or commitments.

For those without access to Instagram, it’s a picture of a tent in the sunset.
Oh, and a wide horizon. Of course.
No visible headlands, phew.

@MulberryBrandy : "another lady who fell under Tim's spell and sold him a tourmaline Ganesh". That expression made me laugh - thanks!

So they have moved the tent out of the bedroom for an evening?

“the gentle relief of knowing there is nowhere else you need to be tonight”

I don't know why she needs to make this sound like a huge profound statement - it's how I feel every night when I get in from the dog's last walk. Isn't it how EVERYONE feels when they finally close the front door and take their corsets off?

I think she fancies herself as a kind of hedgerow philosopher whose self-appointed task is to teach us her Deep Lore of attunement to nature, of salty acceptance, of listening to the song of the mountain yadda yadda.

The kind of platitudinous nonsense you used to get on those posters with kittens and some nonsense about breathing, or being yourself.

Yes, I believe she does think of herself that way, at least her creation Raynor Winn certainly does. It’s not the messages themselves which are the problem for me, but the mouthpiece Sally Walker, a hypocritical, untrustworthy individual who scams people at every opportunity. As in TWS when she kept harking back to their experiences “on The Path”, her IG feed appears to be forever circling back to that highly elaborated book also. It seems like a distraction technique, a desire to remain seen as the couple from that particular time capsule and that nothing else exists. How stupid does she think people are? How much more sympathy does she think she is entitled to wring out? These platitudes are all she has left and they aren’t genuine so what’s the point?

It would be good if the writers among us could listen to the BBC Wales, Ep 4, No Going Back. There was some confirmation of our suspicions re: Sal being only too willing to respond in her narrative to the literary agents suggestions. Several of us have thought this before, particularly because of the agents' own experience, but Tessa Skola (the tourmaline Ganesh seller) gives us an insight.

please correct me if I'm wrong but these posts often seem to appear after TSP has hit the news again in some way. I see these posts as SW thumb-nosing in a 'I'm still standing' way.

I love this ❤️ I think you are absolutely correct. The Tent. They have made it into a symbol of their plight.*
Let’s photograph our tent. Yes, it will symbolise that it was our home and was all the home we needed, that we learned to let go of everything we had and realised that none of it mattered anyway in the grand scheme of things. They’ll imagine us as enlightened and free from attachments that are unhealthy for the mind and spirit. If we can reiterate how free we are, people will forget about our scheming, exploitation of other people for their money. Wanting and desiring lots of money for a lifestyle we didn’t earn, is not the image we wish to present. Earning lots of money legitimately by selling a whopping lie… is a bit shaky also. Let’s photograph the tent!

• Despite not having any plight either before or since that wasn’t just of their own making.

Yes, she's fond of believing that everyone is grinding her into the dirt - as she said in her July statement. I think she dabbles a toe in to test the waters - @YourMoneyforFrothingandYourChipsforFree said that each time she posts she loses followers, but I don't know if that is still true.

Yes, it’s so irritating. This perpetual victim stance. The real victims just don’t feature in her selfish mind.

She has 75.8 k followers now. I think that’s definitely down from whenever I first looked at her Insta account last summer, but not enormously. Still a hundred or more people liking her post, mind you. Comments obviously still disabled.

I’m not sure whether it’s nose-thumbing or just her time-tested trick of brazenly stonewalling and insisting that her version of reality is the correct one.

(That interview where she completely stonewalled on what Moth’s real name, despite the interviewer continuing to probe, strikes me as very significant now. That’s her technique. That’s what anyone asking questions would have got — the police, TW’s mother asking why her account was empty, ‘Anne’ asking why she hadn’t applied for bankruptcy or got a job, or asking for help on her farm, BC asking why they weren’t making cider or trying to get them to accept help etc. Only when necessary to get someone to do something, or not to do something, does she go into her other mode of crocodile tears and gushy, confessional helplessness, as in showing up at the Hemmngs’ house with the weepy story about having sold her mother’s things to scrape together £9k, or the apparently artlessly helpless and contrite confession letter to her sister.)

Or the Insta posts are a nakedly cynical attempt to keep the ‘brand’ alive. That tiny, brave two-person tent, solaced by the beauty of nature against the cruelty of the world of people Who Just Don’t Understand.

Probably all three.

Her latest Insta picture of a tent is interesting because the tent isn't pitched (the guy lines are hanging loose from the front of the tent not secured in the ground). One gust of wind and it will be a speck in the sky. I wonder if she just popped the tent up briefly for a photo to pretend they are still wild camping...or perhaps reused an old picture.

I noticed that too. And of course, when you’re actually camping, there’s endless stuff lying around your tent a lot of the time — it’s far from a tent sitting solitary in pristine grass. It does look staged for effect.

I must admit that I haven't listened to these - no reason other than life intervening. I will give it a listen with my professional head on (rather than my The Walkers Are Tossers head, which I most often wear).

I just listened to it (while planting potatoes in the gaps between violent squally showers, because, yes, my life is that glamorous), and I don’t think it gives any particular credence to the idea that SW’s agent was responsible for the untruths or manipulations of TSP.

Tessa Skola (she of the Tourmaline Ganesh😀) was given Jennifer Christie’s number by SW, whom she’d met at Polruan parties, because she’d been dropped by her own agent and SW told her she’d liked her first book, and they chatted, but TS says she’s not sure whether JC read her book or not, and at any rate didn’t sign her.

What TS seems to be stressing is that JC (whom she describes as ‘feisty’, ‘hard-hitting’ and ‘on the ball’) wanted something current, ‘was only interested in the latest sort of incident or catastrophe or something prevalent in the news’ so you could get out a book quickly and ‘grab the headline’.

I mean, I’m sure she’s telling the truth as she sees it (though she’s pretty vague about the conversation and doesn’t even remember the agent’s name), but I think she’s misunderstanding somewhat.

I mean, TSP wasn’t a book written about a current headline-grabbing catastrophe or crisis. Even if you see it as a book about homelessness, bluntly, even if it had been true, the Walkers’ purported experience bears no resemblance to the lives of the majority of homeless people. it’s not an ‘issue’ book, unless you really stretch it.

Plus I think JC was probably just explaining that she was not a good fit for Tessa Skola, a former cabaret dancer and actress with a sideline in yoga, new age stuff and wellness. Her first book, Bare, from 2011, was a memoir about being a cabaret dancer, and her second, The Sea (2019), seems to focus on the wellness/meditation part of her life. Both seem to be self-published. Bare is available in Kindle edition via Amazon, so you can read the free sample. She can certainly write, and the tawdry backstage cabaret stuff is interesting, but I imagine JC couldn’t see a future for her as a memoirist. She’d already used up most of her life material in two books that were already out there and hadn’t sold well.

https://www.tessaskola.com/

All agents are ‘hard-hitting’. They have to be. They only get paid when they sell a book. They’re hard-nosed salespeople. If you look at the Graham Maw Christie submissions guidelines, your online and SM presence and how you would help promote the book is centred as much as your outline and sample chapters. SW, or should I say ‘Raynor Winn’, didn’t have a SM presence until she signed with GMC, but I imagine JC thought the ‘story’ of TSP would sell itself. The homelessness, the terminal illness, the plucky underdogs stumbling ahead into an unknown future on the SWCP, carrying everything they owned etc etc. That was the ‘package’ she was selling.

@NervesofSteel I think you're right. From your summary - it would seem quite odd for JC to limit herself in the books she takes on to 'headline issues', because surely if she takes on a 'headline issue' book, by the time the book has gone through submission, been edited and a publisher has brought it out - the issue is no longer going to be 'headline'.

Although I wouldn't rule out an agent having significant input into making the book suitable for submission - so she could have advised on some tweaks to the story to make it more 'saleable', I doubt that JC suggested major rewrites.

Thanks to you both - I thought it would be interesting to look at it from a writer's angle. It wasn't so much@NervesofSteel 'the idea that SW’s agent was responsible for the untruths or manipulations of TSP' - we all know SalRay is more than capable of that in many ways. It was more that it had been previously noted that Raynor Winn and her agency set up Instagram accounts within 24 hours in October 2016.

Others felt that the actual homelessness - as opposed to just the losing of their house - had been 'bigged up' and a whole extract from a legal contributor has been inserted in TSP. It is certainly this issue that was noted and commented on by the two main actors and, of course, got Raynor her first articles in magazines.

Although it is interesting that the agent hasn't waded in on her side. Usually an agent will come in to bat on the side of their client, even if it's with excuses or 'her mental health' disclaimers. I'm not sure whether JC has stopped representing SW (in which case a little message to distance herself from the whole debacle might be expected) or has carried on representing (she'll be earning a fair bit from the books, 15-20% of royalties) and is just keeping schtumm.

The absolute, resounding silence from agents and publisher is part of the problem. Added publicity is never bad, but everything surrounding the books has now been called into question - and they have NOTHING TO SAY? At all?

In fairness, many agencies are as interested in how you can promote the book and any SM following you might bring with you as they are in your idea or your writing, and probably more in non-fiction. I’m assuming iGMC had been on FB and only opened an Instagram account when it was clear that was the place to promote stuff now, so it would make sense for her agent to have encouraged SW to start a web presence for ‘Raynor Winn’ — especially as she didn’t exist at all before that moment. You want the reader to have somewhere to go online to know more about your writer, and to follow them to know about book events, new releases etc.

What are your credentials for writing the book? is a big question for non-fiction agencies. SW wasn’t a world-leading practitioner of yogic breathing or anything, but she had the credentials of lived experience (well, purportedly!)