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?

You know, I was thinking about how to approach getting a ghostwriting gig recently as I need the money— I’ve done a lot of editing, so no issue with something going out without my name on it (but I think I was thinking more of ‘memoir’/autobiography than fiction). DH has friends who ghostwrite sports autobiographies, but he has pointed out that my complete disdain for and ignorance of sport of any kind would debar me from those…

Yes, but how annoying you sign an NDA first. Then you discover too late you’re writing Nigel Farage’s Age of Sail novels or something equally horrifying…

SW would be hard not to parody, I agree. And probably very hard to work with, as I assume she would resist every step of the way because she’s a bestselling writer and knows how to do it…

Yes, OWH in some iteration will appear if PRH think it will sell, What they base that decision on will, I suppose come down to whether the three previous books are still selling, and maybe whether the film does reasonably well in the US, and isn’t heralded by reviews seeing it as an English Bonnie and Clyde or whatever.

This book-seller has a slightly different blurb for OWH, ending with a question about whether "Moth" will find the strength to join "Raynor" on the walk. Perhaps the book will end with "Raynor" turning a corner - and finding"Moth" planking on the last trig point, and then the Spring sunshine will come out, the migratory birds will sing, the headlands will shimmer, and it won't be Winter any more. Like summer in a glass! I must pre-order this, a steal at only £22.

https://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/books/raynor-winn/on-winter-hill/9780241484586/

😆You have excelled yourself @Peladon

@Peladon spoiler alert!!

Plus she would hate all the necessary questions that would inevitably unearth contradiction after contradiction and undermine her version of events. "Sally, please unlock the cupboard. I just need to understand how Moth was at death's door, the worst he'd ever been, yet able to win the latest series of The Gladiators."

Your comment about NDAs also made me think of that controversy around Gregg Wallace. Didn't his ghostwriter arrive at his house to be greeted by him dropping his towel? IIRC the NDA is what stopped her talking at the time. But maybe I'm getting that wrong. Either way, poor woman.

My offer came through my agent, and I think it wasn't even as straightforward as that, I probably had to audition for my intended 'author' to make sure we got on and that our vision of their book would click. But I didn't like the sound of it and if I'm putting my effort into writing then I want the kudos and the royalties, thank you very much (ghostwriters tend to get a flat fee upfront, and even if the book goes on to win a Booker or something, you don't get a penny more).

I wouldn't ghostwrite for Sal if the alternative was being dragged along the Coast Path naked. She would interfere at every single stage, reject everything several times and make you rewrite it 'in line with her vision' and then dance off into the future taking all the credit.

That made me laugh.

Yes, one imagines that they'd only bring in a ghostwriter in extremis, after SW's novel had already been sent back to her with detailed notes several times, and it was clear she couldn't or wouldn't do what was needed to make it publishable, so you'd be as welcome to her as someone covered in sewage.

And you can imagine the strength of that particular NDA. We know how much SW loves an NDA...

You're right about GW's ghostwriter, @YourMoneyforFrothingandYourChipsforFree -- ugh. I hadn't known that. How revolting. Poor woman.

and then dance off into the future taking all the credit.

and then sway and shuffle off into the future taking all the credit.

I've edited that for you @Vroomfondleswaistcoat.

All this talk of nakedness from Vroomie - we would have to close your windowcurtain on the charabanc - and FreeChips - shudders at the thought of GW - takes me back into the mists of thread time to naked ramblers, scones and a strange sort of kindness. I've been wondering how Uricon2 and her Esquire are and hoping all is ok with them.

I've also been wondering how far and to where our prison escapees could get on their slow, short, occasional, breakout walks from Dartmoor. It gets a bit windy up there to pitch your tent without guy ropes too.

I am aghast at Penguin still selling the TSP series books as non-fiction and 'unflinchingly honest', when there is so much evidence that the terminal illness, the walks, the first-time author and the homelessness is simply not true. The terminal illness aspect is particularly damaging. In continuing to do so, and for profit, Penguin have made themselves complicit and are now as bad as Sally Walker/Raynor Winn/Izzy Wyn-Thomas and Tim Walker/Moth Winn in my eyes. As a lifelong reader, I am very disappointed in Penguin.

I am very sorry @DisappointedReader and I've put my vest back on now.

I don't know why this review has come to my attention now as it is 2019. Well, I've always been open to hear why readers were attracted to TSP and here we have someone who interprets what she reads just about the opposite of me. To be fair, although I was always a sceptic we know a lot more now. I note that one of Sal/Ray's effective responses is "too complicated" - what she used when questioned by the Australian couple.

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn: Candid Memoir and Enduring Force for Change – OffBeatBooks

Thanks Mulberry! I think I’ve read this in the dim and distant past… This makes me utter a hollow laugh..
Ray’s perspective takes readers through the entirety of the book. In my view, nobody has a greater right to self-pity, yet she refuses to indulge it, relying on her strength of character and love. She inspires a great deal of admiration.
When did she refuse to indulge her self pity? <headscratch> or was the denial of self pity laid on so thick for that purpose? I must make myself look like a martyr while describing my invented reality that has been designed to manipulate the emotions of my readers…

<shuddering also at the image of Greg Wallace> ugh ugh ugh!! 🤢 bleurrrgh! Ew ew ew!! 😫

Good to see you! I’ve also been wondering about Uricon2 and hoping she’s ok ❤️

A tent without guy ropes, maybe it’s caught in a tree by now or blown offshore with them inside it. Her next book can be called “They went to sea in a sieve they did” and be an appropriation rip off of Edward Lear.

Here you are, @HatStickBoots :

They walked the path with a Tent, they said,
With a Tent they went to walk:
Inventing bailiffs at the door,
Leaving a house that was theirs no more,
With a Tent they claimed they walked!
But saying they had walked the path,
They little expected the aftermath
Of readers discovering fibs so big,
But they don’t care a button! they don’t care a fig!
Though the walk was mostly talk.
Far and few, far and few,
Are the walks that they really did,
And when caught out, they turned about
With a Tent, and went and hid.

Oh, @TheBookShelf that was wonderful.
far and few indeed!

Long time lurker have finally caught up with the thread.

Has is ever been considered that SW might write a prequel to TSP , maybe going back to meeting Tim and all their mad cap, free spirited adventures settling in Wales.
It would be a way for her to weave in ‘her truth’ about all the allegations against them both and her remaining loyal fans would surely lap it up.

@TheBookShelf !!! 👏💐👏💐👏💐👏😍 bravo!!! That is brilliant!

@TheBookShelf Round of applause for the pome!

@Victoriawould24 Don't put ideas into her head! But I don't think she has enough writing ability to balance out the fact that we 'know' what eventually happens with putting in new information - prequels are quite tricky. You have to add to the story without changing the eventual outcome. I don't think her writing is up to it.

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat I was thinking it would be a vehicle for her to spin a flowery response to the details that have now come to light. It worries me that she may almost be emboldened by the silence of of some crucial players that had the power to add weight to the actual truth such as TW brother, Dave and Julie etc.
The people that have spoken out don’t really have anything more to say ( such as her former employers wife and daughter whose name escapes my menopausal brain this morning) and anyone else that is a potential danger would surely have added to the condemnation already, so she has a bit of potential to exploit that and create a sort of half truth.
For example saying ‘I did steal’ but presented within a dramatic story line that says ‘we were under enormous pressure from x , being manipulated by x etc’, poor Tim’s mental health, nobody understood us blah blah’.

I do agree that she is not a skilled writer but that doesn’t seem to have been a barrier so far, I haven’t read any of her books (just a bit obsessed with the story thanks to these threads) but the writing that is quoted makes me cringe, particularly the dialogue- just awful, so hopefully you are right.

*I am a little bit chuffed with myself I have thought of something mildly interesting to add to the thread.

It would seem like an obvious step, but she’s already used some of that material in The Wild Silence, though mostly the much-told anecdote about meeting in a college cafeteria, him dipping his Mars bar in his tea, early backpacking trips to Scotland, her parents’ disapproval, their elopement, her shy farm childhood etc. Though some of this earlier stuff seems to contradict the historical record, too.

All that stuff about the tragedy of her father discovering he can’t pass on the farm tenancy isn’t true, because he was never the tenant. SW says they eloped in the face of parental disapproval, but there are photos of them wearing their wedding clothes with her parents, who are beaming. The existence of her older sister is deleted in order to heighten the idea of SW as shy, solitary woodland sprite, and, later, facing her mother’s deathbed alone. The idea that her mother fundamentally disapproved of her is contradicted by family members who say she was her mother’s favourite. There are multiple different stories in circulation about why they moved to Wales. Some family members have suggested it was very sudden, as was SW quitting her law clerk job. Etc etc.

Plus I think @Vroomfondleswaistcoat is right. Prequels are tricky, anyway, because you need to end up in the same place as the start of your first book.

And when you’ve already almost certainly carefully curated information to retro feed a narrative we now know is almost entirely fictional, and have stuck very closely to an unchanging script about your earlier years (nature-obsessed solitary child, Mars bar in tea, passionate mutual adoration, parental disapproval, more nature), there’s probably a reason for hitting the same few familiar beats. Was TW ever an ‘eco-warrior’? Was SW already embezzling or fiddling the system in her courthouse job? Why did they really move to Wales? Etc etc.

Plus, even if she tries to bring her patented 'Hand-Wavium' to bear, any retconned prequel is going to expose at least some of TSP to be false, which is going to throw the 'unflinchingly truthful' tag out of the window.

So, while it's a good idea (for her, possibly, not for us), I don't think it would be possible. Her literal only hope would be an entire expose of all the lies and half-truths and avoidances, a full mea culpa, but as she's still sticking to the story of 'her truth' and everything being as she told it, she can't even do that without a significant amount of back-tracking, which she just isn't capable of.

@Victoriawould24 It's always good to have another thing to consider. Have you ever seen Columbo? "Just one more thing, ma'am"...

Perhaps she could reframe everything by telling a prequel as Moth's Story.

As always very good points Ma’am (s). You can look forward to my next contribution in about 12 months 😆.