Editorial: a pinch of salt
April, according some horrible snobby old anti-Semite, is the cruellest month. No idea what May and June are, apart from a gateway to hay fever, but July – if the one just gone is anything to go by – is certainly the post-truthiest.
On July 5th, the Observer published an excellent piece of investigative journalism by Chloe Hadjimatheou which revealed Raynor Winn’s bazillion-copy bestselling, inspirational, loved-by-many memoir The Salt Path as, to use phrase my Dad would have employed, nowt but a pack of lies. This just as the film adaptation starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs was starting to make profitable inroads at the box office.
The book tells the story of Winn and her husband, Moth (who is suffering from a serious degenerative illness) as they find themselves homeless after a bad investment costs them their farmhouse, upon which they rediscover each other, the glory of nature and the redemptive experience of … something or other when they toddle off on a 630-mile walk along the South West Coast Path. At the end of which Moth, whose corticobasal degeneration usually sees sufferers off within eight years of diagnosis, feels a whole lot better. Well enough, indeed, to undertake two more epic hikes detailed in two successive bestsellers. Not to mention looking pretty buoyant at the film premiere, an event that took place a full twelve years after the events of The Salt Path.
Now, anyone who had read the book with any degree of critical thought (i.e. anyone outside of a book group) would have pegged Winn’s narrative as, to put it bluntly, well fucking dodgy long before the story broke, based on just three observations:
- The details of the house loss just don’t add up (moreover Moth’s serious illness would have expedited any application for social housing).
- Who the hell is called Moth? ( tiMOTHy apparently..2nd.ed.)
- Walking doesn’t cure corticobasal degeneration. Nothing does.
Hadjimatheou’s article demonstrated, with scalpel-like precision, how the loss of the farmhouse was due to a conflation of events across a decade, the root cause of which was Winn’s theft from an erstwhile employer of £64,000, her desperate scramble when confronted to pay it back in order to avoid criminal charges, and a loan from a relative (subsequently bought out when said relative got into financial difficulties). Add to the mix an iffy and almost certainly illegal scheme to raise funds by raffling off the farmhouse, the refusal of a council house, and the negation of Winn’s protestation of homelessness on account of the couple owning property in France – not to mention a raft of unpaid debts as well as petty theft and unremunerated use of camping facilities during their walk – and it’s pretty clear that Raynor Winn (real name Sally Walker) is a shameless grifter with a planet-sized sense of entitlement.
And yet such was the emotional investment so many people have in the book that, within minutes, social media was awash with wailing and gnashing. There were dark mutterings that the Observer’s case had better be watertight. There was pearl-clutching that a memoir could actually contain obfuscation and even falsehoods. There were agonised debates with the self over whether to keep the book or move it to the fiction section on the commenters’ bookshelves. A self-proclaimed radical bookshop was eager to announce they’d pulled it and lambasted another retailer who still had copies on display.
Then there were those who had suspected Winn’s mendacity all along and went into schadenfreude overdrive.
The most hilarious demographic was the what’s-the-big-deal crowd who strutted around swinging their lack of self-awareness in full view, making statements like “isn’t all writing fiction, anyway?” (uh, no, that’s why non-fiction is called, well, fuck, you go figure it out yourself, Sherlock), “people leave things out of memoirs all the time” (uh, actually Winn didn’t leave the loss of the house out of it, she lied about it in a way calculated to milk the reader’s sympathy) and – my personal favourite – “couple got into financial difficulties and found an interesting solution”, for all the world as if nicking £64K off someone is comparable with, say, running up some credit card debt or losing one’s savings.
What surprised me by its absence from the badinage, blustering and brouhaha was any cognisance that this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. Granted, I wouldn’t expect many commentators to recollect the splurge of Satanic abuse memoirs from the 70s, the most notable being Michelle Remembers, all of which were discredited. But surely the glut of false World War II/Holocaust memoirs, from Jerzy Kozinski’s The Painted Bird in 1965 (originally marketed as non-fiction and which netted him a career, an in with the cognoscenti and a rich wife) to the “Hitler diaries” in 1983 to The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz in 2011, by way of Fragments and Misha and Angel at the Fence (pulled just prior to publication) and a bunch of others, ought to be imprinted on the cultural consciousness. Pseudo Satanic lasciviousness is one thing, Raynor Winn’s phoney doctrine of hope and reaffirmation is arguably worse, but the falsification of testimony from the Holocaust? That’s just plain evil.
And yet, to read the papers or surf the net during the last twenty-odd days, you’d think such stuff had never happened before. Of course it has. It just goes in cycles. We’re currently in the era of magical nature fake memoirs. With The Salt Path disappearing from display stands, its place is being taken by Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare, the premise of which might have a Disney scriptwriter backing away and shaking their head. Tenner says it’s next on the naughty list.
Predictably, Winn issued a refutation in the form of a blog post. A hot mess of several hundred words, it posited the theft of £64K as a “mistake” (“How do you plead?” “Mistaken, your honour”), the matter of the French property as irrelevant because of its dilapidation (yet the couple apparently remortgaged the farmhouse to fund its purchase in order to save it from developers … yeah: me neither), and Moth’s medical condition as being genuine pace two heavily redacted clinic letters both of which seem to describe check-ups rather than diagnosis or care pathway. It raised even more questions. Hadjimatheou’s probably working on a follow up piece. Wouldn’t surprise me if she ended up with a book deal.
Neil Fulwood
August 2025