Shortly before the release of The Salt Path, the recent cinematic adaptation of a bestselling memoir by Raynor Winn, Gillian Anderson, star of the film, was asked her impressions of the author.
“I was surprised at how guarded she was,” the actor told the Guardian. “It was interesting to encounter a certain steeliness. It was informative for me to see that.”
A report by Chloe Hadjimatheou in last weekend’s Observer offered suggestions as to why the writer may have seemed so reticent. Published in 2018, The Salt Path tells us how, after losing their home following an unwise investment, Winn and her husband Moth, who had recently been diagnosed with a terminal illness, tramped the 630 miles of the South West Coast Path in the English West Country. As so often happens on such literary journeys, they gained a sort of wisdom and found new depths in their relationship. The book sold more than two million copies. The film was a decent hit in the early summer – perfect counterprogramming to the first rush of superheroes.
It would take a very naive reader not to suspect that such volumes are at home to a degree of creative embellishment. But the Observer story argues Winn may have exceeded industry-standard levels of creative licence.
Book and film tell us the Winns lost their home after a childhood friend persuaded them to invest in what turned out to be a failing business. But Hadjimatheou claims the Winns – whose real names are Sally and Tim Walker – had embezzled money from a former employer. “In the end, I think it was around £64,000 she’d nicked over the previous few years,” Ros Hemmings, for whose now-late husband Winn had worked as book-keeper, told the Observer. The financial crash it was reported came when the couple failed to pay back a loan a relative had made them to cover the Hemmings’ losses. “According to Winn, the couple lost their home simply because their own generosity was turned against them,” Hadjimatheou notes before paddling into those murkier waters.
The Observer piece also raises a sceptical eyebrow about the diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration that Moth received in 2013. Hadjimatheou explains that the life expectancy of those with the condition, which is related to Parkinson’s disease, typically runs from six to eight years and that “patients suffer debilitating symptoms significantly before that”. It is 12 years since Moth got the news. Two follow-up volumes to The Salt Path relate further lengthy walks the couple completed. Hadjimatheou does, however, cautiously say that “There is nothing I have seen to contradict his diagnosis or Sally Walker’s account of it.”
On Sunday night, a spokesperson for the “Winns” (actually, the Walkers) told the Daily Mail the allegations were “highly misleading”. The statement continued: “The Salt Path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey.” When pressed as to which of the allegations were untrue, the couple’s representative failed to expand, but noted they were taking legal advice.
It’s possible that more will emerge. The Observer story lists further allegations about unpaid debts in Wales and mysterious cottages in the South of France.
What becomes of a memoir after debunking? Well, The Salt Path is part of a weirdly unstoppable – and precisely defined – genre that is viewed more as self-help allegory than biographical record. There are endless film adaptations of allegedly true stories concerning walks that brought the characters enlightenment: Wild (Reese Witherspoon walks the Pacific Coast Trail), Tracks (Mia Wasikowska walks across Australia), The Great Escaper (elderly veteran Michael Caine walks to France), The Last Rifleman (elderly veteran Pierce Brosnan walks to France). Would any of these stories be less helpful as life guides for being a little less true?
There was a colossal row in 2006 when it was revealed that James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, a supposed addiction memoir much touted by Oprah Winfrey, turned out to be largely fictionalised. Frey’s former champion had him back on her show and showed no mercy. Maureen Dowd, writing in the New York Times, went into high fulmination. “It was a huge relief, after our long national slide into untruth and no consequences into swiftboating and swift bucks, into W’s delusion and denial, to see the Empress of Empathy icily hold someone accountable for lying,” she bellowed. Yet A Million Little Pieces remained in print and, a full 12 years after the Oprah controversy, became a feature film with Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
Back in the 1970s, concerned parents used to leave a supposed anonymous teenage diary called Go Ask Alice on the beds of any youngster who once arrived home bleary eyed. Few readers believed this tragic yarn of drug abuse to be anything other than a crudely composed admonitory fiction. Sure enough, it eventually proved to be the work of a Mormon youth counsellor – born as far back as the first World War – called Beatrice Sparks. The book has never gone out of print in the 54 years since its first publication.
None of this may be of relevance to Raynor Winn. We have yet to see where her defence will lead. But, whatever happens, don’t rule out The Salt Path hanging around.