Grains of Salt

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In 2018, the British writer Raynor Winn published The Salt Path, a memoir recounting how she and her husband, Moth, set out to walk England’s rugged southwest coast after suffering a double tragedy—they lost their home in Wales after a friend in whose business they had invested hung them out to dry; then, just a few days later, Moth was diagnosed with a terminal degenerative illness—and found both spiritual and physical restoration along the way. The book became a bestseller—its cover, depicting birds wheeling serenely over a choppy turquoise sea, is still a familiar sight in British bookstores—and Winn published two follow-ups. Recently, The Salt Path was turned into a movie starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs as the couple, and received some glowing media coverage: Isaacs teared up while watching Moth pay tribute to him on The One Show, a flagship teatime talk program on the BBC; the Australian Broadcasting Corporation noted that Isaacs was playing a nice guy for a change, after his darker turns in the Harry Potter movies and The White Lotus. The movie currently has a score of 84 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. “A beautiful film, the acting was good,” one user of the site remarked, “but I did find some of the scenes unbelievable, like camping near water when its tidal.” (Four stars.)

Then, over the weekend, the British newspaper The Observer dropped a bombshell story that turned the narrative around The Salt Path on its head. The reporter, Chloe Hadjimatheou, alleged that Raynor and Moth—or Sally and Tim Walker, as they are really called, in a great twist of nominative determinism—didn’t lose their home because of a bad investment in a friend’s business, but after Sally Walker was accused of embezzling the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars from a small firm where she worked; per Hadjimatheou, a distant relative of Tim’s loaned the couple money to repay the amount in exchange for the threat of criminal prosecution being dropped, only for the relative’s business to collapse, setting in motion the chain of events that led to the repossession of the house. Hadjimatheou further alleged that, far from being homeless when they set off on their coastal odyssey, the Walkers owned property in France. (When Hadjimatheou visited recently, she found it to be uninhabitable, but locals recalled the Walkers staying in caravans on the land.) And she raised questions around Tim’s diagnosis with corticobasal degeneration, or CBD, a somewhat rare, typically irreversible, and currently untreatable neurological condition; Hadjimatheou stressed that she hasn’t seen direct evidence to contradict the diagnosis, and that “medical miracles do happen,” but nine specialists told her that they were skeptical “about the length of time he has had it, his lack of acute symptoms, and his apparent ability to reverse them.” (Each of Raynor Winn’s books, Hadjimatheou writes, “has a similar structure”: her husband is struggling with the symptoms of his condition, before a long walk causes them to abate.)

A key source for the financial claims in Hadjimatheou’s story was Ros Hemmings, the wife of the man from whom Sally Walker allegedly stole money, who has since died. Hadjimatheou had expected Hemmings to be surprised when a journalist called on her, but she wasn’t. Hemmings said that she was frustrated after The Salt Path came out and was showered with praise, but had only set the record straight in small ways until now. (Whenever her daughter saw the book in a thrift store, “she would write a little homily in the front about what Sally’s really like.”) In addition to the text story, The Observer produced a slick video version featuring an interview with Hemmings, who is seated on a cliff, the sea reaching out behind her. (“She’s made a lot of money out of ruining my family’s life,” Hemmings is shown saying, of Sally Walker, before adding, bitingly: “Good on her, and I hope it brings her endless joy.”) And for its Sunday print edition, the paper filled its front page with a mocked-up cover of The Salt Path, only in this one, one of the birds appears to be screeching with menace.

In a statement to The Observer, Raynor Winn (and at this point, to avoid going crazy, I’ll switch back to her and Moth’s noms de plume) said simply that “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.” She has since called The Observer’s story “highly misleading” and said that she is taking legal advice. The producers of the movie called it “a faithful adaptation of the book that we optioned,” against which, they said, there were “no known claims” at the time. As far as I can see, Penguin, the book’s publisher, has yet to comment. (Its official listing for The Salt Path still, as of this morning, describes the book as a “true story” and “unflinchingly honest.”) PSPA, a charity that supports people with CBD, and has worked with the Winns, severed ties with the couple, citing “unanswered questions.” (The charity added: “we want to reassure supporters that any fundraising Raynor and Moth conducted for PSPA was via official platforms such as JustGiving and monies raised have been received in full.”)

Meanwhile, a reckoning sprawled out across Britain’s media. Op-ed writers attested to their feelings of disillusionment, even betrayal; Nick Duerden, a journalist who has previously interviewed Raynor Winn and found her story to be inspiring, wrote in The i that he now feels like “an idiot,” and suggested that her books appear to have given people facing dreadful illnesses the false hope that they can walk themselves to betterment. (Others also emphasized the dangers of such an impression, in a country that’s currently in the thick of a debate about the appropriate level of welfare spending for disabled people.) Nigel Jones wrote, in The Spectator, that The Salt Path channeled “an atavistic English desire to chuck everything aside—possessions, money, responsibility, a fixed abode—and get out on the road again,” and suggested that he wanted to believe in it. Writing in the same magazine, Sam Leith, who claims to have been skeptical of the book even before the Observer story, was less romantic, arguing that the reaction to the new claims proves that the only thing Brits love more than a story about underdogs battling against adversity and the inextinguishable resilience of the human spirit is “discovering that a story about underdogs battling against adversity and the inextinguishable resilience of the human spirit has turned out to be a load of old cobblers.” Ed Cumming seemed to prove Leith’s point, in a Telegraph article headlined “Schadenfreude… with a delicious dose of sea salt.” (“Radical self-improvement is always suspicious,” Cumming wrote, especially when combined with “weatherbeaten tweeness.”) The Telegraph also published a listicle of “fake memoirs that fooled the world,” from forged Hitler diaries that tricked a West German newspaper in the eighties to A Million Little Pieces, James Frey’s 2003 account of addiction that was later found to have been exaggerated.

There are several interesting media subplots to the Salt Path drama. One concerns The Observer itself, which only recently relaunched under the ownership of Tortoise Media, a digital startup, following its controversial acquisition from The Guardian, a process marked, as I wrote in December, by strikes at the latter paper and wider concerns about The Observer’s future financial health and availability, both in print and online, where a paywall is reportedly in the works. The Salt Path investigation was the title’s first true blockbuster story since the relaunch, and its ambitious swing and slick presentation—both in print and online, where, at least for now, it remains free to read—would seem to assuage some of those fears. (Tortoise’s pledge that The Observer will remain “the enemy of nonsense,” as George Orwell once put it, certainly feels apt this week.) More broadly, it’s fair to question whether it should have taken so long for a journalist to critically interrogate the claims in The Salt Path, given all the glowing publicity around it. (Watching old interviews with Raynor Winn this morning was certainly a cringe-inducing experience with the benefit of hindsight.) The whole episode certainly speaks to how a given media narrative—be it positive or, now, negative—can snowball and take on a life of its own.

I haven’t read The Salt Path, but from Hadjimatheou’s reporting, it does seem like some of its claims might have been ripe for tougher questioning, earlier. And the news media does have a stake here—interviewing an author who’s promoting a memoir typically isn’t a life-or-death hard-news story, but there can be consequences for the real people portrayed therein, and for those who see themselves as being portrayed. That being said, it’s not clear that journalists could have been expected to sniff out the extent of the alleged deception here, at least on the financial side of things. Hadjimatheou deserves credit for doing so; her story, as published, appears deeply reported. But Duerden, for example, isn’t necessarily to blame for interviewing Raynor Winn with his guard down. “Should I have instinctively presumed that the memoirist made it all up, and that her agent, her editor, and her publishing house, Penguin, were all in collusion?” he asked in his i column yesterday. “Call me naïve—you wouldn’t be the first—but I don’t think I live in that world just yet. When I read a book, a work of memoir, I believe it. I trust in the words on the page. Yes, I know that it is human nature to exaggerate, and to colour in, and I know too that memoir requires a riveting and sustaining narrative. But I don’t expect blatant deception or wild embellishment.” Day-to-day journalism, ultimately, does operate on some minimum degree of trust.

And this whole episode would appear to point not to a failure of journalistic vetting—if anything, it looks like a good, if belated, example thereof—but to a problematic gap between the demands of journalism and the demands of the publishing world, which is, of course, the first line of due diligence for nonfiction books. Unlike at many magazines, book publishers don’t typically arrange for such work to be fact-checked in-house, a function, as Alexandria Neason reported for CJR in 2019, of factors including cost and legal liability, but also, perhaps, basic reputational incentives. If The Atlantic, say, had published The Salt Path as a magazine story, it’s safe to assume that the resulting fallout would be focused on The Atlantic; Penguin is facing questions this week, for sure, but it isn’t the focus of the discourse.

Neason was writing mostly about nonfiction books by journalists. Memoirs, of course, are of a different genre, one that plaits together subjective truth and factual truth in ways that can be hard to disentangle, and, often, dwells somewhere in a gray area between journalism and pure fiction. Several articles on the Winns have referenced Frey’s A Million Little Pieces; Hadjimatheou herself noted that when that book’s exaggerations were exposed, aggrieved readers sued the publisher, Random House, but Erica Wagner writes, also in The Observer, that relatively few people claimed an offered refund, and the book is still on sale today, including at a major British bookstore whose website has tagged it under both “Fiction” and “Biography & True Stories.” And yet, as Wagner argues, “when our sympathy is sought, we deserve the truth. Stories of survival that claim to be true and play on our desire to have faith, bear a weight of responsibility to the reader that should not lightly be betrayed.” Hadjimatheou explicitly framed her investigation around similar concerns, writing, in part, that “we are deep enough into the post-truth world to know that if the idea of truth is mis-sold the idea of truth takes a knock, one that can make a small contribution to a huge problem.” This problem is not one that stays within neat genre bounds. It affects journalism, too.

Hadjimatheou does allow that, for some fans of The Salt Path, its “depiction of a generous England, whose coastline is filled with beauty and people who open their hearts to a couple in need, will continue to resonate even after the revelations in this article.” I can attest, at least, that the beauty is very real. England’s southwest coast path passes through the village where I grew up; I’ve walked various sections of it—through tall hedges and over exposed hills with waves crashing on the rocks below; in baking sunshine and howling wind and squelching mud—and it is reliably restorative, at least spiritually. In a world where so much feels so tenuous, this, at least, is unwavering. If the Salt Path movie generally scored well on Rotten Tomatoes, the site’s collation of reviews from professional critics is a mixed bag. Several of them seem to agree, though, that the landscape is the real star. 

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