Currently, the story is unfolding. The author of The Salt Path has been accused of fabricating parts of her bestselling memoir. Using the pen name Raynor Winn, Sally Walker wrote a beautiful story about losing her home, and taking a walk along the coast path in the UK, healing both her heart and her husband who has a chronic condition. We read it together at the end of last year. It’s an affecting and effective work, taking us on an emotional journey as a reader, making us feel like we’re walking the path, too.
Partly, the affect is achieved because we’re told the story is true.
It’s already getting messy. After The Observer published an investigation into the work, author Sally Walker says in a joint statement with her husband, Tim, who is known as Moth in the book: “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.”
We’ve seen this before—the explosion in the news, accusations made, denials, more accusations, another rebuttal until finally something closer to the truth comes out. It’s loud and often nasty—people are angry and hurt. The publisher and the author are vilified. None of that is good for anyone in the fragile book industry.
It does a lot of damage when a book like this is exposed. Yes, to the author and the publisher, but also to the reader. Why?
Memoir and Autofiction
When a book is published as a memoir, the author makes a contract with the reader to tell the truth as they remember it. Another space where more writers are publishing is in ‘Autofiction’, which is a novel closely based on the life of the author. Often the author is the main character, but they make up events.
This is what The Observer says about Autofiction: “One could argue that the genre of “autofiction” – narratives explicitly modelled on the author’s life and yet positioned at one remove – blurs the boundary between fiction and fact. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s many-volumed My Struggle, Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, much of the work of the Nobel-prize winning Annie Ernaux – invite us to identify the work and the writer. But a certain distance is maintained. We don’t see these works as factually true.”
Raynor Winn aka Sally Walker could have published this book as Autofiction. We may have loved it just as much as readers.
Or would we?
What I found in The Salt Path was a peaceful solace. A quiet assurance that in the busy, crazy lives of modern times, we all have the potential to step away. By walking in nature for days and days, by letting go of the constant connection of the internet, work, family, we can find a deeper, more real connection. With ourselves. With the world. With those we love.
Raynor Winn writes, “So far away and yet the light was still in reach, touchable, while the land the lighthouses stood on was already slipping away.”
That’s what the book felt like to me—a liminal, hopeful place. I was reassured in the gorgeous writing I could find myself again, one day, if I sought to. Because Raynor had done it herself, when everything was so bad there was no escape, she remade her life. Don’t we all want to feel that possibility? Now, with these revelations, has that been taken away?
The Observer says today, “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.”
I can’t go so far as to say I feel betrayed. As a writer of fiction myself, the place between truth and reality is where I spend most of my creative time—but I want to believe the story people tell. When someone tells me something is true, especially in a world where even our politicians seem to take the truth as light and bendable, truth seems to be an important word.
But what do you think? As readers yourselves, I want to know how reading The Salt Path (or watching the movie) believing it was true when you find out it, perhaps, isn’t.
Join me in our Life-Changing Book Club. We pick a book every two months. These will come from you: books you share that have changed your life will go into the selection. The way the book you tell us about has changed your life is your secret to share or keep.
If you’re new here, my name is Alice Kuipers and I’m a writer, mother and dog & cat-owner transplanted twenty years ago to the Canadian prairies from England. I’ve published fourteen books in 36 countries and my writing has been described as: “For storytellers and story lovers,” by Kirkus Reviews; ‘Gorgeous, heart-ripping, important,” by VOYA; and “Intense and wonderful” by Bif Naked. Join me for coffee breaks, book conversations, and to share my writing life together.
Xoxo
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