The glee over the downfall of Salt Path is ugly and elitist

The Herald Scotland

2 days ago

'Mitchell's travels across the line that separates fiction and non-fiction are his singular feat,' she wrote in a review. 'His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they're so much more exciting to read than the work of other non-fiction writers with ambition.'
Much as I admire Malcolm, she was a bit of a minx: a contrarian that liked to bait her readers with provocative opinions. And much as I admire Mitchell, I think he crossed lines a journalist — even a 'creative' journalist — ought not to cross. But memoir is different. Memoir is the pursuit of a partial truth that lies beyond the strict laying out of facts. When charting a relationship, we can say: 'This happened, then this, and then this,' but the significance we attach to the chronology is entirely subjective.
A memoirist may base their book on events as they remember them, but which ones they choose to emphasise and which they choose to downplay will alter the way the reader views the whole. In fiction the 'unreliable narrator' is a literary device; in memoir it's a given. We are all unreliable narrators of our own lives. No-one should ever pick up a memoir expecting a definitive account. At best, you are being served up one party's 'truth'; other brands will be available (though they may never be written).
This is a preamble to talking about The Salt Path: a scandal which, according to some catastrophisers, threatens the entire genre. It is of course suboptimal that Raynor Winn stands accused of misrepresenting the circumstances in which she and her husband Moth lost their house — the catalyst for the walk at the centre of the book — and that doubt is being cast over the degenerative condition from which she says Moth suffers. For her part, she says the claims are "grotesquely unfair" and "highly misleading".
But I'd argue the response to it — the sheer glee some people have taken in its annihilation — is both ugly and elitist. The implication appears to be not only that Raynor and Moth got their comeuppance, but that the kinds of people stupid enough to take comfort in their story also got what was coming to them.
Read more Dani Garavelli:
In the aftermath of the Observer exposé, which included allegations that Winn had defrauded her previous employer of £64,000, others have chosen to cast the book as a giant grift in the mould of Major Charles Ingram – the cheating Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? contestant, or Captain Tom's daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore, who appears to have helped herself to large chunks of the money raised in his name.
I can see the attraction in that. We Brits love a financial scam well-executed. With only money at stake, we can pretend to be outraged while secretly admitting the chutzpah of all involved. But that degree of premeditation seems unlikely to me. Publishing is a precarious business; a best-seller is never guaranteed. It feels more plausible that Winn chose to write her book the way she wrote it because that's the version of herself she wanted to believe in. 'We tell ourselves stories in order to live,' Joan Didion famously said. The story Winn told herself may have been a whopper, which is a shame because — as moral arcs go — one which followed an author admitting, owning and atoning for her past misdemeanours would have been far more interesting.
Instead, by charting her failure to budget, her theft of food, her refusal to pay campsite fees, Winn unwittingly unveils herself as a woman who thinks the world owes her a living. Some truths will out despite our best efforts.
The book has been a huge success. (Image: Newsquest)
Penguin must take responsibility for a lack of due diligence if the claims are true. Forget the erosion of funding: it's the publisher's job to ensure the authors they commission are who they say they are. On Amazon, there are one star reviews suggesting holes in the story.
But it's also worth asking why the book industry, and indeed consumers, are so fixated on quests and spiritual journeys. It puts a pressure on memoir writers to shape their writing in a particular way. I remember mulling over this when I was reading Sally Huband's Sea Bean, a memoir on how beachcombing helped her cope with chronic illness. I should stress that I really liked this book, so what follows is not a criticism.
But as someone who sometimes writes non-fiction memoir, I found myself constantly fretting: would the eponymous sea bean ever be found? My concern was not for the beachcomber Sally Huband, who had already gathered many other interesting things from the strandline, but for the author Sally Huband, for whom the failure to accomplish the mission within the publisher's time frame might prove a disaster.
Read more Dani Garavelli:
Huband's book is not like The Salt Path. There is a spiritual journey of sorts, but it's about coming to terms with the limitations of her life. That's an entirely legitimate enterprise, but even a coming-to-terms should not be de rigueur. Isn't failure as interesting as success? Can't we just celebrate the human experience in all its glorious messiness? If you're looking for truth, that's where it's more likely to be found.
Not everyone is hung up on the truth. You'll see that if you check the Amazon reviews for James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, a memoir about addiction, later revealed to contain significant falsehoods. 'It doesn't matter to me that some ... of this book is fabricated,' one reader says. 'Some books stay with you.'
'I'm not particularly bothered that some of the facts have been switched or altered in this memoir to enhance the reader's experience,' adds another. 'To me it makes sense to alter facts and timelines to make a story read well.' What's important to these commentators is less the book's technical veracity than its ring of truth. Perhaps it feels more authentic for being less so.
And yet, The Salt Path scandal has broken at a time when it is becoming more and more difficult to tell what's real and what isn't. Every day, we watch people accepting at face value news items that are demonstrably false. Old riots being passed off as new ones. A clip that shows Donald Trump saying the US should have sent weapons to Russia instead of Ukraine. At the same time actual events defy belief. Is Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok really sending out tweets praising Hitler? Is that really the effigy of a migrant boat on the top of a bonfire in County Tyrone? Apparently so.
In the midst of all this, you'd think a best-seller about a middle-aged couple on a long walk would be very far down the public worry list. But perhaps for the most aggrieved it is something tangible to fix their worries on. Social media is an ephemeral, tricksy thing full of blind alleys and trap doors. But books? Books are old world. Books are solid. They come in two main categories: fiction and non-fiction, and you're supposed to be able to tell the difference. The Salt Path breached that contract. It made the world even more precarious. Because, if you can't trust books, what can you trust?