Spinning Straw into Gold has its Drawbacks, says Griselda Heppel

My late mother was a marvellous raconteur (or raconteuse, to be correct). She’d regale a whole room with her funny stories of life as a diplomat’s wife, or – cringemaking for us – the hilarious things her children had said and done. Growing up, I began to spot embellishments in these anecdotes, not to say downright twisting of the truth; but whenever I pointed this out (with a doubtless annoying puritanism), I’d be silenced. ‘So what?’ she’d roar. ‘It makes a far better story this way.’ Cue uproarious laughter from her audience. 

It didn’t matter, of course it didn’t. Or not very much. But over the years I found myself increasingly treating her accounts of her early life, family history, relationships, discussions and quarrels with a large pinch of salt, to the point when I would doubt her version of a certain important event, only to find out later that it was true. The problem was, how could I tell? Knowing her talent for spinning dull, factual straw into exciting, gleaming, semi-fictional gold, how could I know when she was doing this and when she wasn’t? Needless to say, any sign of scepticism on my part infuriated her. She knew she was speaking the Absolute Truth. My role was to trust her. 

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

The trouble is, trust isn’t something that can be switched on and off at will. Once you’re known to be prone – even for reasons of mild entertainment – to playing around with the facts, you lose control over how others perceive you. I thought about this recently, when reading about Raynor Winn (or Sally Walker, as her real name turns out to be) hitting back at the tide of public anger raised against her by the revelation in The Observer that her memoir, The Salt Path, was built on lies and theft. That, far from losing their home through a naïve investment to help out a friend – the springboard for her and her husband, Moth, to start their epic walk along the South West Coastal Path – she forfeited it through needing to repay over £60,000 she had stolen over a year or so from her trusting and distraught employer, who nearly lost his own business in the process. 

Outraged at such deception, critics have piled in about other aspects of the memoir, in particular Moth’s serious, debilitating and painful illness, corticobasal degeneration (CBD), which miraculously improved through the discipline and rigour of walking: obviously that too, was a total fabrication, just to gain sympathy. Or why isn’t he dead by now? In vain Winn pleads this really is true, look, these letters from consultants prove it. No one will believe her now. 

The thing is, I’m prepared to believe that part is true. It’s such a weird, pointless extra burden to add to the toughness of their journey. Her writing is good enough to keep us reading without having to shoehorn an extra trauma into the mix. And just because someone lies about one area of her life doesn’t mean she lies about all of them. 

What I, personally, can’t forgive her for is that she’s proved my friend to be right. The one I lent the book to, five years ago, who hated it because she could tell there was something fishy, right from the start. Who wasn’t prepared to enjoy the well-written, often amusing account of this shabby, hopeless couple stumbling along a demanding path through some of the most beautiful landscape in the country, simply because the reason for their doing so was all wrong. 

It’s sad, because I still think it’s a wonderful book. 

If only Winn had been a bit more honest right from the beginning … 

And now for some blatant self-publicising. The new edition of the Children’s Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2026 has just come out, packed with all the information on agents, publishers and general writing services you could possibly need, plus a few dozen interesting articles covering all stages of the writing process. Among which, ahem, cough, cough, there’s one by me, page 25: ‘The next chapter… being a successful self-published author.’ 

It’s a long game….

Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2026