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.
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.
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.
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| The Salt Path by Raynor Winn |
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….
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| Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2026 |
Comments
I'll stop here and hope that other AE writers can pick up the thread. Meanwhile, well done for getting in The Writers' and Artists' Year Book.
If she'd said, 'This is a work of fiction,' then, again, that would be fine. That's what writers do: they make stuff up.
But she said, 'This is a memoir.' That is, an historical, truthful account of a life. But, allegedly, her account isn't truthful. She lied about how she came to lose her home-- and somehow forgot to mention how she stole from her employer. She appeals for our sympathy on the grounds that her husband suffers from an awful disease-- but that seems to be somewhat untruthful too.
There's an agreement between writer and reader. The writer says: This is a fiction but invested with as much imaginative truth and conviction as I can give it. And the reader is convinced, or not, by what they know to be a fiction.
Or the writer says: This is the truth, about my life or someone else's, and I've been as honest about it as memory or research allows me to be. The reader extends their sympathy to the subjects, on the understanding that what they read is the truth.
Walker broke that agreement with the reader. She claimed her book was 'a memoir' when, allegedly, it's fiction. If the allegations are all true, then, however beautifully written her fiction is, she has no right to be surprised by the backlash, or complain about it. She asked for her readers' sympathy-- but she was lying to them.
If a member of our family, or a neighbour, lies to us in order to gain a favour, we're not happy about it when we discover the lie. Why should we be any happier when a writer tricks us?