What Does A Writer Owe Readers?

Thoughts after The Salt Path

Yesterday I woke in Wales to one of the biggest literary scoops Britain has seen, with The Observer claiming the multi-million selling memoir turned box-office hit, The Salt Path, might not be as straight up true as it paraded itself to be. The claim that hit me the hardest was that the medical condition of the husband in the book was possibly exaggerated or indeed its very existence, fabricated.

I was in Wales for a literature festival, and as usual, I’d publicly expressed some scepticism at the now tired trope of the healing powers of nature, expressed too simplistically in too many nature memoirs. The natural world is a complicated, tyrannical thing, and bodies are complicated too, prone to failing, failings not often miraculously cured by long cliff top walks. Famously the sea will not save you but more than likely, kill you. Of course, it’s impossible to say if the medical facts of The Salt Path are true or not, but many other writers I know have expressed doubts in the past and mostly in the pub, and then yesterday, for most of the day, my phone lit up.

The inevitable scandal around the book serves to highlight many ongoing discussions around memoir, memory, falsity and narrative, in the same way James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces did years earlier. It also will inevitably make publishers already wary of the genre even less inclined to take risks on personal books. It also hopefully will prompt more conversations around the uncomfortable ableist and capitalist narrative often perpetuated by nature memoirs - just walk more to heal yourself, swim harder to cure your condition, pitch your tent in the countryside and behold a miracle will befall you, etc. The basic message is, try harder. It’s tired and jaded and hopefully this will move the genre on to create way for new and varied perspectives instead of closing it down completely, but we will see.

I will not get started on how so many nature memoirs are pseudo-religious replacements for older holy texts. Or not here at least, see you down the pub for that one. Although, that said, when done well, a good book featuring nature and its interplay with humans is as beautiful as it is rare. I’m thinking here of Rob Cowen’s magnificent The North Road, Ruth Allen’s Weathering, which really did change my life, and Peter Riley’s Strandings - a book I recommend all the time, and one of the strangest books I’ve read.

Everyone had a hot take yesterday and some of them were very funny. I say everyone but largely there was also a lot of silence, which is often more telling than the noise. But what I didn’t see said, was what Raynor Winn had done to readers.

Quite simply, if these claims are true, she’s let them down. In Wales, I was staying in the house of a very sweet, avid reader. Within minutes of the newspaper arriving, it was clear he felt very let down. But I cried, he said, and millions others too will be saying the same now the story’s lit up all the other news channels.

When I teach memoir, I talk about the contract with the reader. This is the first thing anyone embarking on memoir should think about and keep to. The contract is simply this, that in good faith, the story is true. It’s not a difficult one. This means no made up illnesses, no made up disadvantages to illicit sympathy, and fundamentally, no providing false hope. A novel, that’s a different contract, the contract is to deliver a story. Autofiction, that’s your get out of jail free card - it might be true and it might not be. I often joke that autofiction’s either a great way of making your life look more interesting than it is, or to avoid people knowing just how chaotic it actually is.

It’s not really that hard. Pick a genre, and stick to the contract.

By its very nature, writing memoir is exposing. It is also the thing no one’s asked you to do, unless you’re already well known. It’s also the last thing most people who know you want you to do. It’s also one of the hardest things to do, if it’s done well and you’re telling a difficult story. But what a memoir can give the reader, is a lifeline, outweighing the damage it does to you as the writer. It’s three years next week since The Last Days published in hardback, two years today since it published in paperback, and I still have people telling me it saved their lives. That’s something I never expected to happen, but it’s also a massive privilege. For readers, a book can be both a window and a mirror, and that’s what The Last Days did and does, it offers people a way to see into a world they don’t understand, but for people trapped in that world, it offers a way out. The Salt Path offered that too for sufferers of terminal illness, and yesterday’s expose took that way. This breaks the contract with the reader in a brutal way.

As soon as you write one memoir, you become a poster girl for whatever cause the memoir’s attached to and you’re then expected to follow up with the next along a theme. If you look at Winn’s books in terms of design they all form a coherent visual identity. Narratively, each book starts with a deterioration in Moth’s condition, and ends with another walk that’s fixed him. Here Winn becomes a brand in the same way cosy crime is, there’s a comforting formulaic structure to her stories that lulls the reader towards a safe, inevitable conclusion. The writer as brand becomes the enemy of art, and yet we are told it’s what readers want. I wonder. I circumnavigated this by flexing to fiction and being characteristically unpredictable, dangerous for my career, safer for me as an artist.

What readers deserve, is to know if what they’re reading is real or not. I’m bored of much of the self aware pontificating around memoir and memory, it’s not really that difficult. Memory is subjective sure, but you can’t remember something that didn’t happen. Yes, false memory exists, but it seems a bit much to claim false memory in the case of medical conditions or specifics. Sure, details go astray, but the actual framework of a life is not a hard one to keep track of. If, in good faith, you present your past as you remember it, with the intent of telling a story that acts as both the window and the mirror, that’s great. If you deliberately fabricate circumstances of your life, then you’ve led the reader a merry dance. If these allegations against Winn are true, then perhaps she should’ve turned to fiction instead, after all, it appears she has a great imagination.