A book turned film has been on my mind a lot recently – The Salt Path, by Raynor Winn. In 2013, she and her husband Moth found themselves homeless and walking the South West Coast Path in England, shortly after a business deal went wrong and Moth was diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration. It’s a story of love and resilience in the face of extreme adversity – life and weather wise. A couple of months ago, a film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs was released – my review title was “unremarkable film for what is a truly remarkable story”. Last Saturday this was put to the test – a detailed story in The Observer was released, accusing Winn of distorting reality (or flat out lying). It suggested that she had in fact embezzled money from her former employer, evaded the law, and that, according to a selection of neuroscientists, had even lied about Moth’s illness, a condition with a life expectancy of six to eight years after the onset of symptoms (he has been living with it for over a decade). Winn, her literary agent and the production company behind the film are currently all under fire – the former because she supposedly lied, the latter because they did not conduct sufficient due diligence.
Halfway through the book when I first happened upon the article (I had actually been looking for the year they had done the walk, as I spent most of my summer holidays in Cornwall and wanted to see whether it was possible we could have crossed paths), I now find it a difficult read – why? Increasingly, I have been prompted to think about the relationship between reality and fiction. I find biopics for instance strangely hollow in their attempts to depict a real person – as I mentioned in my review of A Complete Unknown, there is a certain framework that the genre follows that it has never surpassed (can it?). It will also always have the imprint of the director and actors – they can read as many books as they want, even meet the person, but they will never capture them fully. This is the case no doubt for Anderson and Isaacs, who do a good job of capturing two people going for a long walk and facing the hardships of homelessness – they are both brilliant actors, but I felt that same shallowness, even though I am sure they had their fair share of conversations with Raynor and Moth. To find out, then, that what they were playing onscreen was also false? Who to believe, even when Winn has since defended herself, publishing doctor letters addressed to Moth to prove his diagnosis? And the crucial question – is it any of our business? I will be the first to say I have struggled with the book since – every sentence I read I now doubt. I feel I’ve been tricked – the beauty of the coast, of the hardship turned almost spiritual awakening is sullied.
This is a deeply complex matter – a film that reinterprets a story we are now finding out is perhaps a lie. Why are we so obsessed with things being real? This is certainly not the first time a memoir has come under fire for being somewhat disloyal to “the truth” (see A Million Little Pieces by James Frey). Where is the line – don’t we all play with it once in a while when telling a story, embellishing little details to make it that bit more exciting? Unfortunately, The Salt Path seems to go further than that – if, and only if, The Observer story is true (there’s that word again), it would mean that Winn supposedly ruined a man’s life, and owes money to many people in the village she and her husband left behind. There is a betrayal here, as the Winns are supposedly victims in their side of the story – when it fact others might have been victims of their actions. But was the walk redemption? Or has it given false hope, inspired others based on a lie? This is something that is hard to reconcile with the portrait of a couple who lost their home out of the goodness of their heart.
