Moths to a flame

The success of The Salt Path, Raynor Winn’s memoir of her and her husband’s desperate, inspirational trek round the coast of Cornwall, shows how hungry we humans are for a feel-good story. An investigation by The Observer has revealed that parts of Winn’s story were embellished, distorted and possibly completely made up. The boundaries of truth and lies have become so blurred that disappointed readers are now questioning whether the couple walked the 630-mile coastal path at all, though there is nothing in the exposé to suggest that that part was fabricated. But it shows how once a story presented as true starts to unravel, the loose threads quickly dominate the pattern.

My own memoir, All the Time We Thought We Had, came out at around the same time as The Salt Path and, it’s safe to say, was a lot less successful. Certainly it was never in any danger of being made into a box office smash starring Gillian Anderson. I wrote it during the year after my wife, Magteld, died of cancer, anxious to get the story down before I forgot too many of the details. The most important question I asked myself was: why publish this? It was one thing to preserve the memories for myself, but to repay the time and attention of a wider readership I had to go beyond the banal, sad truth that my wife’s death at the age of 38 had left me feeling wretched and lonely. It had to offer some kind of redemption.

In an interview to publicise the book, a journalist asked if I’d found love again. By now I’d been widowed for five years, so the question wasn’t unreasonable: in fact, it’s one I’d have asked if I’d been the interviewer. But the disappointment on her face when I said no was almost palpable. The pull of a happy ending is so strong that we almost feel short-changed if a sad story doesn’t have one. That was something Raynor Winn understood very well. The Salt Path was described as “unflinchingly honest” and a heartwarming testimony to how British people respond to hardship, but what really inspired readers was Moth Winn’s miraculous ability to survive a terminal brain condition. Alas, although only Moth and his doctors know what it says in his medical records, several neurologists familiar with CBD said that the improvement in his symptoms during the walks was unlike anything they had ever seen. The most likely explanation was that this, too, was a fabrication.

I couldn’t care less about Raynor Winn’s decision to change her and her husband’s names from the more prosaic Sally and Tim Walker when they left their former lives behind. I could just about forgive them claiming to have been made homeless when they had a second house in France: moving permanently to another country under duress is no picnic. The allegations that they were ruined not by an ill-advised investment decision and a miscarriage of justice, but their own greed and deception, were shocking but had an element of hubris. But what really stuck in the craw, for me at any rate, was the quackery. Raynor put Moth’s ability to confound medical science down to “neuroplasticity”, implying that degenerative diseases could be overcome by staying positive and going for some vigorous walks. So many people who have been diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses, or cared for someone who has, have been pestered by an insensitive former friend who claims to have found the cure for their troubles on the internet. The cruelty is in the implication that if the prospect of your own demise is getting you down, it’s because you’re not trying hard enough to fight it.

Readers took Moth’s miraculous recovery to heart because it seemed to be redemptive. They wanted to believe that a man really could get better from a degenerative illness by walking, just as they wanted to believe that British people are unfailingly kind and generous towards those in need, or that a couple devastated by financial and medical traumas can overcome them through sheer grit. The Salt Path’s winning formula is a confection of false certainties and comforting lies laced with pseudo-scientific hocus-pocus. Most good writing, I’ve come to realise, is about pain: how we experience it, how we deal with it and how we cope with its aftermath. The redemption I found in writing my own memoir, and that I wanted to convey to the reader, was the acceptance that life is inherently messy and chaotic, and we tend to be happier when we stop pretending that we’re trudging towards a carefree future. There is no happy ending, no miracle cure; nobody is changed for the better. We learn to accommodate the pain and life goes on. The Salt Path does not describe pain and redemption, but a pastiche of suffering and a pastiche of recovery. It is not an uplifting journey of self-discovery: it is a mirage.