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Warning: this post discusses terminal illness and Ableism
I watched a normal-looking woman on The One Show sofa, sitting next to the actor Jason Isaacs, and talking about her memoir being turned into a movie (starring, oddly enough, Jason Isaacs.)
(The One Show - for those of you who aren't British - is a Big Deal™.)
Something about her - the woman, Raynor Winn - seemed... off.
But then, I try not to judge too much based on brief interviews - I don't know these people, y'know?
Sometimes people seem off - not least when they're not TV people, and suddenly find themselves talking to the nation in the prime-time flagship slot (Lord knows, that would def. make me seem off!)
Her story - the story on which her book, The Salt Path, was based - was one of perseverance against the odds.
Raynor Winn and her husband Moth (no, those aren't their legal names,) lost their house in Pwllheli, North Wales to a 'bad investment' the same week that Moth was diagnosed with a rare and agressive terminal illness.
(Before you ask, I don't think they're Welsh - they were living in Wales, but are English as far as I know. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.)
Having effectively lost everything, they make the decision to live a nomad's life, and hike The Salt Path (hence the name,) otherwise known as the South West Coast Path in England's West Country (int'l folks: the West Country is a group of English counties.)
Along the way, Moth miraculously begins to reverse his no-hope diagnosis.
Which... was part of the reason I thought Raynor Winn seemed off, not gonna lie.
If something seems too-good-to-be-true, it usually is.
And having lost my mother a few months before that The One Show appearance... I felt like she was implicitly encouraging terminally ill people to take part in a extreme feat (the SW Coast Path is loooong, and known to be a not-easy hike,) with the painful hope of achieving their own miracles.
...It seemed like it was verging on inspiration porn, in all honesty.
Not long later, I heard the name Raynor Winn again, and thought of that ordinary-looking, possibly slightly-off, woman, sitting on The One Show sofa.
But this time, her and her best-selling memoir, The Salt Path, were all over the news for a whole different reason.
I've never read The Salt Path by Raynor Winn.
I was vaguely aware of it, of course, before the movie came out and then the scandal hit - it's hard to hang around bookish webspaces and not have had it enter your periphery vision from time to time, usually in the form of a glimpse of the cover - but it never really seemed like my kind of book.
To be honest, my brain put it down as some sort of combination of Wainwright's Walks and supermarket-shelf misery memoir, neither of which appealed to me, (but all love to those who like either of those - you do you.)
This may or may not be an accurate or an inaccurate description of the book - as I said, I haven't read it.
But then, the scandal.
Newspaper articles started to filter through the noise, declaring that maybe this true story is not-so-true after all.
And then I saw the Sky documentary (conveniently titled 'The Salth Path Scandal,') led by Chloe Hadjimatheou, the journalist who originally broke the scandal in The Observer.
Now, The Salt Path Scandal documentary was pretty good.
It certainly did a good job of investigating the claims made in the book, and raising questions about what Raynor and Moth Winn are really like.
But... it was also clearly journalist-lead. And it had a journalist's approach to what constitutes 'The Truth.'
'But Cee, surely there's only one Truth?' - I'm so glad you asked, hypothetical reader, because no.
There is never just one truth.
Because we're all looking at things from our own perspectives, our own lenses, warped by time and emotion and the fallability of human memory.
And that difference in perception? Carries a lot more weight than you'd think.
I've spoken online, more than once, about the toxic friendship I was stuck in as a teenager.
I hope that it would be pretty damn difficult to track down the girl involved; I'm not naive enough to think that it's impossible, but pretty damn difficult is, I hope, a good enough layer of protection to both her and me.
But if she were to come across one of my writings about her - would she realise, I wonder? Would it ring any bells?
And if she did know that I was writing about her... I seriously doubt she would see that period of our lives in the same way that I now do.
I imagine she's painted a version of that time in her memory where either everything was sunshine and rainbows, or else every single girl who eventually escaped her influence was somehow the villain.
Very few people see themselves as 'the bad guy.'
I very much doubt that Raynor Winn sees herself as 'the bad guy' when it comes to how she lost the house.
She blames a bad investment, and heavily implies she was scammed by a friend.
The counter-narrative, from people who knew her in Pwllheli, back when she went by the name Sally Walker, is that she was allegedly embezzling and stealing left and right, and lost the house as part of a court order to get some of the money she had taken paid back.
The thing is that memoir writers? They're not journalists. They're telling their story, not the objective, provable, facts.
I've come across a fair few memoir writers in my time on the bookish interwebs - some are shy, some are bold, some are kind, some are mean: it takes all kinds.
And they have a wide variety of views on just how 'true' a memoir should be.
Some view memoir as requiring absolute 100% honesty - down to researching facts to get the timeline of their own lives in order.
Others see it as Art with a capital A - yes, it's true, but the details don't matter.
It's emotionally true - the rest is for the story, for the reflection, for the potential healing that it can bring to write things out when you've been through some sh**.
Because the way that a memoir is presented is as a cohesive narrative - a story, laid out from beginning to end.
And that's broken, the illusion shattered, if it's filled with 'and I can't remember if it was my neighbour or that kid from my maths class 'cos they had the same haircut at the time' or 'then my teacher said something but I don't remember what.'
A few instances of that is acceptable, even relatable; a book filled with it is unreadable.
So if you can't remember whether it was your sister or your cousin that you went to that park with when that thing happened? Pick one that feels right-ish.
If there were about five people involved and the whole scene has got a bit messy? Cut it down to two or three and make them composite characters. Representative of more than one of the real people in your life.
...It was with composite characters that The Salt Path Scandal doc. misunderstood the medium the most, imho.
There was an instance talking about a dude Raynor and Winn had met on their walk - an American artist in the middle of the English countryside - they went home with said dude, and a few things happened.
So the documentary tracks down an American artist in the middle of the English countryside who had met Raynor and Moth, and complains that when they were at his place, he was not living the life of swingers and hedonism that's implied in the book.
...This would have been a decent complaint, if Raynor Winn had 'named and shamed' him in the book. Defamation, even.
But the man in the book? The, for want of a better word, character? He didn't have the same name as the man who was complaining.
In my oh-so humble opinion, the book character was a composite of several different people that Raynor and Moth met along the way.
Because the story worked better when features of more than one guy were given to the sexy-times story.
Hell, Raynor may even have confused two or more people in her head. Memories are tricksy things, and not as fixed as we would all would like to think.
Granted, if this character is a composite, she clearly hasn't mixed the melting pot enough to obscure any details of the real American guy - so she should have done better.
Or I could be giving her too much benefit of the doubt - who knows?
Regardless of whether this was a composite character or not, the American fella sees it as a thinly-veiled representation of himself, and is hurt by it.
And that sucks. I would hate for someone to write about me in an unflattering and potentially untruthful light, and I'm sure you would too.
And, again in my oh-so humble opinion, this is one of the pitfalls of the whole memoir genre - especially where retelling and composite characters are concerned.
Because if a journalist doesn't realise that memoirs have a different definition of 'truth' then you can guarantee that the general public has absolutely no clue.
The problem is that memoir 'characters' are not the same as fictional characters - they have to (potentially) suffer the real-life ramifications of artistic decisions.
But when the memoir writer is writing, I imagine that those memoir 'characters' don't always feel like real people.
Or if they do, it's people as they were at that precise moment - frozen in time and therefore unable to be hurt by something like a misremembering, or a difference in perception.
Of course, then there's the biggest question of all - how 'true' was Moth's terminal diagnosis?
It feels unpleasant to even consider questioning someone's serious health problems.
But when someone's other claims are being questioned, it's kind of inevitable.
And, as I said at the beginning, the memoir - which was not written by Moth himself but by his wife - does seem to be presented as a bit... Ableist-trope-y.
And that kind of slightly off-ness is going to lead to awkward questions. And questions shouldn't be avoided just because they're awkward.
So yes, the question of whether Moth actually had that diagnosis were raised by both the original articles and The Salt Path Scandal documentary.
I think that Chloe Hadjimatheou's article 'The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit and desperation' lays her points out pretty neatly - note: she uses both Moth and his former name, Tim Walker, to describe Mr. Winn:
'Moth’s debilitating illness is at the very heart of the story in The Salt Path. Winn tells us that he received his diagnosis in 2013, a few days after they learned that their house would be repossessed. A consultant explains to the couple that Moth has corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a relatively rare neurological condition in the same family as Parkinson’s disease.'
[...]
'Life expectancy for CBD sufferers is often tragically short: six to eight years from diagnosis is typical. Many patients suffer debilitating symptoms significantly before that, often ending in the need for around-the-clock care. In Tim Walker’s case, he has been living with the condition for 18 years and he seems to have no visibly acute symptoms.'
[...]
'Each of Winn’s three books has a similar structure: they all start with Moth suffering from the symptoms of CBD. The couple then embarks on a challenging walk of hundreds of miles over several months, carrying their belongings and tent on their backs. By the end of the walk Moth’s symptoms have abated and he seems much better.
The last of Winn’s three books, Landlines, goes a step further. In the first few chapters, Moth’s condition seems far worse than it has ever been and a brain scan shows “a distinct reduction in his receptor cells”. But at the end, of another long walk a subsequent brain scan shows “a normal reading”. The CBD seems to have disappeared.'
If I were being exceptionally kind (and someone's got to be, because lord knows there's not enough kindness out there,) I would suggest that perhaps Moth was misdiagnosed - that a stroke, perhaps, was causing his symptoms, and that a whole parade of doctors have been dropping the ball for nearly two decades.
Pwllheli comes under Betsi Cadwaladr health board, and honestly I doubt that a misdiagnosis would hit their Top 10 Big Mistakes We Shouldn't Have Made list any time soon - as a health board, they are somewhat notorious.
But then, the Winns moved shortly after the diagnosis to do their West Country adventure, so presumably there's been some other health boards involved with them in the 18 years since.
So it is possible that a misdiagnosis was involved. But it still raises questions.
I think that what was most telling to me, though, was when The Salt Path Scandal doc. tracked down some family members of both Tim and Sally Walker (aka Moth and Raynor Winn.)
Both families had tales of family members being ripped off financially by the couple in extremely unpleasant (downright nasty, in some cases,) circumstances.
And the general attitude was that they never paid any attention to 'Uncle Tim's' various illnesses - rightly or wrongly, they didn't take his health seriously.
Of course, Ableism does mean that even those closest to us can be dismissive of serious health problems, but they certainly weren't backing him up, so make of that what you will.
So where does that leave The Salt Path? Where does that leave 'the truth'?
As they always were - our own perspectives, our own lenses, warped by time and emotion and the fallability of human memory.
...But hopefully shaped, at least a little bit, by the evidence, too.
Though in this case, the solid evidence, on all sides, seems a little... off. 😉
Raynor Winn refutes the allegations made, and her full statement, including alleged medical letters about Moth's ongoing re-diagnosis, can be read here.
The next Nerd Church post will be on 25th Jan 2026 - hope to see you there!
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