Oh, the trouble we could have saved Sally Walker!
When I say Sally Walker, I mean the author of The Salt Path; when I say we, I mean myself and Jason Goodwin, who between us have published some 15 books – histories, novels, travelogues, cookery books – and who every November run a residential writing course in Dorset; and when I say trouble, well, I mean with her story-telling.
If you happen to have been alive this week – to anything other than Wimbledon or the progress of the Lionesses – then you will have surely been conscious of the monster pickle that Walker (nom de plume Raynor Winn) has gotten herself into. By writing a non-fiction account, that is, of the hike that she and her husband, by her account terminally ill, took along the South West Coast Path – which turns out to be shot through with lies.
It happens that our writing course takes place barely a mile from the path Raynor and Moth, actually Timothy, walked years ago on their ‘remarkable and redemptive journey’. We cover everything, adding all that we’ve learned in the course of our own writing and teaching to the rich mix of ideas which spill out of our guests; how characters speak, how ideas form, what is that the makes a reader commit to a book and, more than anything else, what is the secret to a good story?
Perhaps the most grievous lie exposed by the Observer’s researches into the Walkers relates to the circumstances which led the couple to lose their home and to embark, for want of anywhere else to go, on their great hike; not because, as Walker claimed in the book, she had been stiffed by the obscure machinations of a supposed friend but as a consequence of her having embezzled some £64,000 from her one-time employer. Much has been written about the writer’s contract with her reader and the betrayal of the reader’s trust. And while all that is true, it seems to me to miss the greater point, which is this: that from the writer’s perspective Sally Walker’s greater transgression may have lain in her failure to see that the truth would have made a decidedly greater story than the one she chose to concoct. The problem was that she put the preservation of her reputation as an upstanding character, as if any reader cared, above the story. Given that the alleged industrial-level manufacturing of false invoices in her role as company bookkeeper sounds like nothing if not great material, I can’t help but wish that she’d come clean about the thieving. That would have made a far more compelling justification for a walk that thereby becomes redemptive not merely in a physical and emotional sense but in a moral one too.
It’s instructive to compare this particular literary scandal with the one which engulfed James Frey after the 2003 publication of his A Million Little Pieces. Here the issue was that Frey in framing his descent into a drug-fuelled hell had massively fabricated his juvenile delinquency and his spells in jail – in short, making a fraudulent claim of criminality. Otherwise, as nothing more than an averagely errant youth he would have had, as he seems to have understood all too well, barely a story to tell.
Any writer will understand exactly why the author, in the pursuit of a story, did what he did with A Million Little Pieces. They will find the case at hand harder to make sense of; but what happened with Walker, I’d contend, is that the writer within lost out to the insecure social being within, at the expense not only of the truth but also of the story.
Indeed, if Sally Walker wished to explore the way that stories work, she could do worse than join us at Rushay, the lovely Dorset house where Jason and I will be running this year’s writing course from 21st– 26th November 2025. She could even retrace some sections of her beloved salt path…
For more on the writing course, click here: