Feeling salty about being led down a bad path

I’m heartsick. An author that I loved lied. It wasn’t that she quibbled or fudged. She lied by seriously distorting basic facts. She wrote three lovely memoirs (The Salt Path, The Wild Silence, and Landlines), which I have encouraged friends to read. Worse, I’ve written positive reviews of her books.

Now, the author is at the center of a controversy. The controversy, which focuses on her first book, The Salt Path, tells the story of Sally and Tim Walker (known in the books as Raynor and Moth Winn) and the cataclysmic events that upended their lives, and the creative way they responded.

In The Salt Path, Walker/Winn said that a bad investment deal wiped out their money and caused them to lose their house. Homeless and middle-aged, they decided to hike the South West Coast Path of England also known as The Salt Path.

Along the way, they sometimes slept outdoors. Some days, they had little to eat. Often they encountered kind people. As they trudged the coastal path, Walker/Winn’s husband, who was suffering from a debilitating disease, started to get better.

The reader is drawn into this tragedy of extreme down-and-outness and wonders, How could this happen?

The truth, though, is far less laudable. What has recently come to light is the fact that Walker/Winn embezzled 64,000 pounds ($86,000 in US dollars) from an employer. When she was discovered, she borrowed money from a relative in order to pay back the stolen funds.

The person who made the loan then ran into money trouble and from there the Walker/Winns’ financial situation unraveled. The fact remains that Walker/Winn was not blameless, and she was not a victim.

Other facts are troubling, too: The medical community doubts the veracity of Walker/Winn’s claims about her husband’s health. Also, the couple owned property in France, but Walker/Winn never mentions it in the book. The author maintains that the house in France is uninhabitable. So, why not say that?

This isn’t the first time an author has distorted or misrepresented or even fabricated events. James Frey exaggerated details of his childhood in A Million Little Pieces, and Oprah, who had praised his book, had to eat crow when the truth came out.

If an author sees the need to manipulate the facts, why not just write fiction? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that we love to read true stories of hardship and forbearance, but Walker/Winn did not tell a true story.

In writing about this discovery in The Observer, a newspaper originating in the United Kingdom, writer Chloe Hadjimatheou said, “The power of a true story lies in the fact that it’s true: it promises to tell the reader something real about what it is to be human and what’s possible.”

It is true that humans lie and humans steal, but in not telling readers that she had done both, Walker/Winn didn’t ultimately tell us what was possible; she told us a perversion.

A reader enters a contract with the author. A fiction writer can lie and still tell great truth about the human condition. The memoirist, however, has a greater burden to tell the real truth, to respect the author’s trust.

I trusted Walker/Winn, and now that trust is broken with me and all her many fans.

We want possibilities, not perversions, in other aspects of life, too. We place trust in institutions and leaders, and we enter a similar contract of trust, but that trust is being broken over and over again.

What are we to do? We can grow cynical, or we can speak up. It feels small and insufficient to say, "Speak up," but do it anyway, even if your heart is broken. 

Joan Zwagerman is now wary of recommending memoirs to friends.