Slurp! We scarf up fake memoirs.
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In hindsight, some of the details in the book did feel vague. The loss of the couple’s home was never quite explained and Moth’s physical issues never seemed enough to stop him walking on. However, I saw that lack of detail as part of Raynor ‘s intention not to dwell on the darkness, but to focus on the light...
Raynor claims that Moth is told by a consultant that he has corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare and terminal neurological condition, related to Parkinson’s, that causes sufferers debilitating symptoms: tremors, loss of limb control, dementia and devastating and irreversible brain damage. With no treatment, and no cure, life expectancy for CBD sufferers is typically six to eight years from diagnosis. Moth, however, has lived with the condition for 18 years. In fact I recall, having read the book, googling the couple out of curiosity and being surprised at how well he looked, but then thinking, “What do I know?”.
Gevalt, woman. You know a lot. You preferred to walk on through the wind, walk on through the rain! Though your dreams be tossed and blown, walk on walk on with hype in your heart…
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A writer for the Independent:
… I was an audience to two early Salt Path haters: my mother and grandmother. “A load of crap,” my grandmother exclaimed between bites of a pub lunch. “It was all a bit neat, wasn’t it?” added my mother.
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Full disclosure: I can be a credulous fool too.
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[T]here were a few nagging doubts in my mind: if the supposedly mortally sick husband ‘Moth’ was really suffering from an incurable and debilitating degenerative disease, why does he appear perfectly well in the many interviews that the couple have given to promote their story; and what exactly was the nature of the vaguely described bad ‘investment’ that lost them their home?…
[I]t is for me a real disappointment to discover, with a sense of weary inevitability, that they are probably just another pair of dishonest grifters making money out of our gullibility.
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Only last week, I was having lunch when The Salt Path came up in conversation. ‘That’s the one about the woman with the terminally ill husband who went off round Cornwall, wasn’t it?’ said one friend. I responded, perhaps a little heartlessly: ‘Yeah, and then the husband weirdly failed to die and she got a couple of sequels out of it.’
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Think of those endless airport books promising businessmen that they are just a mindset tweak away from becoming a billionaire, or evangelical converts who turn out to be running from some abominable secret. It’s even worse when it is combined with this sort of weatherbeaten tweeness, a sentimental, live-laugh-love vision of Britain in which whatever your situation – brain disease, homelessness, poverty – you are only a thermos of tea and a chat with a crofter away from happiness.
Nicely put.
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Even the film-makers appear to have baulked at some of what Winn describes. In the book, the disasters of homelessness and terminal disease are further exacerbated by the tragic death of her favourite old ewe, Smotyn (Welsh for spotty): “I curled on the grass next to her and sobbed… Let me die now, let me be the one to go, don’t let me be left alone, let me die.” This scene was quietly dropped from the film.