New Salt Path revelations...
Sunday Blog 227 - 22nd March 2026
Today will be a post only, with no video or audio. I have a cold and it has temporarily robbed me of my voice.
When The Observer article first dropped in July 2025, questioning the truth of the memoir The Salt Path, I was riveted. The article is entitled ‘The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit and desperation.’
Let me summarise for you. The Salt Path author’s nom-de-plume is Raynor Winn. Her actual name is Sally Walker. Her memoir posits that she and her husband lost their home through no fault of their own, and then he was diagnosed with the hideous cortico-basal-degeneration disease - CBD. In the face of these two monumental setbacks, they took up their rucksacks and hiking boots and headed to the Salt Path - the South Downs Way - in the UK. He is miraculously cured by all that walking and they re-establish themselves financially and all is joy.
Two other spin-off books with the same narrative arc of man-is-sick-man-and-wife-walk-man-gets-better have since been published, and all have done well. Walker has been a cash cow for the publisher Penguin.
Enter The Observer article which revealed that Sally Walker had embezzled more than 64,000 pounds from her employer when she was bookkeeping at his real estate company in a sleepy little UK village. When her dodgy accounting was revealed, Sally Walker begged them not to press charges and repaid the money by drumming up a loan with heinously large interest payments, using her home as collateral. Over time the loan was called in, and that’s how she lost the house.
Doubts have also been cast on her husband’s CBD diagnosis which usually has a six-eight year prognosis. He is still alive and quite hearty more than thirteen years after his diagnosis.
Anyone, like myself, who attempts memoir understands that the whole truth can never be told. Only my version of events, through my idiosyncratic lenses and biases. But. As the quote from one of my favourite authors that begins this blog says, we as writers have to put down the bad and stupid things we do.
Like Wil Patterson did in his memoir Mr Ordinary Goes to Jail where he traces his gradually escalating financial pressure to provide the lifestyle his spouse wanted. And then there is the day when he sees a cheque cross his desk (he works in insurance) which is made out to his name. He banks it, panics and then - nothing. Nobody notices, and so bit by bit he steals cheques that are not made out to him. On and on it goes, but eventually he is caught and fully co-operates with the police. He also shares the experience of his three-year sentence and what he learned about the prison system. It’s a deeply human book. Maybe Sally Walker could have written that book, but instead she chose to write a novel in which she cast herself as innocent victim. And markets it as a memoir.
The journalist who broke the Salt Path story, Chloe Hadjimatheou, has recently done a seven-part podcast on the controversy, bringing yet more deceit to light. I binge-listened to it. Public service announcement - you have to sign up to the Observer podcast as a free trial to hear the last episode so you may as well sign up in the beginning and save yourself all those ads.
In case you don’t have the time required to listen to it all, I can share some nuggets:
The affecting scene in the book and movie where the bailiffs knock on the door? Didn’t happen. They’d already long left.
As well as embezzling from her employer, Sally Walker stole from her parents-in- law. And her mother. She has never faced criminal charges on any of her thefts.
I could go on and on. Penguin still lists The Salt Path as an unflinchingly honest memoir. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s a literary heist on the public’s sympathy and kind hearts.
Here’s forever and always to the Garners of this world, the memoirists who tackle writing all the worst things about ourselves, honouring the integrity contract between author and reader.