Raynor Winn, author of the award-winning memoir The Salt Path, which was recently adapted into a film, has been accused of “lies, deceit and desperation”. Writing in The Observer, reporter Chloe Hadjimatheou claims that Winn left out significant facts and invented parts of the story.

The Salt Path follows a transformative 630-mile trek along England’s South West Coast Path that Winn took with her terminally ill husband Moth after they lost their home and livelihood.

The Observer article claims that aspects of both the story of losing their home and Winn’s husband’s illness were fabricated. In a statement on her website, Winn has defended her memoir, calling the claims “grotesquely unfair” and “highly misleading”.

There’s a long list of memoirs which have been shown to be problematic. James Frey’s recovery memoir A Million Little Pieces (2003) was allegedly exaggerated. In 2006, he apologised for fabricating portions of the book. Worse, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s feted Holocaust survivor memoir Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1995) was completely fake. Wilkomirski’s real name was Bruno Dössekker and he was not a Holocaust survivor, he had simply invented his “memories” of a death camp, though he seemed to believe they were true.

But, for readers, how much does this matter? Novelist D.H. Lawrence wrote that readers should: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.” As readers of The Salt Path, we fear for Raynor and Moth as they desperately try to escape drowning from a freak high tide at Portheras Cove. We are relieved when we hear that Moth’s terminal disease was “somehow, for a while, held at bay”.

The origin of the word fiction is from the Latin fingere, which means not to lie, but to fashion or form. All memoirs – indeed, all texts, from scientific articles to history books to bestselling novels – are “formed” or “shaped”. Writing doesn’t just fall from a tree, we make it, and it reveals the world by mediating the world.

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But this idea, that writing is a “shaping”, is why this case matters. Writing, done by oneself, or by a ghostwriter (or even by AI) has conventions, not-quite-rules that underlie its creation and reception. Some of these are in the text (the enemies eventually become lovers); some are outside the text itself (you really can judge a book by its cover). But most conventions are both inside and outside at the same time.

Works by historians have footnotes to sources, so you (and other historians) can check the claims. Each scientific article refers to many others, because each article is just one tiny piece of the whole puzzle on which a huge community of scientists are working, and the extensive references show how this piece fits (or doesn’t). Non-fiction follows conventions, while novelists can do whatever they want, of course, to challenge or obey the conventions (that’s one reason why novels are exciting).

Memoir has a particularly important convention, revealed most clearly by the historian Stefan Maechler’s report on Wilkomirski’s fraudulent memoir. Maechler argued that Wilkomirski broke what the French critic Philippe Lejeune called the “autobiographical pact”, a contract of truth between the author and the reader.

For Lejeune, however, this pact is not like a legal agreement. A memoir, unlike a scientific article, need only put forward the truth as it appeared to the author in that area of their life. While the information needs to be accurate to some degree, its level of verifiability is less than a legal document or work of history. Much more important for Lejeune is the harder-to-pin-down fidelity to meaning.

After all, many meaningful things – falling in love, for example, or grief – happen mostly inside us and are hard to verify. Even more, the developing overall shape of our life as it seems to us is not really a historical fact, but our own making of meaning. For Lejeune, in a memoir, this emotional truth is more significant than the verifiable truth.

Playing with ‘emotional truth’

The author of The Salt Path seems to have leaned into this idea. In her first statement after The Observer’s piece she claims that her book “lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives … This is the true story of our journey”. How, after all, could one verify a “spiritual journey”?

However, I don’t fully agree with Lejeune. Perhaps our inner and outer worlds are not as separate as he supposes. Our public actions, including sharing facts, show who we are as much as our words describing our inner journeys.

In a memoir, the verifiable truth and the emotional truth are linked by a kind of feedback loop. As readers, we allow some degree of playing with verifiable truth: dialogue is reconstructed, not recorded; we accept some level of dramatisation; we know it’s from one person’s perspective. But we also make a judgment about these things (there’s no fixed rule, no science to this judgment).

If there’s too much reconstruction, too much dramatisation, we begin to get suspicious about the emotional truth too: is this really how it felt for them? Was it honestly a spiritual journey? And, in turn, this makes us more suspicious of the verifiable claims. By contrast, the novelist’s pact with the reader admits they fake emotional truth, which somehow makes it not fake at all: that’s one reason why novels are complicated.

This is why defending a memoir’s “emotional truth” is a high-risk strategy. We know from our own lives that people who are unreliable in small (verifiable) things are often unreliable in large (emotional, meaningful) ones.

So, for readers, the facts behind The Salt Path matter less in themselves and more because each question points to a larger issue about the book’s meaning. When you call someone “fake”, you don’t really mean that “their factual claims are inaccurate”, but that they are somehow inauthentic, hollow or – it’s a teenager’s word, but still – phoney. Once the “autobiographical pact” looks broken in enough small details, the reader no longer trusts the teller or the tale.

In a lengthy statement published on her website in which she addresses the allegations in detail, Winn said that the suggestion that Moth’s illness was fabricated was an “utterly vile, unfair, and false suggestion” and added: “I can’t allow any more doubt to be cast on the validity of those memories, or the joy they have given so many.”

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Robert Eaglestone does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.