A tale we should've known to take with a pinch of salt

While the author has denied fabricating parts of her memoir, 'The Salt Path', we must acknowledge how much we love a cosy adversity story - regardless of truth, says Adam White

- Adam White

Days before The Observer published its bombshell report on the alleged fabrication of key elements of Raynor Winn's pop-inspirational tale The Salt Path, I was the 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.

They complained not because the just-released film adaptation of Winn’s memoir felt disingenuous - there were no Cassandra-like premonitions here of the brewing scandal - but because its story of sudden homelessness and pseudo-philosophical salvation along England’s south coast was representative of a particular milieu in English culture: a middle-class setback dressed up as something we should all care about.

Winn’s 2018 book, which has sold more than 2 million copies and produced two sequels, recounted how she and her husband, Moth, lost their bucolic “forever home” - a 17th-century Welsh farmhouse - after a business deal went awry, leaving them penniless and homeless. At the same time, Moth was diagnosed with a rare and incurable neurological condition known as corticobasal degeneration (CBD), which typically carries a life expectancy of six to eight years.

I should add here that I do not have a heart of stone: of course, these two incidents are saddening and deeply traumatic to those experiencing them. But it is an incredibly unique set of circumstances where modern homelessness is concerned. Before they lost everything, the Winns lived a comfortable, atypical life of business deals, land ownership and financial investing. Cathy Come Home it ain’t.

Still,