Raynor Winn, The Salt Path

Note: At the bottom of this post is the original note about this book, which was complimentary and made no mention whatever of the anxieties I felt about its treatment of illness and disability. I confess, I took it at face value, and the simple fact is that Raynor Winn lied to us.

That's not how the talented and insightful Polly Atkin puts it in her new Literary Hub article "Nature is Not Going to Cure You: On Raynor Winn’s Fabricated Memoir," but that's what I'd say, and also I'd say that we all should've known better. If I'd read Atkin's astonishing, conversational Some Of Us Just Fall before reading Winn's book, I would've known better.

I wonder if Raynor Winn has met James Frey. Trust NOTHING below this word in this post.

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If I was a better person, I would've reread Raynor Winn's memoir-y The Salt Path before posting these notes, but....

The thing is, I loved this book when I read it during the interregnum, during the long months of COVID that I wasn't posting on the blog. It's sweet and tough and clear-eyed, and I've recommended it to so many people IRL that it just doesn't make sense not to say something here.

A precis: not long after Raynor Winn and her husband Moth learn that he has a terminal illness, they lose their family home which provided them with their income. Homeless, unemployed, and facing an uncertain path toward Moth's certain death, the logical move is for these two 50+ non-hikers to walk the 630-mile coastal path from Taunton, in Somerset, to Pencarrow Head, in Dorset. Things go wrong, things go right, but the path and the world remain, and they finish their very long walk together.

And it's stunning.

Moth's cranky but determined, Raynor canny but distractible, and their relationship is improbably unshakeable, all to such an extent that I would've loved to spend even more time with them than the 272 pages that The Salt Path runs. Fortunately, since this one came out in 2018, Winn has already written a second memoir-y book, The Wild Silence, with a third one due this fall, again from Penguin, entitled Landlines.

As often happens to me, somehow I've found myself less motivated to seek out the sequel to a book I so enjoyed. I'd love to justify it somehow (small presses rather than Penguin! so many new voices to check out! variety is the spice of life!), but honestly it's probably COVID and fatigue.

You'll almost certainly love this book, I swear.