BEWARE! Memoirs are not always what they seem

Tintagel, South West Coast Path, Cornwall, England

My memories of a family holiday in Cornwall, England from the early 1970s are few but vivid: fishing for mackerel off a small boat in a rocky sea; meeting the Fosters — a large and lovely family who taught us how to play Racing Demon, a raucous card game that we continued to play for years in our own family; and cool weather — family photos show us in jackets and long pants, no swim suits ever captured on camera. These memories are precious reminders for me of a particular summer* during my childhood.

Hold that thought

In 2018, when I heard of a new memoir by an unknown author about the walk she and her husband took along the South West Coast Path in Cornwall, I knew immediately that I wanted to read it: memoir is a genre I enjoy; the landscape through which the couple walked is raw and beautiful; and their story sounded amazing — hardship and loss, redemption and healing, renewal by way of walking, and success through writing. Everything I love in a story. So I bought The Salt Path by Raynor Wynn and devoured it. Well written and vivid, the couple’s story was remarkable, heart-rending, powerful.

My mother read it, too, and enjoyed it equally. We talked about it. The book was everywhere, a bestseller, award winning. The author was everywhere, in the papers, on the radio and podcasts. A complete and stunning turnaround for her and her husband. No more destitution for them.

Hold that thought

When Wynn’s follow-up book The Wild Silence came out, I downloaded a sample to my e-reader and eagerly began it, but I did not devour it. Something seemed off, fishy, false to me. I read the entire sample but was not persuaded by the writing or the story to buy the book, and I began to wonder who Wynn really was. How had she come to have the exceptional publishing success she had with big-name Penguin Books — selling two million copies worldwide! Possibly the writer in me was a tad jealous, I’ll admit, but when Mum agreed with me that the second book was no match for the first, I let it go and moved on to other things. Until last week. 

That is when a post came across my Instagram account about Chloe Hadjimatheou, a British journalist being nominated for her investigative work on The Salt Path. The journalist’s name didn’t mean anything to me, but her work on this best-selling memoir pulled me in like a powerful magnet. I love nothing more than a diligent journalist on the hunt for the truth — think All the President’s Men, one of my all-time favourite movies and political-news stories.

When I landed on Hadjimatheou’s 7-episode podcast series about her work to uncover the truth behind the memoir, I was hooked. "The Walkers: The real Salt Path" is wonderful story-telling in audio form and impressive (dogged) investigative journalism. I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say that I am thoroughly convinced by Hadjimatheou’s work. If I had a paper copy of Wynn’s book on my shelf, I would shred it.

Hold that thought

We know that memory is not only fallible, it is fickle: what I believe to be true about, let’s say, Sunday lunches at my grandparents’ home may not be what my siblings believe to be true. We each carry versions of the truth of the experience within us. But that difference is mere variation of the same core truth — Granny’s overcooked vegetables, Grandpa’s flourishing of the carving knife while serving the roast, and so on. When I write about those memories, my hope is that my words spark memories, thoughts and ideas in my readers. While not every detail or nuance may be exact and correct, the essence of the story, the core of the narrative absolutely is: the love of family, the gathering around the table for the Sunday ritual of lunch and conversation.

What Raynor Wynn did in her so-called memoir was not so much colouring the truth for the sake of the narrative as it was distorting it, even inventing it, and presenting that story as memoir. I was OUTRAGED when I learned this from Hadjimatheou’s work, because I had been duped by Wynn and by Penguin into believing the story I had read in 2018 was TRUE. That is why I read memoir: for the true story, well told, by someone who has gained something from some real experience that they want to share with others. I do not read memoir for inventions so large they are, in fact, lies. That is what FICTION is for.

These thoughts add up  

Memories are precious. Memoirs are nonfiction narratives, told with creative literary style and techniques. Books are sold by genre. Books need readers. The publishing world operates for profit, but cannot operate outside the rules of their own game if they wish to be credible and reliable for readers. 

Now, in my world, rules are made to be broken, but genres in the writing world exist for the benefit of both the writer and the reader: They demarcate the boundaries within which the story is first written and then read. This understanding is like a contract between writer and reader, and, in my view, it is sacred — breached at the writer’s peril. Just ask Raynor Wynn, whose fourth book is, apparently, on hold at Penguin.

I'm listening to Hadjimatheou's podcast series for the second time, but I'll not read another word by Wynn. 

Cornwall holiday pics: I found these after some digging in a family photo archive labeled Spring 1969.
I cannot believe even my family would go on holiday to Cornwall in springtime England. Hmmmm.
My siblings and I cannot independently verify the date*, but this kind of memory-distortion
(was it 1970 or 1969 or maybe it was 1972?) is not what I would call substantive in this context. Would you? 

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Housekeeping note: Thank you for the comments on last week's post about 'love of country' that many of you sent me or posted to the blog. It is always gratifying when my words evoke your own. Thanks to the suggestion from my friend RT, I reworked the post into an op-ed piece for the local paper; I didn't overthink matters, I revised, I restructured, I hit SEND -- and the next day it appeared with a giant Canadian flag on the op-ed page. And then more comments were sent my way from a whole new round of readers. This is why I write: to connect, to spark, to engage. Thank you for doing exactly that with last week's piece. It warms my heart and fuels my writer's mind.

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Photo by Crispin Jones on Unsplash