This weekend a UK newspaper, The Observer, dropped a grenade into the literary world by reporting that Raynor Winn’s beloved memoir The Salt Path - and the film adaptation currently on screens - were “spun from lies, deceit and desperation.” It’s a striking accusation aimed at a story that has inspired millions, a tale of resilience and redemption on the windswept South West Coast Path. But it also begs a larger question: what do we mean when we talk about “truth” in memoir?
Memoir, by its very nature, is a slippery form. It sits between fact and feeling, between lived experience and crafted narrative. Memoirists don't merely recount events - they shape them, select them, heighten them. This doesn’t necessarily make them liars. It makes them storytellers.
We could go back, if we like, to one of the earliest memoirs in Western literature: Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico. Ostensibly a military accountof Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul, it is also a masterclass in propaganda. The Roman legions always appear noble and victorious; their enemies, brutal and barbarous. The inconvenient truths - the defeats, the errors in judgement, the internal political manoeuvring - are notably absent. And yet no one reads Caesar today for factual accuracy. We read it for insight into how Caesar saw himself and wanted to be seen: as a strong, just leader with history at his feet.
Winston Churchill understood this well. “History will be kind to me,” he said, “for I intend to write it.” That quote alone tells us that self-authorship is part of the power of memoir. Churchill was not simply recording history; he was shaping legacy. Memoir, at its most potent, is an act of control over narrative when life itself may have felt beyond control.
Which brings us back to Raynor Winn. If it’s true that elements of The Salt Path were fictionalised or glossed over - if, say, the couple were not quite as destitute as portrayed, or the reasons for the destitution not so clean cut and
blameless, or indeed if illnesses may not be quite as clearly diagnosed as may be claimed - does that render the entire story a fraud? Or does it still carry a deeper, emotional truth: that a couple facing profound loss found solace and strength in nature, that they walked their way into a new kind of life?
We are not defending wholesale invention here. There is a line. A memoirist cannot fabricate core facts and still claim the authority of lived truth. But that line isn’t always easy to see. It shifts depending on the purpose of the story and the pact between writer and reader. Some authors go too far - James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces being the cautionary tale. Initially sold as a raw and harrowing true account of addiction and recovery, it was later revealed that significant parts were exaggerated or entirely fabricated. Oprah Winfrey, who had championed the book, famously confronted Frey on live television, and readers felt betrayed. The backlash wasn’t just about the lies - it was about the breach of trust. On the other hand, authors like Karl Ove Knausgård go to the opposite extreme. In his six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle (MinKamp), Knausgård lays bare every facet of his personal life: his relationships, family conflicts, insecurities, and even his most mundane thoughts. The books are so ruthlessly honest that they caused real-life rifts with people portrayed in them - including his wife and father’s family - raising questions not about factual accuracy, but about how much truth one should reveal. In Frey’s case, the danger was too little truth. In Knausgård’s, perhaps too much. Both illuminate the complex ethics of writing about one’s own life - and the lives that inevitably surround it.
The real skill of memoir is knowing where to draw the line. To tell the truth, not necessarily as it happened minute by minute, but as it felt. To shape reality without betraying it. To honour the emotional core without straying into fiction disguised as fact. This is where a good memoir service comes in, to help you find that line without lessening the impact of your story.
Memoir is not reportage. It is memory filtered through meaning. It is not courtroom evidence. It is campfire storytelling. And if Raynor Winn helped readers feel less alone, less defeated, more hopeful - even if some details were burnished along the way - that too is a kind of truth. But when truth gives way to deception, the trust between writer and reader breaks. And that, more than any factual discrepancy, is the greatest betrayal.
In memoir, the truth matters. But it is the right truth - the deeper truth - that matters most.
To find out more, visit Memoir Magpie