Most of you will have noticed that books have made it into the mainstream news in the past week or so. The controversy surrounding The Salt Path, and the film adaptation that was recently released, is a reminder that when we cross over into the regular news, it tends to be for unfortunate reasons.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
It’s also a reminder that for the world beyond our bookish walls, issues we have been grappling with for years can cause consternation to a public that thought it knew where it stood, only to find its conceptions built on sand. The relationship between truth, story, and memoir is, now, once again at the heart of this set of interrelationships.
Truth, Memoir, and the Frey Effect
The contents of books based on authors’ lives have been the subject of debate and scandal for as long as storytelling. The first time I remember it in the regular news was when it emerged that James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces may have overplayed the drama of the author’s journey through addiction and abuse. As I recall it, the scandal was as large as it was mainly because the book had been endorsed by Oprah. But I may be misremembering that (see what I did there?) Slate offers a good explanation.
The 2018 book The Salt Path is the memoir of a couple who lose everything (their house, and the author Raynor Winn’s husband’s health to an incurable degenerative disease), and then find peace through undertaking a life-altering long walk on the eponymous route. It’s a story of hope and how to find peace mindfully, and was recently made into an acclaimed film.
The only issue is that now a piece of investigative journalism says the two premises—how they lost their house and the husband’s diagnosis—aren’t true. Publishers Penguin Random House have delayed the author’s next book, and the film studio has pushed back responsibility onto the publisher. The author has defended the book.
The Creator-Audience Contract
Arguments have broken out about due diligence, from studio and publisher alike. But while these contracts are important, this story is about a deeper contract with a much longer history: that between creator and audience.
This story matters to us as writers for the reason I hinted at in the opening paragraph. It illustrates something that, within our bubble, we might (in either direction) think of as a closed but technical debate—about which audiences don’t really care.
In an age of influencers who routinely, let’s face it, lie to their audiences to sell products and garner clicks, is there still a contract between audience and creator? Are authors to be held to a higher standard than their social media creator counterparts? Elements of the media and public clearly believe so. Interestingly, Winn’s comment in response that “This is the true story of our journey” echoes James Frey’s statement that the book conveyed “the essential truth of my life.”
These statements capture what, as writers, we intuitively understand—but which readers sometimes can, and lawyers so often do, find hard to grasp.
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