Up the garden Path

The book everyone's talking about

PUBLISHERS COME UP with all sorts of wheezes to get booksellers to read (and hopefully then recommend) their wares. They bombard us with multiple proof copies before publication, with hyperbolic notes pleading for our attention for this ‘lead title’, ‘superlead’ or even ‘biggest superlead for years’. The classier editors send handwritten postcards extolling the virtues of their latest works.

Some authors, meanwhile, are held captive by publicists until they’ve hand-delivered such proofs to every bookshop in town, sometimes with added inducements in the form of chocolate or sweets (yes please).

Nothing, though, gets a book to jump out of my to-be-read pile like a good old scandal. So it was that, despite being published in 2018 and selling just shy of a million copies, it was only this week that I finally got around to starting The Salt Path. And I’m enjoying it so far, even though I’ve yet to get to the bit where Raynor and Moth are joined on their journey by a talking horse named Shergar who sympathises with the plight of the litigant in person and advises them on the best campsites to bunk down without paying.

I’m not the only one whose curiosity has spiked. As soon as I opened up the bookshop earlier in the week, one regular perched at the bar ostensibly to order a cuppa but principally, it seemed, to ask “so, what do you think?” An ex-boss of a chain bookseller texted me from a screening of the film adaptation to report a “packed” and “quite excitable” audience. Presumably sales of popcorn were up.

For those somehow unaware of the book, in the same week Raynor Winn loses her business and home through no fault of her own and learns that her husband, Moth, is dying of a rare neurodegenerative disease. The two then set out to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path and are revived by nature and the kindness of strangers. The original paperback edition made almost £5m at the tills and became the 45th bestselling non-fiction paperback since accurate records began, according to The Bookseller, a trade magazine.

For those somehow unaware of this week’s brouhaha, The Observer alleged that the memoir was, well, somewhat less than the “honest and life-affirming true story” we were sold. The report claimed Winn embezzled £64,000 from an employer and cast doubt on the author’s claims about her husband’s health. Winn issued a convoluted rebuttal disputing the reporting but admitting that she reached a settlement with the employer on a “non-admissions basis” after he reported her to the police.

No doubt all of this will be debated (and perhaps litigated) for some time to come. But the affair brings to the foreground two interesting points about publishing.

First, it underscores the extent to which readers rely on the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. In this case, no one in publishing is seriously arguing that, if the facts are as The Observer claims, the book falls under the heading of ‘artistic licence’. But the furore is a useful warning. The depth of feeling and the language of “betrayal” indicates just how strongly the average reader believes that everything in a book marketed as non-fiction should be just that.

Publishers are a little too comfortable with messing about with what actually happened when, or what one calls “creative freedom when it comes to dialogue, scene or characterisation”. The use of composite characters, where for narrative simplicity the actions of several real people are attributed to one ‘non-fictional’ hybrid, for instance, is fairly common.

Memoir is a particularly fraught genre. One thoughtful editor emailed this week with the example of a doctor or therapist whose imperative to protect their patients’ confidentiality might mean writing “about a situation that’s fabricated from the experiences of several patients that would therefore be true in essence but not specifics”.

“The writer (and publisher) has to negotiate these grey areas,” the editor went on, “both with respect to the law and their moral compass; it might be the case the author’s right to write about their experience can only be exercised if facts are changed or identities concealed, but does this make a story untrue?”

As the editor pointed out, the risk of a reader feeling misled in such cases can be mitigated — but not entirely removed — by an upfront explanation in the book itself. Another editor remembers fighting for just such a declaration in a similar book to be moved from the afterword to the front of the book.

Still, the best narrative non-fiction writers can tell a great story without such devices. They will often supply sources and an author’s note explaining how they have approached episodes where the facts are unclear.

Second, some of the responses to the reporting show a lack of understanding of the role of a book editor. This is understandable: until I started Backstory, I’d have pictured an unworldly type in tweed whiling away the days in a comfy armchair, manuscript and red pen to hand.

Some senior editors are called ‘publishers’ or ‘publishing directors’ and in a way this better describes their job. In my experience, they are ferociously bright and creative individuals who care deeply about their books. But they are also harried and permanently on-deadline cogs in a publishing machine, responsible for editing ten or more books a year at the same time as choosing between sometimes more than 100 mock-ups of a book cover, reading countless submissions from aspiring authors and attending endless acquisitions meetings, launches and author events.

They are required to care much more about commercials than their equivalents in newsrooms. Apart from the most senior amongst them, newspaper editors were traditionally blissfully unaware of the impact of a given story on the bottom line. In a decade in journalism I never once heard talk of a P&L; every book has one and every book editor has to care about it.

In this context, even the £2,000 or so that it costs to request a legal read of a manuscript is significant. (Even then, the lawyer’s job is to pick up on potentially defamatory statements or actionable invasions of privacy, not to conduct a forensic investigation into a writer’s account of her own life. The Salt Path, apparently, had a legal read.)

“I don’t know of any British publisher that employs a full-time fact-checker,” one non-fiction editor told me. “So uncontroversial assertions will rest on the author’s warranties and indemnities in their contract with the publisher — and good old-fashioned trust and honesty. Though of course standard editorial processes often lead to discussions around correcting facts just as much as correcting spellings.”

As another put it to me, “sometimes alarm bells go off and sometimes they don’t”. “We’re not The New Yorker. We don’t have a bottomless pit of money, we are overworked editors doing a minimum of ten new titles a year if not more. If an author says x is y, our inclination is to believe them, unless it smells wrong.”

Nor, I pointed out, is there much incentive to start picking holes in a good story. “People want redemptive stories,” the editor agreed. “They want hope. The world feels increasingly hopeless.”

For good or ill, then, an editor has neither the time nor the inclination to check every assertion made by an author. A rogue comma will probably be picked up, a libel of an oligarch certainly will… but a selective account of the author’s motivations for a long walk in the countryside? Hardly.

Non-fiction is my first love. I still believe a great work of history or journalism can be as much a page-turner and every bit as moving as a novel. But the truly great non-fiction writer has confidence that the stuff of real life is vivid and fascinating enough without embellishment, that there is no need to let a good story get in the way of the facts.

Happy reading!
Tom

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