There has been a media storm surrounding the memoir series “The Salt Path” by Raynor Winn (the author’s pseudonym). The memoir, now a trilogy with a potential fourth book still to come, has also been recently adapted into a major motion picture. The plot of the memoir appealed to me personally, not necessarily because of the usual interest in overcoming adversity plots, but rather because the novel centred on walking, hiking, and the restorative power of putting one foot in front of the other.

Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild, which I’ve reviewed in the past (find the review here), follows a similar plot: walk until you figure yourself out. Humans have been walking to find and lose themselves for centuries, and I believe this is part of the appeal of many hiking and walking memoirs, of which The Salt Path could certainly be classified as. I think there’s a reason why people turn to running marathons and hiking epic trails when they reach a certain age – it’s about finding the person you wanted to be but might have lost sight of because of family, life, work, children, illness, loss, and so much more.

Yet, The Salt Path, if recent investigative articles are supposed to be believed, might not reflect the whole truth, allegedly. I don’t want to speculate on the veracity of the story. I don’t have all the details, nor am I a lawyer. What I do know a thing or two about, though, is memoir writing, because I wrote my PhD on the philosophy of selfhood and memoir. And what I want to focus on today are the theories that might help us understand why and how we conceptualise memoirs and creative nonfiction writing in a way that differs from fiction and other forms of creative writing.

No one cares if a fiction novel is made up. In fact, that is the whole point. People expect a fantastical story that, while it might have elements of plausibility, can be complete and utter fabrication. The crazier and weirder the fabrication, the better it can be sometimes.

Memoir, a form of autobiographical writing, has an entirely different playbook.

Memoir comes from the French mémoire, meaning “memories”. It typically refers to a specific period in a person’s life, rather than recounting their entire life. Memoirs might be about a trip (like a really long walk or hike), but it could also be about their time at a particular company (think The Wolf of Wall Street), or it could be about a time when they were ill (I’ve reviewed some examples in the past here). It differs from the term “autobiography”, which is supposed to refer to the retelling of a person’s whole life. The “auto” in autobiography means that the author and the subject of the biography are one and the same. A “biography” differs from an autobiography in that it has a different author from the subject of the book. A famous example of this is the biography Alexander Hamilton written by Ron Chernow. The subject of the biography is the life of Alexander Hamilton, but it was not written by Hamilton.

Why is it important to establish these kinds of terms? Many readers consume content without always considering the rich history of storytelling and how genres form, evolve, and change. Whether we know it or not, genres affect our expectations of a story, even if we might not understand all the rules of the genre. Just imagine a crime novel where no crime is committed. Or a romance novel where no one falls in love, with anyone or anything. As you can see, some genres have obvious expectations, while others, like memoir, might be more vague; nonetheless, expectations are present. And those expectations shape our relationships to the stories we do and don’t read.

Memoirs are about the specific remembrances of a time in someone’s life, like a long hike along the English coastline. They are always biased recollections, as it is impossible to disentangle oneself from one’s own perspectives. Memoirs are always going to write the protagonist in a particular way, because the author is the subject. The memoir, unlike diaries or personal journals, also has an element of the public in it. The memoir is written with an audience in mind, which changes the way the story is shaped and told. The public and private self become so enmeshed in memoir writing that it can be impossible to untangle. And really, disentangling the two isn’t the point.

What becomes fraught is the expectation of ‘truth’ in nonfiction writing. And the truth I speak of here is not an ‘ultimate truth’ that is objective (although there are always objective truths in what we write). The ‘truth’ and the ‘expectation’ can be thought of as the relationship between the reader and writer. What might this truth be? Well, there are a lot of theorists and literary critics who have written extensively about this topic, and it goes all the way back to ancient Greek philosophy. We have been thinking about the dilemma of truth and expectation in storytelling since we started telling ourselves stories.

The writing of autobiographical works of any kind is a way of forming and creating our identity. Just like the stories we tell ourselves in our heads about who we are, what we like, who we love, what our culture and language are, etc. The narrative becomes a way to make sense of our selfhood, and I argue (like many philosophers) that writing is not just a sense-making tool, but a way for us to construct and constitute our identities. This is also true for the reading of texts (memoir, but also fiction and other genres). When we read, we also form and construct our own identities. Not in the way that we become “the person who likes romcoms”, or “the person who enjoys a spicy margarita”, but that we see parts of ourselves in the characters, in the plots we read, in the relationships we observe on the page. They help us affirm, reject, and question who we are.

This is at the crux of why allegations of fictionalisation in memoirs and autobiographical works become so scandalised. The truth, the creation of identity through writing, is fractured because the reader’s expectation —the expectation that we are given truths about not just ‘who’ someone is in the world, but ‘how’ they constructed their identity in the world —is potentially undermined.

It is still early days, and I am unsure what will happen with The Salt Path. I do know that there are many other memoirs that have also had allegations about how ‘truthful’ they were, and I am sure that there will be many more. The reason why memoirs, and creative nonfiction writing, can be so powerful is because of the level of truth involved in it. It is an unspoken contract between writer and reader, and a painful when one feels like the other has broken that contract, that trust.

Let me know if you have read The Salt Path or seen the film. As always, stay respectful and share the love.