Fear and trust: on The Salt Path
When the allegations against Raynor Winn and The Salt Path first broke, seeing a fellow nonfiction writer publicly lambasted for not telling the truth left me feeling anxious for days. Could this ever happen to me?
The reactions that followed the Observer’s ‘big reveal’ were all about lies, deceit and morality. ‘They’re not who they say they are! Did Raynor embezzle money from an employer twenty-odd years ago? Were they really homeless if they own land in France?’ Or as one account I saw put it – “… tough long-distance walking and sleeping rough with a degenerative disease, living on 9p noodles? Do me a favour!”. But who’s lying about what is just the surface of the story. Underneath I think this is a tale about trust. Nonfiction writing relies on you believing that what I’m telling you is true. That’s why The Salt Path allegations have caused such outrage. We trusted Raynor and Moth. We identified with them, became invested in the emotional truth of their story and felt their pain. As my friend said to me in an angry text message
“I shed tears over those two!”
My fears are bubbling up from the fact that although I definitely haven’t lied, not everything I write about in my latest book Minor Keys can be tied down to one discrete incident or attributed to one specific person’s account. Could someone ever say I’m not telling the truth, that I’ve got things wrong because they see them differently, and that my writing is a lie? My writing generally derives from my interpretation of what several people have told me, and what I experience across multiple situations as I go about my research. In fact, it's my ability to aggregate those singular stories and episodes into general themes that makes me a good qualitative researcher. But ultimately it still all boils down to trust, and whether my readers will consider me, and my story are trustworthy.
I’m reassuring myself by remembering that I have used all the tools that nonfiction writers have at their disposal to make sure that doesn’t happen. I’m still uneasy, but these are tried-and-tested methods we use so that we are not just asking our readers to trust us, we are providing reasons why they absolutely can – and should:
Evidence answers the question ‘Can I trust this account is true?’ When we add notes and cite sources for our claims, we are laying an audit trail to show how we have arrived at what we’re asking our readers to believe. We also allow people to explore our points further if they choose.
Method addresses the reader’s concern ‘Can I trust how this account was arrived at?’ Good research-led writing is systematic. Giving an account of the methods we have used – for example providing demographic details of people interviewed, and the events that from which our information were generated.
Reflexivity is a reply to those asking ‘Do I trust why this story is being told?’ Reflexivity means giving some background to you as a human, your motivations for undertaking the project, your stance towards the subject and so on. It helps the reader decide whether your account is plausible or not because they have a sense of where you are coming from.
Authority asserts ‘Yes, you can trust me’. Our credentials, qualifying our claim to be an expert on our story, our subject, the pedigree of the publisher and/or publication all contribute to this.
This last one – authority – is why The Salt Path especially felt like a betrayal, because Penguin - one of our largest, and oldest publishers - stamped it with their seal of approval. The damage from a breach of trust extends beyond the specifics of one case. That’s why publishers have issued apologies when true stories turn out not to be true, and even offer refunds to readers who feel indignant that they have parted with their money for a lie. They do this to protect the industry and the wider concept of ‘the true story’ so that we can continue to believe in nonfiction in a post-truth world.
But is truth really so easy? Only today I read an article about ‘speculative nonfiction’ – a new genre that invites us to write truths about imagined futures and alternative scenarios. How can something be true if it’s never happened? When asked if this gives writers a license to lie, the article’s author is emphatic: “Absolutely not… the speculative essayist makes it clear when the essay is veering into speculation” Usefully, they also suggest some words that signal how to do this, words which tone down the certainty of truth claims: perhaps, I wonder, maybe. So with this in mind I can add another tool to my list of ways to build trust:
5. Tentative language to show that there may be other ways of understanding what you’ve written, and that you don’t have sole authority on ‘the facts’. This builds trust by graciously inviting the reader to disagree with you.
I’ve used each one of these trust-building devices in Minor Keys, yet I still squirm. In the time it’s taken me to gather my thoughts and write this piece, Raynor Winn has published her response to the allegations, but regardless of what the facts really are, trial by media is real. Mud sticks, and in an age of social media the mud that gets thrown is of the most revolting kind – particularly when it is slung at women*. There is so much more at stake from going public with your writing in a digital age – it’s not just the critics’ columns to prepare for, but the trolls and keyboard warriors too.
Minor Keys is not a memoir, but I do hope it communicates an emotional truth. It is a strong critique of white cis-male privilege in the music industry and it’s about to go public, I’m nervous about the reactions it could provoke and how will I cope with and respond to those reactions. So at it’s heart, I guess what’s really going on here is that what’s happening to Raynor Winn has tapped right into my self-doubt and fear of being ‘out there’.
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*See Mary-Ann Sieghart’s The Authority Gap: Why women are still taken less seriously than men, and what we can do about it. and Mary Beard’s Women and Power: A manifesto for compelling and shocking contemporary and historical evidence for this.
With thanks to Susanne Schotanus and Siobhan Fox who gave feedback on earlier drafts of this piece