Days before The Observer published its bombshell report on the alleged fabrication of key elements of Raynor Winn’s pop-inspirational tale The Salt Path, I was the audience to two early Salt Path haters: my mother and grandmother. “A load of crap,” my grandmother exclaimed between bites of a pub lunch. “It was all a bit neat, wasn’t it?” added my mother.
They complained not because the just-released film adaptation of Winn’s memoir felt disingenuous – there were no Cassandra-like premonitions here of the brewing scandal – but because its story of sudden homelessness and pseudo-spiritual salvation along England’s south coast was representative of a particular milieu in English culture: a middle-class setback dressed up as something we should all care about.
