Like many writers, I have been following the unfolding revelations about Raynor Winn and The Salt Path with great interest, and a degree of self-interest. I am a memoirist and nature writer, and I live with chronic incurable illness. I lived amongst nature when I became most ill, and I still became more ill. No amount of cold water swimming or walking barefoot in the grass or communing with birds has cured me.

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So, after midnight on Saturday July 4th, when my partner turned to me wide-eyed and said “you’re going to want to hear this,” then began to read Chloe Hadjimatheou’s Observer article on Raynor Winn to me, I admit I felt a kind of euphoria. At last, I thought, this nonsense is being exposed.

Nature writing has long had a problem with the way it presents illness. Nature writing only wants to admit illness into its pages if it is to show nature performing a miraculous cure.

Publishing is so attached to the idea of a narrative arc that peaks with healing that it simply cannot encompass the truth: if it were that simple, no one would be ill. If we could all walk or swim or wild ourselves better, one in five of us would not be disabled. After all, Thoreau, the godfather of walking literature in the US, still died of TB.

For years I have been trying to highlight this fixation on the Nature Cure as a kind of victim blaming, implying as it does that people who have not been cured by time spent with nature simply haven’t tried hard enough. In that time I have watched instead the belief that we could all just cure ourselves if we changed our lifestyles become policy, both in the UK and US.

Nature writing only wants to admit illness into its pages if it is to show nature performing a miraculous cure.

In 2018, the year The Salt Path, with its “inspirational” narrative of healing via a long, hard walk, was published by Penguin, I was in a mentoring for underrepresented writers run by Penguin Random House. I hoped when I was accepted to the program—with a proposal for book about nature and living with chronic illness that I explicitly termed an “anti-recovery memoir”—that it signaled a desire to course-correct. That somebody—anybody—understood that people could not walk themselves better from an incurable illness.

Instead, I was pressured to change the book to make it “less bitter” about illness. I was told repeatedly that it was simply not commercially viable to write a book about illness and nature in which I did not get better because of the nature. Without a redemptive Nature Cure arc, my work was deemed pointless, unsaleable. To not get better, it was clear, was both uncommercial, and uninteresting to readers. Possibly actively repulsive.

This was not a personal issue. Though it was particular people who said and wrote these things to me, it could have been almost anyone within the industry. Talking to other disabled writers and publishing workers in the years that followed, it became clear to me how deeply entrenched these ideas about illness, wellness and disability are throughout the publishing industry.

In the days following the initial article, disabled journalist and memoirist Lucy Webster posted “I’m sorry but did the nondisableds really not stop to consider that walking is not a cure for a degenerative neurological condition?” Like many disabled people, I dismissed The Salt Path as inauthentic immediately, not because of any special knowledge about the writer’s financial troubles (as suspicious as much of that narrative was), but because I knew what Lucy and most chronically ill or disabled people know: no one can simply walk off a terminal illness.

No one owes anyone details of their diagnoses. That is personal information, and people’s needs should be met without disclosure of medical details. But the way Moths’ illness has been written about has influenced real life possibilities for other disabled and ill people.

I believe, as I write in my nature memoir Some of Us Just Fall, that the way we write and talk about disability matters. I have seen for myself the way stories about our lives dominate the options available to us in our lives: “The way we talk about illness and disability dictates what is possible for all people who are affected by it. The narrative odds are too often stacked against disabled people. There are two options that seem to be available: triumphal recovery or inspirational death.”

Here in the UK we face catastrophic welfare cuts based on the idea that there simply cannot be as many sick and disabled people in our country as there are. Our government wants to “incentivize” people who are too sick to work back into work by removing the minuscule trickle of funding they receive to help them stay alive.

At the same time, it is cutting funding to the program that enables disabled people who can work to cover the extra costs of being disabled, like accessible transport to a workplace, or specialized software. In the U.S the shift is even more alarming, as a renowned anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist sits in post as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. It has not been as dangerous to be disabled in the western world since the 1930s.

Publishing is, in many ways, a mirror of society at large. It reflects what people believe and want to believe. In this case: that illness can be controlled and avoided if only a person makes the right decisions. Lives right, eats right, moves right.

People do not want the messy, uncomfortable truth that disabled people know—that we are all only one infection or accident away from disability. That disability is not a choice, but a natural variation of existence. That disability is part of the natural world, and not an anomaly to be corrected. That incurable illnesses exist. That medicine is an inexact science. That a disabled life has just as much worth as any other.

Yet in reflecting dominant ideas about wellness and illness, publishing also supports and perpetuates them.

As recently as June 2025, Raynor Winn was still claiming that her husband’s “health has improved almost miraculously” through activity in nature (this time gardening at a borrowed farm, rather than a long walk). Winn talks of the health benefit of her husband being “rewilded,” a recent trope emerging from the Nature Cure which I find particularly toxic, and is particularly alarming in the current anti-scientific political context.

As nations, we could rewild ourselves very easily into a pre-medieval state of continual infant loss to avoidable disease, into death from food-poisoning and sepsis, and much more.

Publishing has a responsibility to think about the consequences of the messages it supports and perpetuates.

Penguin has washed its hands of responsibility for any factual errors in The Salt Path, yet it is Penguin’s marketing campaign that presented it as both “unflinchingly honest” and as a tale of a miraculous cure, just as much as the Winns have themselves.

Everyone who has been moved by this story needs to reflect on why, and what it tells them about their own relationship with illness and disability. Why is it this story they wanted to believe, that they bought in its millions, that they wanted more and more of?

Amelia Fairney, who worked at worked at Penguin Random House for twenty-eight years before leaving this last year, expressed hope in a piece in The Observer that the salting of the salt path will catalyze essential change in a publishing field that has favored perceived commercial [pull] over reality. As she writes:

‘The harms of publishing as fact what is later revealed to be part-fact or even fiction are considerable – extending far beyond the financial consequences for publishers of disgruntled buyers demanding refunds.’

As a disabled writer, it is clear to me there is a specific problem not just with counterfactual content being presented as truth, but counterfactual information about illness being presented as credible health advice. Publishing has a deeply embedded structural ableism problem.

One of the examples Fairney gives of publishing’s peculiar penchant for pseudoscientific wellness propaganda is the fact podcaster Steven Bartlett—who tells his listeners cancer can be cured by a Keto diet and vaccines cause illness, amongst many other dangerous health conspiracies—has been given his own imprint at Penguin Books.

Publishing has a choice. As Fairney states, it can either continue to part of the problem, perpetuating quackery disguised as health advice and legitimizing and laying the ground for deadly policy changes such as those we are seeing in the UK and the US—or it can learn from its past mistakes, and work to dismantle the structural inequalities it is currently underpinning. Publishing has a responsibility to think about the consequences of the messages it supports and perpetuates.

On Instagram, memoirist Kerri ni Dochartaigh wrote:

Memoir matters. Female memoir set in place, with the natural world at the forefront, exploring illness, poverty, class and grief matters. Real, true stories of trauma, fear and worry; of hope and resilience and getting through, are the stories that change lives. We as readers need these stories.

We as writers need to tell these stories. And we need support in doing this, different support than many of us are offered within the publishing framework as it stands.

Yet it is not these voices—our voices—being heard.

It is long past time for everyone to take a walk with their own assumptions about illness, about disability, about poverty and about value, to walk through their own thoughts, and come to a more realistic conclusion.

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The Company of Owls by Polly Atkin is forthing from Milkweed.