Consider the things that happen in our lives: Messy and often incoherent incidents best understood in the rearview mirror, if we can understand them at all.<\/p>\n
Then consider what we read about life, how it\u2019s presented to us in books.<\/p>\n
As readers, we\u2019re used to consuming other people\u2019s lives as if they\u2019re lessons in how to live: How to deal with adversity and how to overcome it.<\/p>\n
Things might go badly in our own lives, but we\u2019re fundamentally optimistic, so we want true stories that conform to that worldview.<\/p>\n
If reality is a show, then we want our narrator to win.<\/p>\n
And the publishing industry supplies those tales.<\/p>\n
The tragedy-to-triumph structure that such books conform to only tangentially resemble the reality we inhabit.<\/p>\n
A recent Observer article investigated Raynor Winn, the author of the hit memoir The Salt Path, and cast doubt on the twin inciting incidents of the book: Her husband\u2019s illness and the circumstances of their debt and subsequent loss of their house.<\/p>\n
Outcry ensued.<\/p>\n
\n There is how you remember things and there are the facts.\u00a0\n <\/p>\n
Some facts can\u2019t be established except through memory \u2014 for example, how you felt at a certain time and place \u2014 and depend on a certain literary artfulness.<\/p>\n
Then there are others you can verify simply by looking at your bank records, checking your old messages or emails, or consulting your diary.<\/p>\n
What about the fact-checking process? Commentators have asked this question in relation to the Winn book.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The truth is that much of what\u2019s published doesn\u2019t undergo the forensic examination by an editor that we might like to imagine.<\/p>\n
Partly this is related to the economics of publishing: There are fewer people, each carrying out a vast array of tasks, resulting in less time to do the kind of in-depth editing that can smoke out factually inaccurate material.<\/p>\n
Many of the factual mistakes in books might be honest mistakes, but that doesn\u2019t make them any truer.<\/p>\n
The other side of it is that nobody wants to question a good story, not even book publishers.<\/p>\n
![\"Writer](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/4718216_4_articleinline_BenR_190717_P7170846.jpg\" "\\"Writer")
Writer Raynor Winn, husband Moth, and dog Monty. A recent \u2018Observer\u2019 article investigated Winn and cast doubt on the twin inciting incidents of the book: Her husband\u2019s illness and the circumstances of their debt and subsequent loss of their house. Picture: Ben Russell<\/p>\n
Consider this process: A book proposal is sent to an editor. The proposal is circulated to others at the publisher and, at a weekly editorial meeting, everyone \u2014 other editors, the marketing department, the publicity department \u2014 get behind it.<\/p>\n
It gathers a momentum within the publishing house that\u2019s unstoppable.<\/p>\n
They think of it as a surefire hit and plough their resources into it to give it the best chance of achieving bestselling status.<\/p>\n
(It gets increasingly difficult as the momentum builds to suggest that some of the facts might be suspect.)<\/p>\n
One key reason for getting behind it is that the author can more easily generate publicity because the book is about his or her life \u2014 they\u2019ve lived it and can speak with authority in the media about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The narrative arc of the book is their own personal arc.<\/p>\n
The author can do interviews on This Morning or The One Show, talking about their triumph over adversity. Excerpts of the book can be serialised in magazines.<\/p>\n
Effectively, the author is the book and the book is the author: The gap between life and the written word has been closed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n Fine, unless that means you must live a lie.\n <\/p>\n
The public \u2014 whether they\u2019ve read the book or not \u2014 invest in the author\u2019s struggle and ultimate triumph, in which they can play a part by buying the book and helping the author to achieve financially secure, even millionaire, status.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re participating in this process as consumers, playing a small part in the rise of a figure who we identify with.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Inevitably, we feel betrayed when what we believed to be a true story is just, well, a story that seemed to resemble the truth.<\/p>\n
The rise of the reality TV show over the last three decades has opened a dark portal to celebrity for ordinary people.<\/p>\n
Such shows construct situations in the attempt to reveal the essential character of the participants: Those who are rewarded invariably reveal some kind of authenticity in spite of the falsity of the construct.<\/p>\n
It seems like we\u2019ve absorbed so much of the reality form that it has become difficult to separate the true from the false anymore.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We\u2019re used to taking others\u2019 stories at face value without probing too deeply.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n The prevalence of social media presents the possibility of curating selves that might only be tangentially related to the reality of our lives.\n <\/p>\n
If someone tells us a tall tale in the street we might be a bit sceptical, but if they spout it on social media, or on a podcast, we might take it as fact.<\/p>\n
This is mass media with little to no editorial intervention, yet still carries the weight of authority no matter how much we hear about \u201cfake news\u201d.<\/p>\n
Books reflect this augmented reality, and we \u2014 no matter how much we believe ourselves to be above gullibility \u2014 can embrace it without question.<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t have to believe everything we read; a healthy scepticism keeps us sharp and, indeed, ensures we remain good readers of books and even life.<\/p>\n
(One of the reasons for the current decline in non-fiction book sales, I\u2019ve heard, is the rise of podcasts which allegedly fulfil the same function for many people as sitting down to read about a topic. I don\u2019t wish to tar all podcasts with the same brush, but I\u2019ve heard more bullshit facts from people whose source is invariably a podcast \u2014 one helmed by a minor celebrity who might have skimmed Wikipedia \u2014 than I\u2019ve heard from people who\u2019ve read about the same subject in a book.)<\/p>\n
There\u2019s life in a book.<\/p>\n
\n Writers can let current and future readers know about what it was like to live and think in the world in a certain place at a certain time.\n <\/p>\n
I\u2019m not a huge fan of the self-help genre but, as I\u2019ve got older, I\u2019ve begun to acknowledge that honest communication \u2014 be it in life or in art \u2014 can have a useful, even therapeutic, effect.<\/p>\n
That doesn\u2019t mean that the book has to be a confessional account of the emotional life of the author, but rather that it has a ring of plausibility and truth about it.<\/p>\n
I look for a relationship between life and the page that\u2019s not necessarily direct transcription, but rather reflects an author\u2019s close examination of the events and feelings that they or their subjects have experienced in life.<\/p>\n
Something that tells the reader in a relatively unvarnished way what it was like to be alive.<\/p>\n
Exaggeration and embellishment aren\u2019t compatible with such an approach.<\/p>\n
\n I think that\u2019s the central betrayal when a work of non-fiction becomes economical with the truth.\n <\/p>\n
There\u2019s a balance to be struck between artfulness and factuality, and that\u2019s one of the key challenges of writing non-fiction.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a meretriciousness to flashy but empty writing: We emerge from the experience of reading it dazzled but unedified.<\/p>\n
In non-fiction writing, the memoir form is sadly compatible with making a writer a brand, and becoming a brand might seem a commercial blessing but, in my estimation, can be an artistic curse.<\/p>\n
If that writer is sloppy, cynical or, let\u2019s face it, a complete fantasist \u2014 and if we choose to believe them \u2014 then it\u2019s bad news for everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Consider the things that happen in our lives: Messy and often incoherent incidents best understood in the rearview…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23174,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[14742,457,96,14743,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-23173","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books-features-and-news","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-person-karl-whitney","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}