The Salt Path and 2025's most scandalous books

In 2025, personal stories proved popular and powerful – but several controversies raised questions about the future of the memoir genre.

Personal stories can be powerful, and no more so than in 2025. Over the past 12 months, memoirs have frequently made the headlines both for the stories they told – and the details they missed out.

In the spring, Sarah Wynn-Williams's Careless People, an exposé of her time working as an executive at Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, became a bestseller despite a gagging order banning her from publicising it.

Later in the year, Virginia Giuffre's powerful posthumous autobiography Nobody's Girl detailed her sexual abuse at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein and his circle, including allegations against Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, which he has always denied. The book – which sold one million copies in two months – intensified pressure for the former prince to be stripped of his titles – which he was in late October.

Kamala Harris's 107 days, an account of her doomed presidential run, garnered plenty of column inches for her criticism of Joe Biden. And the year also saw high-profile memoirs by Margaret Atwood, Malala Yousafzai and Jacinda Ardern, as well as moving life stories like Arundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me and Yiyun Li's Things in Nature Merely Grow, an account of losing two sons to suicide.

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But 2025 was also a year when memoirs attracted attention for the wrong reasons. Journalist Olivia Nuzzi's much-hyped American Canto which, among other things, detailed her "digital affair" with Robert F Kennedy, was called "aggressively awful" a "hate-read" and "insufferable filler" by critics. Despite generating hundreds of column inches of coverage, the book sold fewer than 1,200 copies in its first week.

In September, the New York Times published a story that raised questions over Amy Griffin's hit memoir The Tell, a book championed by figures including Oprah Winfrey, Gwyneth Paltrow and Reese Witherspoon. The book chronicles Tell's childhood sexual abuse, relying on memories recovered in MDMA therapy sessions.

The Salt Path scandal

Perhaps the biggest literary scandal of 2025, though, concerned Raynor Winn's memoir The Salt Path. First published in 2018, the book tells the story of Winn and her husband Moth's 630-mile (1,015km) trek along the UK's South West Coast Path. In the book, readers learn that the couple lose their home after a failed investment and subsequent legal dispute with a friend. To make things worse, Moth is diagnosed with the terminal neurological disorder corticobasal degeneration (CBD) days later. With seemingly nothing to lose, the couple decide to start walking. By the time they've completed their trek, they have been offered a place to live by a stranger and Moth's symptoms have amazingly started to reverse. 

Readers fell in love with the triumph-over-tragedy narrative, which its publishers described as "unflinchingly honest". The book has sold more than two million copies and was translated into more than 25 languages. Winn published two successful follow ups, The Wild Silence and Landlines. Spring 2025 saw the release of a film adaptation of The Salt Path, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs as the couple. 

Alamy

But in July, UK newspaper The Observer published an investigation calling into question the book's accuracy, and honesty. Documents and interviews revealed that the couple, whose real names were revealed as Sally and Tim Walker, lost their home after Winn took out a private mortgage to pay back tens of thousands of pounds she was accused of stealing from her employer. Journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou also spoke to neurologists who expressed doubts over the idea that Moth's symptoms could be reversed – or that he could still be so healthy 18 years into his diagnosis.

Winn published a lengthy statement on her website, calling the investigation "grotesquely unfair, highly misleading" and saying that The Salt Path was "about a capsule of time when our lives moved from a place of complete despair to a place of hope".

This month, a further investigation by Hadjimatheou and a new documentary, The Salt Path Scandal, brought up more revelations, including an alleged letter of confession from Raynor Winn, obtained from her niece, in which Winn appears to admit to stealing money from both her own mother and her in-laws. Another statement from Winn denies the claims, saying: "I did not steal from family… Nor have I confessed to doing so and I did not write the letter suggesting I did."

But the story shows no sign of going away, with a podcast series coming in 2026. Hadjimatheou, who was planning a reporting trip to Syria when an Instagram direct message first tipped her off to The Salt Path story, calls it "one of the biggest scoops of my journalistic career".

At first, there were reports of bookshops offering refunds to betrayed readers. Yet, in the aftermath of the investigation, The Salt Path climbed back up the bestseller list. Cinemas continued to show the film. Today, you can still find the memoir on prominent display in some bookshops.

In the documentary, Hadjimatheou asks readers at a literary festival about their reaction to the scandal. While some are shocked, many seemed nonplussed by the allegations. "It's a book about a walk. It's not about something life-changing. Enjoy the book," says one. "With every story there's always a bit of fiction added in," offers another.

The fact v fiction debate

The saga has ignited discussions about how truthful memoir needs to be, a debate that emerges every time there's a story like this. In 2006, after his memoir A Million Little Pieces was found to be heavily fabricated in sections, James Frey said he did it "in order to serve what I felt was the greater purpose of the book".

Earlier this year, the writer Lily Dunn published a book dedicated to the craft of memoir called Into Being. The book came out of 10 years of teaching and mentoring memoir, and her own experience of writing one: 2022's Sins of My Father: A Daughter, a Cult, a Wild Unravelling.

"I'm slightly obsessed with it," she tells the BBC. "I haven't really read anything other than memoir for years."

For Dunn, there's a special connection between a reader and someone sharing intimate and often painful life experiences on the page. "Memoirs can become much more important than the story that they're telling in terms of affecting lives, making a difference to laws or how we see certain things," she says."My book led to a documentary that then became a platform for other people's voices. A memoir can carry on having this life beyond you, which can make it incredibly powerful."

She was surprised by some reactions to The Salt Path revelations. "There was a 'what's the big deal?', kind of response," says Dunn. "For me, the most important thing in the definition of memoir is honesty. Having that trust between the narrator and the reader is really important. Of course, we all remember things differently, and memoir is very subjective. But the best memoirs are the ones that admit that, and explore it through the writing itself."

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Trust is also required between an author and their editor – especially as few publishers will check everything that is written. Penguin's Michael Joseph said their "due diligence" for The Salt Path's publication included a clause about factual accuracy in the author's contract and a pre-publication legal read. 

Amelia Fairney, a former communications director at Penguin Books who now works for an organisation fighting disinformation, wrote in The Observer that "publishing has a fact-checking problem", claiming profit can come before truth. She writes: "to raise any qualms about the authenticity of an author of the hugely money-spinning status of Raynor Winn would require some chutzpah". 

As associate editor of The Bookseller, Caroline Sanderson has spent 25 years previewing and reviewing memoirs. This year, she also published one of her own: Listen With Father: How I Learned to Love Classical Music.

She thinks there are serious questions that need answering about The Salt Path, and whether readers were deceived, but worries about one case tarring the whole memoir genre. Especially as, for her, there's always a murky line between fiction and non-fiction.

"I'm a great champion of the idea that fiction and non-fiction are not at separate poles of the universe," she says. "There are many novels, very often debut novels, that are very autobiographical in nature. There are many non-fiction books which one would say were imaginative. 

"I think if we say that memoirs have got to be the exact facts, and nothing but the facts, that cuts out a lot of real narrative creativity."

The 'healing nature' boom 

In recent years there has been a boom in books that blend a personal narrative with nature writing, including Chloe Dalton's Raising Hare, Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk and Amy Liptrot's The Outrun – the latter two have also been made into feature films. 

The Salt's Path's tale of resilience against the odds is a particularly seductive one, but the fallout over the book has raised questions about narratives that push the healing power of nature. 

More like this:

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• The 400-year-old mystery of Shakespeare's wife and son

• Why Frankenstein is so misunderstood

In a piece for LitHub, the memoirist and nature writer Polly Atkin, author of Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature Writing and Not Getting Better wrote: "Nature writing only wants to admit illness into its pages if it is to show nature performing a miraculous cure."

James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd's Life and The Place of Tides, told The Guardian: "I find [nature writing] more interesting when it's less about personal redemption and more of a mirror on the big things that I care about: the politics, the economics, what's actually really happening in the world."

Roadside Attractions

Atkin and other writers are expanding the parameters of nature memoirs. Natasha Carthew's Undercurrent told of her childhood in rural poverty, and next year will see the publication of Rough, examining the untold stories of Britain's coastal communities. Noreen Masud's A Flat Place uses Britain's open landscapes to explore emotional trauma and reflect on her upbringing in Pakistan and Scotland.

For Sanderson, these kinds of personal stories can make us think about bigger issues in a way that current affairs or history books can't. Looking ahead to 2026, she is excited by Lifeboat at the End of the World by Dominic Gregory, a debut memoir by a volunteer for the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution). "It's the most visceral thing I've read about the small boats crisis. I feel like a more informed person for reading this book, and it's beautifully written."

Next year will see plenty more memoirs likely to grab headlines, from powerful stories like rape survivor Gisèle Pelicot's Hymn to Life to releases from familiar names like Lena Dunham and Liza Minnelli.

As for whether The Salt Path scandal will make publishers nervous about commissioning real-life stories, Sanderson hopes not. In a fractured world, and with AI increasingly distorting our sense of reality, human experiences are more important than ever. "Reading other people's stories and understanding other people's lives is something that we urgently need."

The Salt Path Scandal is available to view on Sky and NowTV.

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