When Stories Move Us: Does It Matter If They’re True?

The Salt Path and "Emotional Truth"

The Salt Path : true or false?

Modern writers – and readers - are increasingly willing to detach a story’s meaning from whether it happened. Christianity is not willing to do this and cannot survive if we try.

Raynor Winn’s memoir The Salt Path was published in 2018 and became an overnight publishing hit. The book claims to be the true story of how Winn and her husband Moth lost their home following a failed investment. Subsequently, Moth was diagnosed with a rare degenerative neurological condition called corticobasal degeneration (CBD).

The couple, in their early 50s, set out to walk the 630 mile South West Coast Path along the English coastline, camping as they went. The walk seemed to all but cure Moth’s condition. The book become an international bestseller, selling more than two million copies worldwide. In 2025, the movie version of The Salt Path was released, starring Gillian Anderson.

However, since mid-2025, investigative reporter Chloe Hadjimatheou of The Observer has raised serious questions about the factual accuracy of key elements of Raynor Winn’s memoir. Doubt has been cast on the story of whether the couple really became homeless in the way described – in particular, whether the loss of their home followed a failed investment or was linked to an alleged embezzlement committed by Raynor herself.

Furthermore, Moth’s diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration seems questionable – or at least, the claim to have slowed or even reversed some of the symptoms of the disease via a long walk. Neurologists expressed scepticism about the way the illness was portrayed in the book and about Moth’s unusually long survival timeline.

Would it matter if the book told a basically untrue story? It has clearly moved and inspired many readers. Isn’t that enough? Many readers will reasonably feel that the emotional resonance of a narrative can be valuable even when its factual basis is dubious.

In her response to the accusations, Raynor Winn has said that The Salt Path is “true story of our journey,” and that it is an “honest account”.

Note that this language leans to the subjective. She does not mount a forensic defence of the accuracy of her narrative. Rather, she suggests that it is true for her. It is her truth.

From Truth to Usefulness

What we see happening here is part of a wider cultural shift in which narratives are evaluated by their usefulness rather than their truth. A story is true if it heals, empowers, or provides a source of meaning for the reader. We now speak of “emotional truth” or “lived truth”. The “emotional core” of the story is enough, even when the facts are fuzzy – or worse.

Back in 2006, this is how author James Frey defended himself when he too was caught fabricating details of his memoir A Million Little Pieces.

This is all fine of course when a storyteller openly admits that they have created a fiction. That’s what a novel is. It may draw from actual events and real characters, but in pretending to be a “real” story, it lets us in on the game.

But a memoirist is doing something different. Their work depends on believing that this is their actual lived experience. Memoir gets its moral authority from reality. Their power as storytelling depends not on artifice but on testimony. We trust that the speaker is describing what they honestly think occurred. Now, we have to say that in a literary memoir, a certain amount of bias and personal colour is a given. The writer is not attempting to give an unbiased account. But we accept that it is nonetheless fundamentally true as they see it.

Does it matter?
What happens when a culture becomes comfortable separating meaning from reality? There will be those who feel duped by Raynor Winn. But there will also be those who accept her defense. Increasingly, we seem comfortable saying that a story may be “true” in its emotional impact even if it is uncertain (and even false) in its factual basis.

The debate also raises a broader question. In a culture increasingly willing to separate meaning from factual accuracy, what happens to traditions that have historically insisted that their claims refer to events in the world?

For example, Christianity is increasingly invoked as a source of moral vision or cultural inheritance - something that can sustain the West even if its miraculous claims are left politely to one side. Even Richard Dawkins, who scarcely believes that a word of the Bible is historically true, concedes that ‘cultural Christianity’ has a kind of benefit to society.

Yet the New Testament writers appear deeply concerned to rule out precisely that option. Luke introduces his Gospel by emphasising that he is reporting events that have been “carefully investigated from the beginning” (Luke 1:3). The apostle Peter insists that the Christian message is not based on “cleverly devised myths” (2 Peter 1:16). And Paul goes further still:

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile (1 Cor 15:17).

“Futile” is the exact opposite of “useful”. It is no good searching for the emotional core if the core is nothing but a fabrication. Christianity does not offer a story that is meaningful, whether it happened or not. It stakes everything on the claim that it did. Its meaningfulness is essentially tied to the claim.

Which means that it can be emotionally and existentially true because it is not simply those things. As novelist, poet, and memoirist John Updike puts it:

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall…

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

(“Seven Stanzas at Easter”)

If The Salt Path turns out not to be accurate, readers may still find something to value in it — though I suspect most people will find that what appeared to be a remarkable memoir is a poor novel. The implicit covenant between author and reader has been broken.

My guess is that the ‘emotionally true’ argument won’t wash with many readers, however. It is deeply unsatisfying to find that our emotional experiences don’t match the real world — that they have been artificially generated without our knowledge. That tells us something about what ‘emotional truth’ must be in the first place - it challenges us to consider truth as not just a matter of subjective experience alone.

That is where we find the Christian faith positioned. It the resurrection did not happen, Christianity would not become less inspiring. It becomes false.

Christianity does not offer a story that remains meaningful whether or not it occurred. It cannot be a matter of subjective experience only, without also being a matter of a public and historical truth.

It stakes everything on the claim that something happened in history, in public, in the material world, that changed the future of humanity forever. The hope it offers is not drawn from metaphor or moral insight, but from an event: the Word made flesh, crucified under Pontius Pilate, raised on the third day.

The gospel is not a story that helps whether or not it is true. It helps because it is.