Letter from a Reader 7.15.25

Is a scandal involving a memoir by a second author about to explode in the wake of the 'Salt Path' controversy?

Reese Witherspoon in the movie version of Wild / Fox Searchlight

Is a major scandal about to taint a second memoir by a female author?

A British newspaper said on Friday that The Salt Path may not be the last firsthand account to face pulverizing scrutiny. In a story about Raynor Winn’s hit memoir-turned-movie, Rowan Pelling wrote in the Independent:

“Even as I write this, I’ve been tipped off that a major scandal might blow up over another ‘nature-adjacent’ memoir by a female author.”

There’s reason to be wary of such tips. Leakers can have pure or impure motives and can try to plant false stories. For every Mark Felt, the Deep Throat who helped Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein break the Watergate story, there’s a squealer driven by naked self-interest. The timing of the tip to the Independent is suspicious.

A leaker might want to distract attention from The Salt Path scandal, which centers on allegations that the author made up parts of her story about how a long hike lifted her spirits amid a cascade of woes. Or the tipster might hope to suggest that Winn’s sins aren’t so bad: What another author has done is worse. And when a leaker targets a female author, you can’t discount that sexism may be at work.

But if you can question whether another scandal is brewing, you can’t dismiss the idea out of hand. Or, at least, I can’t. I’ve reviewed too many books that should have caused more controversy than they did. Critics try to give authors the benefit of the doubt, and they often give too much of it. The New York Times, after praising The Salt Path as “luminous” and one of the “best travel books” of 2019, hasn’t mentioned that parts of the book may be fabricated or embellished.

So many fake memoirs have made it past gatekeepers that my first reaction to the possibility of another breach wasn’t, That can’t be true. It was: I hope it doesn’t involve Raising Hare. That was one of my favorite memoirs of 2024.

Chloe Dalton and Raising Hare / Penguin Random House

Chloe Dalton’s story of a rescued hare that stuck around qualifies as “nature-adjacent” and has details others might find less plausible than I did, including that the hare hopped into her lap when it wanted attention. Its shortlisting for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction could have led a snubbed author to seek revenge via a leak. And Dalton has worked as a policy adviser to British politicians, including the former Conservative Party leader William Hague. It’s not too fetched to imagine that a member of the ruling Labour Party might see her as an enemy, or that an influential Conservative might hold her partly responsible for the party’s loss of power, and want to discredit her work.

Other targets of a leaker might include Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir, Eat Pray Love. That book is “nature-adjacent” if you count the mosquitos that dive-bombed Gilbert as she did yoga on an ashram in India.

But her unnamed yoga mentor faced allegations of sex abuse years ago, and it hasn’t kept Gilbert from landing more book deals. Why dredge up another scandal when that one had little effect?

Ad for the movie of Eat Pray Love with Julia Roberts / Columbia Pictures

There are many other “nature-adjacent” memoirs by women, going back to Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in the 1970s. But one bestselling personal story especially deserves closer scrutiny.