You Can’t Walk Your Way Out of Disability

I love a good publishing scandal. They’re usually highbrow enough that you don’t feel cheap for being engaged by them, stupid enough to give you excellent schadenfreude, and low-stakes enough that you don’t walk away wishing you and everyone involved was dead. This summer’s excellent offering in the form probably came out of the blue to readers, like myself, who live outside the UK. The Salt Path (2018) is a nature memoir by Raynor Winn describing how, after losing their house in a series of financial mishaps, she and her husband Moth (both pen names) regained their zest for life and faith in humanity by walking along England’s South West Coast Path. It has spawned two follow-up books (a projected third has now been pushed back indefinitely) and a film adaptation starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. In early July, an in-depth exposé in the Observer by Chloe Hadjimatheou revealed that the Winns had been wildly dishonest about the circumstances that had led to their becoming homeless—beginning, but by no means ending, with the fact that Raynor had apparently embezzled a five-figure sum from her employer.

The article is worth reading in its entirely, and occasioned some interesting follow-up conversations, including such questions as whether people who were not white and middle class could get away with making vague, implausible claims about the reason they’d lost their home and still be seen as worthy and sympathetic, or what responsibility the publishing industry has to ensure that the books it publishes as true stories are in fact that (currently, the standard appears to be “we make authors sign a release”). But one aspect of the story whose significance didn’t hit for me when I first read about it, but which has continued to evoke anger, is Raynor’s claim that walking South West Coast Path helped alleviate Moth’s symptoms of corticobasal degeneration, an incurable neurological illness. In LitHub, Polly Atkins has an excellent article about how the publishing industry is out there searching for nature memoirs that are also healing memoirs, and how that both reflects and intensifies the hostility towards chronic illness and disability in our culture.

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.

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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.

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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?

We live in a time of not just rising fascism but rising eugenics (the two are, of course, intimately linked). This expresses itself in ableism that runs the gamut from slashing welfare budgets for the disabled to declaring triumphantly that the r-word is safe to use again, in the rejection of the well-established science of vaccination that has at its root the belief that illness is a way of weeding out the undesirables, in the denial of the necessity of COVID mitigation measures and the reality of long-term COVID after-effects, in multiple reports by disabled people that they have felt pressured to consider assisted suicide, in fatphobia that somehow manages to revile both fat people and those who pursue solutions to their obesity such as GLP-1 inhibitors, as well as many other examples. Atkins is absolutely right that selling nature cure memoirs is yet another facet of the growing belief that illness is a choice, no different, in its way, than RFK Jr. attacking psychiatric drugs or ADHD medicine and declaring that people who suffer from such diseases should opt for diet and exercise instead. It’s something that we all need to be on the lookout for, and ready to stomp down on with extreme prejudice. Perhaps, Atkins’s article suggests, the scandal of The Salt Path is not as low-stakes as I originally believed.