There is a scandal over a memoir I read some time ago. It’s a book called ‘The Salt Path’ and what it purported to be was a truthful tale of personal triumph over terminal illness and poverty, a hooky kind of book that reeled me right in. The scandal is that it seems to be mostly made up, although it’s hard to know how much is true given that the other sides of the story have taken suspiciously long to come to light – and they also sound a lot like score settling.

The authors have done alright. Four best-selling books and a Hollywood film in they have been paid handsomely for delivering to punters like me exactly what we wanted: an undemanding and seductive story that hits all the right beats. It was very easy to switch off critical faculties and accept the woo that for some people at least terminal illness and poverty can be vanquished if you really put your mind to it and walk like you’re a medieval pilgrim. Maybe Chaucer got it right about that bunch of chancers.

Its premise, that if only sick and poor people would behave differently they could be miraculously cured, is popular. I think it’s appealing partly because it puts the burden of being sick and poor on the shoulders of the sick and poor. Everyone else gets to sanitise their hands and move on. It’s also a fake unboxing of that spurred tormentor, hope. I read reports of reviewers with chronic and terminal illnesses who instead of being given the comfort that they deserve, now felt that they were inadequate, that what was happening to them was their fault. Instead of the story being faulty.

In an attempt to prove that one of the writers did have the terminal condition in the book, medical evidence has been put on social media. Doctors’ letters have had bits redacted with a black sharpie, which ironically highlights that we don’t have the whole story and doesn’t really help. I’m cynical anyway: my mum-in-law, her lungs shot from fabric dust (she said) and smoking (do you blame her?) caught covid in hospital in 2023. She was 68. She worked as a curtain cutter. She died. Her death certificate mentions bronchopneumonia, lung disease (non-occupational), and an autoimmune disease, one that women get and takes so long to diagnose it was probably too late anyway, Some facts, a narrative of sorts.

I read The Salt Path with hunger as I was trying to make myself feel better since I’d been diagnosed with MECFS and had spent a large part of eighteen months or so in bed with even my thoughts evaporating within my own mind. I don’t exactly remember when I read it; probably late in 2019, just before we were all plunged into the world of sickness that I was emerging from. The cure for MECFS was supposed to be a controlled and increasing amount of exercise. Push through, it’s in your head, do not whatever you do listen to yourself. Try to walk a consistent amount every day and gradually increase your activity.  The story coming from patients, mostly women, was the opposite: do not at any cost push yourself. I listened to that story, and was glad of my recovery, supported as I was by my husband, but still The Salt Path resonated.

Unfortunately, the research behind the forced exercise cure was in 2021 revealed by a NICE review to be of either low or extremely low quality. The treatment has been withdrawn. But it doesn’t stop the public and some doctors’ suspicion that sick women malinger – and that there are far too many of them. If you cannot be cured then what? What are we supposed to do about you? We’re an expensive social problem. People ask how you are, if you’re feeling better. There is no socially acceptable answer.  The truth frequently drew scorn: if I hadn’t done so little and had so much care from my husband I would not now have a life that looks very much like the one I had. “I’d have had to work,” was the roll-eyed response to my story. “I couldn’t do that.” May The Salt Path be a parable that comforts them.

There’s a better book about the salt roads and chronic illness, though it’s not reducible to a Hollywood film script. Thursbitch, by Alan Garner. I recommend it.