There’s a curious thing that happens in publishing.
If you’re going to tell your story-your real, lived, complicated, maybe even quietly remarkable story, then make sure it includes at least one of the following: a breakdown, a diagnosis, a death, a downfall, or preferably all four. Bonus points if you can describe it with lyrical prose while foraging for samphire somewhere on the South West Coast Path.
Because publishers, and increasingly bookshops too, aren’t just selling stories. They’re selling catharsis, packaged pain, ideally with a hint of privilege for the reader to relate to.
The furore surrounding The Salt Path, following Raynor Winn’s admission that the original pitch for the book was ‘…not entirely truthful’, has sparked something of a reckoning. Readers who were moved by her apparent destitution and raw resilience now wonder if they were misled.
But the deeper question is this: would the book have been published (and so widely embraced) if her life had been less dramatic?
Or less tragic?
Or if, God forbid, she had written simply and honestly about being middle-aged and a bit lost?
Publishers are businesses, after all. They respond to trends and numbers. And right now, what sells isn’t quiet resilience or thoughtful reflection.
It’s trauma.
Transformation.
A bruised but Instagram-friendly kind of survival. There's a particularly lucrative market in stories of the ‘comfortable’ middle class knocked off their axis-because their pain is seen as being somehow more palatable and more intriguing, than that of those who've lived with struggle as a constant rather than an anomaly.
The result?
Real stories, stories of people who live in the cracks of society, or who refuse to embellish their experience to meet a narrative arc are quietly sidelined. Writers who have something honest, insightful, and quietly powerful to say are passed over because their truths don’t tick the ‘pain-to-redemption’ boxes.
Not enough peril.
Not enough marketing potential. Too subtle. And in many cases, too working-class, too ordinary, too unadorned for the curated authenticity the industry now prizes. We hear less from the people who don’t shout, who live without drama, or whose resilience is a quiet, daily thing. Yet it’s often these lives, unflashy, unfiltered, that say the most.
There’s a place for books like The Salt Path. But let’s not kid ourselves that they represent the whole of human experience. For every glossy memoir about loss and rebirth, there are hundreds of people with quieter truths that deserve to be heard.
Maybe it’s time publishing stopped chasing the drama and started listening to the humbler, more human stories that sit in the margins?
