Raynor Winn's name change...

through a therapy lens

Why might The Salt Path’s Raynor and Moth Winn have changed their names?

Well, we don’t know whether Moth is Mr Winn; he could still be Tim Walker - this is the name used in the hospital letters that Raynor has posted on her Instagram feed today. In her statement, Raynor claims Moth is short for Timothy which is valid, though she never liked the name Sally, so changed it to an old family name - and Winn is her maiden name.

But why change your name, the one you have lived with for most of your life, because you don’t like it? It’s generally something you’d more likely do in your teens, when grappling with the identity of the adult you’re becoming. I once knew an aerobics instructor who was beautiful, shiny, with a handsome boyfriend, a successful career. She seemed very driven and ambitious. Someone in a class told me she used to be Tracy. A re-invention, casting herself as Jade - it made me wonder who Tracy had been, in her ‘old’ life. What the name upgrade signified.

Our name is such an intrinsic part of us, and Raynor’s name change makes me wonder about a need to trade in an older version of herself for a completely different one. To re-invent herself, leaving something unwanted behind. Is this a bid not only to escape being identified as someone who’d stolen and deceived, but to split herself off from bad parts of herself, rather than confront them? Like conveniently shedding a skin.

When I read Raynor’s post on her Instagram page this-morning, my heart sank. She has zoomed in on the ‘vile and heinous accusations’ made in the Observer article casting doubt over Moth’s CBS (corticobasal degeneration) diagnosis as being the most painful accusation of all, which is slightly side-stepping the main issue: that she stole £64,000 from an employer.

It feels like a deflection. The question about whether the CBS diagnosis is a fabrication would not have come up if we’d not heard compelling evidence from a reputable national paper’s investigative journalist that she stole from her employer. This is serious stuff - and what we need to hear is something from Raynor that convinces us a mistake has been made, that she never actually stole that money.

Or - an admittance of a failure, a lapse, a mental-health struggle, perhaps, with some explanation of what led to that, and something to make us understand that she has learnt, reflected, atoned, and grown from the experience, which is now behind her.

A name-change feels, to me, troubling. I actually want Raynor and Winn to be the lovely people we’ve been led to believe they are. But I wonder whether this splitting off of unwanted parts of herself from her past is a pattern, and the re-invention with new names a flight to a perceived new life, where past problems dissolve away.

I realise that when I read The Salt Path, the decision for the two of them to walk the 630 mile South West Coastal Path, when Moth had been given such a diagnosis, felt very odd. I couldn’t imagine taking that same decision, had it happened in my life, or see any of my friends reacting similarly. I would follow the experts’ advice, and try perhaps to secure work, to provide healthy food for Moth, not feed him pot noodles or drag him up on the days he was unable to move. OK - so Raynor says this movement is what’s given him back his flexibility and strength - but that seems like chance. What if he’d died as a result of carrying a rucksack along those gruelling, precarious up-and-down paths? What if he’d frozen, and tumbled off a cliff into the sea?

The walk feels like a huge risk. But conversely, what did they have to lose, having, as Raynor states, lost everything? We can’t know how we’d respond, in such testing times as losing the home we’ve raised our children in, made our own.

Having written a book myself and learnt so much about what agents and publishers demand in order to make a manuscript sellable in a competitive market, I understand there is such a concept as ‘creative truth’; that memory isn’t reliable enough to faithfully recall every detail, and past events must inevitably contain fictionalised elements. And that dramatic events are to be drawn out in order to draw readers in. That sensationalism sells, and publishers may even encourage this, to make sales in a crowded marketplace. What is the agent or publisher’s role in the editing of Raynor’s stories into something they deem worthy of sending to print?

Whether Moth’s diagnosis is true or not, though, there is something questionable many of us have felt, but put aside, in the belief these are good, likeable and trust-worthy people. Hearing about Raynor having stolen so much money suddenly brings all those hidden concerns to the forefront. It couldn’t help begging the question: what else isn’t as it seems?

We need you, Sally, to face us all and tell us the truth of this story, of this claim you’ve stolen a large sum of money from your employer, if you are to salvage your reputation and everything the Salt Path and sequels has given Raynor and Moth. Side-stepping by saying mistakes were made during ‘pressured times’ is, I’m afraid, just not enough.