From "Penguin says it did 'all necessary due diligence' with The Salt Path" (BBC).
I hadn't heard of this controversy until I listened to the new episode of a podcast I like, "Giles Coren Has No Idea." From this week's episode, "The Salt Path Crumbles":
Esther (wife of Giles): Does it matter if the book is true or not? I'm not saying... it's okay to sort of tell lies and steal money. Does it really matter if the book is true or not?...Giles: Yes! You write fiction if you've got a good idea about a couple who get defrauded by one of their closest friends, one of them has cancer, and they go for a massive long walk, and they get over it, and the cancer's cured — write in the fucking novel! Don't pretend it happened to you!
Esther: Well, that's the thing that, that is the thing. I mean I think that... the publishing industry, not Penguin in particular, because I'm sure they thought it was all true. I mean....
Giles: Don't be so quick to exonerate them! You are gonna say what the publishing industry is longing for is true stories. They are — Penguin among them — not investing in brilliant young novelists and great young writers and handing out 5 grand here and 10 grand there to build the UK fiction. They just — million pounds to the fake Moth and his bollocks cancer....
Moth = the name of the husband in the book. Apparently, Moth is not his real name. Who could've guessed?
Giles is right. There's a longing for true stories that lowers the standard. Because it really happened/"really happened," you don't expect everything to be beautifully and brilliantly composed. Label it fiction and see how far you get with this junk about your transformative long walk or whatever. Fiction must reach a higher standard, and then no one wants to read it anyway.
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Eat, Pray, Lie
Well, that was a bad business deal in a wide sense of the phrase...
I prefer all my TV shows to have the disclaimer "Inspired by a true story."
Does it matter whether 'Schindler's List' was fiction or fact? It's only about the Holocaust and that's so far in the past. 'Go Ask Alice'? Teenage drug abuse isn't a problem any more. 'Honor Lost' by Norma Khouri? Who talks about honor killings these days?
Migrant squatters?
It's not like you expect the MSM or the talking heads on TV to really dig in and get the facts. There's a narrative only tenuously connected to reality that needs to be maintained. Lenders are predatory, corporations are evil, and undocumented migrants are all the children of Mother Theresa.
defrauded your employer is a "crime" now?
what Sort of world are we living in?
what Else will now be a "crime"?
pickpocketing? rape? murder?
This is getting out of control!
Laws are to persecute HATE SPEECH!
I'm sure there have been plenty of occasions when the producers find out it's fake, but like the story enough to pretend they didn't know. What matters is getting eyeballs, so then when you publish the truth of the scam, you have another great story. A twofer.
Only the self-employed and life-long unemployed can believably claim they never stole from their employer.
It's an interactive story. The Salt Path: a story of fraudsters on the lam, where the paying customers are fleeced in real time as the con goes on.
I wondered why YT was offering me vids about The Salt Path, which I knew nothing about.
Now I know what I've been missing.
Does it really matter? Did they walk the 630 miles or not? Were they poor or not?
There are lies and there are LIES. Fake but accurate is often a joke. But things don't have to be 99 percent true. Materiality.
Maybe the choice of Jason Isaacs to play Moth was a tell.
Obviously Penguin needed more intersectionality. It's not enough for the publishing world to just ignore white male authors. White female authors should probably be ignored,too, as well as straight males of any color and Christians of any stripe. Then and only then can they achieve... Well, whatever it is they are trying to achieve.
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