Woody Brown knew he wanted to be a writer when he was 8 years old. Around that age, he made up stories about his alter ego, Cop Woody, a hero who went around saving people.
The tales stunned his mother, Mary Brown. She’d been reading to him since he was a baby, but never imagined that he could create his own elaborate plots.
As a toddler, Woody was diagnosed with severe autism. Doctors concluded he couldn’t process language, and said it was pointless to explain things to him or talk to him in complex sentences. Whenever Woody spoke, it sounded like shrieks and gibberish.
But Mary came to realize that her son understood more than he appeared to. He would become hysterical if they deviated from their daily routine, but if she explained why they had to stop at Target before getting lunch at McDonalds, he would calmly follow her into the store. At 5, Woody learned to communicate by pointing at letters to spell out words, using a laminated card. He began responding to Mary’s questions, first with single-word answers, and later with short sentences. When he started spelling out his Cop Woody stories, Mary recognized some of the plots, which were lifted from the headlines. Woody had been following the news on the TV and radio.
“That’s how Mom figured out that I was listening to everything,” Woody told me when we met on a recent morning at his parents’ home in Monrovia, Calif., where he lives. To express this, Woody tapped letters on a board with his right index finger, while Mary, who was seated next to him on the couch, followed his finger taps and repeated the words aloud.
When he learned to communicate by spelling, it felt like an escape hatch had opened, Woody explained.
“Miraculous discovery,” he spelled. “I thought I would be caged my whole life, and then the door was open — left ajar, not flung wide, because the majority of people still doubted me.”
After getting an English degree from the University of California Los Angeles, from which he was the first nonverbal autistic person to graduate, Woody received a masters in creative writing from Columbia University. This month, he is publishing his debut novel, “Upward Bound,” which centers on the lives of disabled people at an adult day care center in Southern California. The novel, which Woody spelled out at a rate of one paragraph a day, has drawn enthusiastic advance reviews and praise from writers like Paul Beatty, Roddy Doyle and Mona Simpson.
Beatty, who was one of Woody’s teachers at Columbia, said he was struck by the range of characters and voices in “Upward Bound,” and how they build on one another like a chorus.
“The characters, I think like Woody himself, they all know what they want to say,” he said.
While not strictly autobiographical, the stories in “Upward Bound” are shaped by Woody’s experience. He describes the agony of being unable to share his thoughts or control his verbal and physical tics, and the frustration of being underestimated by people who look at him and see an uncomprehending, mentally disabled person.
“I wanted to reach neurotypical readers, the well intentioned people who don’t realize that we are the same inside,” Woody explained. “I have all the thoughts, dreams, longings and intelligence as any neurotypical person. I just present a little differently.”
On the morning we met, Woody and Mary and the family’s two dogs, Morton and Brisket, greeted me at the front door of their home, which sits on a quiet street near the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. We spoke in half-hour intervals, the amount of time Woody could tolerate without getting too overwhelmed.
Sitting in the living room, Woody often gazed at a rolling metal cart he kept by his side, which Mary calls his “AV cart.” It held two iPads and two laptops that played different shows he watches, including his favorite, “Thomas & Friends,” the animated kids’ show featuring talking trains.
The collage of moving images looked chaotic and distracting, but it helps keep him calm, he explained.
“I have many channels running concurrently in my busy brain,” he explained. “If I try to narrow it down to one, the top of my head blows off.”
Being around Woody, I was struck by his self possession and quick, decisive responses. When I asked what he hopes readers will take from his book, he answered without hesitating: “That I’m a really good writer and they can’t wait for my next book.”
It was one of the few times he glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, and smiled.
At 28, Woody is unable to live independently. His small, bright and tidy bedroom is full of toys and knickknacks he’s loved since he was little — Mr. Potato Head, Legos, a large plastic track for his trains. On one wall, there’s another riot of screens: a large flat screen was showing local news, and iPads and computer monitors played YouTube and animated movies. “Thomas” is almost always playing, along with one of the “Toy Story” movies; Woody is named after the movie’s toy cowboy protagonist. On a desk in front of the television, he keeps his toy trains — which he lines up in precisely the same order that they appear in “Thomas & Friends.” Outside his bedroom, there’s a wall of Woody’s diplomas from Pasadena City College, U.C.L.A. and Columbia.
During our conversations, which took place over two days, Woody mostly stared at his screens or looked down at his lap or across the room, or out the window into the garden, where Morton, a gray poodle mix, was barking at a landscaper’s leaf blower. It’s hard to process what he’s hearing while making eye contact, he explained.
Sometimes he verbalizes through an involuntary repetition of words, and utters phrases from movies and TV shows, like “Evil Dr. Porkchop,” or “Blow the whistle, Henry.”
Woody was born in Pasadena in late December 1997. Mary and Drew Brown had two young daughters and demanding jobs in entertainment — Mary worked as a story analyst for Hollywood studios, and Drew was a producer for television shows. So when Woody was 2, they enrolled him in day care.
Right away, the teachers told Drew and Mary that something was wrong with Woody, who was unresponsive to basic instructions. Tests showed he was severely autistic. His doctors concluded he would likely never develop the ability to speak coherently or hold a conversation.
Mary took Woody to speech therapy, play therapy and occupational therapy, draining their savings. Nothing seemed to help. He couldn’t be directed toward an activity and had obsessive compulsive behaviors, Mary said.
“He would line up his trains, which he still does,” Mary said. “Some things have not changed at all.”
During those years before he could communicate, Woody felt isolated and overlooked.
“I could understand everything but I couldn’t tell them what I knew,” he spelled, “so they all assumed I was intellectually disabled.”
In 2003, when Woody was 5, the Browns learned of a woman named Soma Mukhopadhyay, who had developed a system to communicate with her nonverbal autistic son. Her technique taught children to express themselves by pointing at letters to spell out words, or by writing or typing. She worked in Los Angeles, and they started taking Woody to see her once a week, for $25 a session. Mary learned how to use the letter board with Woody, though she struggled at first to communicate smoothly.
Mukhopadhyay recalls Woody as a bright and creative child, and still remembers his stories about his heroic alter ego.
“He would look at himself as a cop in the story, Cop Woody, who would do all these superman things and save people’s lives,” Mukhopadhyay said in an interview.
Katie Anawalt, speech-language pathologist who trained with Mukhopadhyay, said when she first watched Woody use the letter board, she saw the tension evaporate when he was finally able to get a thought across.
“You can see his body relax,” said Anawalt, a family friend of the Browns who has worked with Woody over the years.
Some of the communication methods Mukhopadhyay teaches have drawn criticism from language experts who argue that the person holding the board might be influencing or misinterpreting comments from a disabled person. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association doesn’t recommend the method, and put out a statement in 2019 warning that the resulting words might not reflect the disabled person’s intentions.
There are also skeptics who doubt someone as severely autistic as Woody can form and express sophisticated thoughts, much less write a novel.
Mary said she isn’t surprised some people question Woody’s abilities — it took her years to recognize what he was capable of. But she bristles at critics who say the way they communicate is harmful or manipulative.
“How on earth am I harming him?” she said.
Mary has also faced questions over whether she’s influencing or shaping Woody’s writing, which she insists she isn’t. When Woody is conversing, his finger flies across the board, but when he’s writing, Mary makes him spell out each word slowly. He can also type on a keyboard, but prefers to write with the letter board, because his poor fine motor skills make it hard to hit the right keys, and the time spent fixing typos makes him lose focus.
When he’s writing, Mary often reads sentences back to him multiple times to make sure she’s captured it accurately.
“I ask, did I get it right, do you want a comma or an em dash?” she said. “I didn’t ever want my voice to creep in.”
Almost every phase of Woody’s education was a struggle. In elementary school, he was frustrated in the special education track and prone to outbursts, occasionally throwing chairs.
“Teachers assumed that he couldn’t keep up, and it was the opposite,” Drew told me at their home. “Imagine being stuck inside your head and being more intelligent than people give you credit for.”
College seemed out of reach. Mary worried Woody couldn’t sit through long lectures without screeching or making a scene. Still, she couldn’t accept the alternative, adult day care, so Woody and his aide Sal, who helped him through high school, filled out an online application for Pasadena City College, not mentioning Woody’s disability. When Woody was accepted, they tried to find a full-time aide, but it was too expensive, so Mary accompanied him to class to facilitate.
Woody excelled at community college and transferred into U.C.L.A., where he took a creative-writing class with the novelist Mona Simpson. He submitted a story, “The Eloper,” about a nonverbal autistic man who wanders out of a day care facility and is accosted by police officers. It became the opening of a longer work of nested stories set at a center for people with disabilities.
“It was such a persuasive view of a world that I hadn’t seen before,” Simpson said.
In graduate school at Columbia, Woody continued to work on “Upward Bound,” which took around two and a half years to write. His teachers and classmates quickly adjusted to Woody and his mom’s presence — Mary attended classes as his communication aide — and his tendency to have an iPad playing with the sound on mute.
“He has an instinct for the natural shape of a story,” said Rivka Galchen, one of Woody’s Columbia professors, who saw early drafts of “Upward Bound.” “His voice is so buoyant and kind and funny.”
The novel is partly autobiographical, and partly an exploration of a grim alternative reality that Woody avoided. One of the main characters, Walter, a nonverbal autistic young man whose life mirrors Woody’s in many ways, can’t be left unsupervised at home and has to go to a day care center. “I had no way of letting people know who I was, and my exterior presentation led people to make demeaning assumptions about me,” Walter reflects in the novel’s opening chapter. “My intelligence was like the rock pushed up the hill by Sisyphus. I could never get it to the top.”
Some stories come straight from Woody’s life, like the night he punched through a living room window, distressed by what he felt was an insensitive portrayal of an autistic person in the TV movie “Temple Grandin.” A chapter titled “Camp Cammie” describes his experience at a sleepaway camp for disabled people. His parents had to pick him up almost immediately, after a counselor saw him clutching an empty pill container, which had been mistakenly left in the duffle bag he brought from home, and assumed he had overdosed. When they asked if he had swallowed the pills, Woody could only yell “Henry,” one of the trains from “Thomas & Friends,” which Woody calls out when he’s distressed.
On a recent Friday morning, Woody and Mary sat side by side at a desk in their small home office to work on his second book, “Alfie,” a novel about an autistic man who grows up trying to recapture the camaraderie he felt with a young baseball prodigy when they were children.
“I’m going to read two paragraphs before, is that OK?” Mary asked. Woody pointed to “yes” on the letter board. Mary read the passages Woody had written the day before, describing how Alfie, the young baseball prodigy, doubted his athletic abilities and was wracked with anxiety.
Woody picked up the story. As he pointed to letters, Mary slowly read the words he spelled and typed them up.
“He … kept … it to … himself … not … wanting … to … disappoint … his … hovering … parents.”
Mary held up a piece of paper that said “end of paragraph” on one end, and “keep going” on the other. Woody tapped “keep going.”
“Little … did … he … know … that … he … was … exactly … the same … as … his … outwardly … placid … father,” Mary said as he tapped.
The day before, as Woody and Mary and I sat in the living room, I asked him what it was like to imagine the inner lives of neurotypical people in “Upward Bound.” Along with autistic characters, the novel explores the perspectives of employees at the day care center. Some are heroically devoted to the disabled people in their care; others, through a failure of imagination or empathy, are unable to recognize their humanity.
Woody’s answer suggested that he thought it was a curious question.
“I live with neurotypical people and I’ve met many,” he spelled. “It wasn’t difficult to imagine their lives and thoughts, whereas they have trouble imagining mine.”
Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times.
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