Critics Love It. But Who Wrote It?
A best-selling novel about disability was written via letter board. Or so the story goes.
On a recent morning at Rockefeller Center, NBC employees strolled through the crowd with copies of Upward Bound, the latest book-club pick from the Today show co-host Jenna Bush Hager. “It’s deeply heartfelt and moving,” Hager said, after holding up the debut novel from the 28-year-old Woody Brown, “and the reason it’s so authentic is that the author understands autism firsthand.”
That understanding is indeed profound. Brown’s autism is such that he can barely speak, and he communicates mostly by pointing to letters, one by one, on a laminated board. This is also how his novel, which is already a New York Times best seller, came to be. In the recorded interview that followed Hager’s introduction, Brown’s mother, Mary, sat beside him, holding the letter board and reading his tapped-out messages.
“I never thought there could be a life like this,” he spelled, after Hager asked him to reflect on the publication of the book. Upward Bound describes the different, sadder sort of life that could have been. “I had no way of letting people know who I was,” the character who is most like Brown says in the first chapter. “My intelligence was like the rock pushed up the hill by Sisyphus. I could never get it to the top.”
The real-life Brown spelled his way through high school and, with his mother at his side, earned his bachelor’s degree, with highest honors, at UCLA. Then he earned an M.F.A. in writing at Columbia and secured a two-book deal from Hogarth, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Brown described what this was like by letter-pointing during the NBC interview.
But if you watch the footage closely, and at one-quarter speed, it doesn’t look like he is spelling anything at all. Brown’s finger can be seen, at several points, in close-up, from a camera just behind his shoulder—and what he taps onto the board seems disconnected from the sentiments that Mary speaks aloud.
Katharine Beals, a linguist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania who has a son with autism, has studied Brown’s controversial method of communication since the early 2000s, and she has cataloged the ways in which it fails. She told me that she found the clip from NBC to be upsetting. Beals conceded that it can be hard in some cases to say whether such communication is real—but not in this one. “This isn’t subtle,” she said. “You can see that he’s not pointing to the letters.”
In the broadcast, Mary says: “To finally be in the room where learning was happening, I felt like I was in heaven.” But Woody’s finger seems to say: Tobgdhi nvza.
On YouTube, where the clip from NBC is posted, viewer comments are aggressive, ranging from ridicule to accusations of fraud. These are snap judgments based on a single, highly edited video; in the end, there is no way to prove or disprove from afar Brown’s capacity to write. But several professional organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, have issued formal warnings against the use of Rapid Prompting, a training method for communication from which Brown’s approach is derived. “There is uncertainty regarding who does the spelling,” ASHA says. And given that the method may mislead, “children and their families can incur serious harm.”
I emailed Brown, directly and through his publisher, to request an interview and ask if he or his mother would explain the spelling process as it appeared on the Today show. I got an emailed statement back. “I can understand why people are curious—even skeptical—about my method of communication,” it said. The statement continues:
It is mysterious and confounding to see a severely autistic nonspeaker perform acts of scholarship and fiction writing if you don’t presume intelligence in a disabled person. I have been using the same green board since I was in middle school and I find the letters and colors very calming. A keyboard requires specific aim and is unforgiving of error. I have a distinct brain but imperfect aim. This may look chaotic but in this way I keep up a steady rhythm with my finger that helps me stay on track. I am no savant. I came to novel writing like most published authors. I have read many books, attended good colleges, and got my MFA in writing at one of the country’s best programs. The only difference is that I communicate in a different manner.
Mary Brown has elsewhere addressed the possibility that she is influencing or even formulating her son’s words. She told The New York Times that she works hard to verify that everything Woody wants to say, down to the punctuation mark, is faithfully captured by the letter board. This is why, by her account, he wrote his 188-page novel at a rate of just one paragraph a day.
I’ve done a lot of reporting on contested messaging like Brown’s, and I’ve had the chance to talk with many autistic people who can barely speak but who seem to spell out complicated messages with their parents’ help. A few of them were clearly able to produce at least some simple messages on their own. (In community parlance, they are known as “independent typers.”) I’ve heard from parents about how such communication has enabled them to connect with their children and provide a better life.
I’ve also seen the many ways in which this method can go catastrophically—and sometimes even criminally—amiss. In one case that I covered over several years, a college professor in New Jersey ultimately pleaded guilty to aggravated criminal sexual contact with a man who had been diagnosed with severe cognitive and physical disabilities. (She claimed that he’d spelled out his consent.) And my impression of the clip from the Today show was very much in line with Beals’s. The messaging looked more than just “chaotic.” It looked compromised.
Brown learned to spell words on a letter board from a woman named Soma Mukhopadhyay, who developed Rapid Prompting in the 1990s. The New Jersey case involved an earlier incarnation of the same approach, called Facilitated Communication, that works by having someone type into a keyboard, or point to letters on a board, with a helper at their side who grasps their hand or holds their arm. Upon its arrival in the United States, “FC” was celebrated as a means of liberation for nonspeaking autistic kids, whose hidden skills and inner life were suddenly revealed. In this magazine, I’ve described what happened next: FC users, working literally hand in hand with their classroom facilitators, started typing claims of sexual abuse. Many of those accusations proved to be unfounded, and parents were unjustly sent to jail.
Clinicians quickly came to understand that the method was susceptible to a very powerful “Ouija-board effect”: A facilitator could unwittingly deliver subtle and subconscious prompts—gentle pressure on a person’s wrist, perhaps—that shaped the outcome of the process. When the typers were subjected to formal “message-passing tests,” in which they would be asked to name an object or a picture that they’d seen while their helper wasn’t in the room, they almost always failed. Even kids who had produced fluid written work seemed incapable, under those conditions, of saying anything at all.
By 1994, the method was broadly disavowed. Yet a core group of true believers continued to promote its use. The New Jersey professor was among them. So was Mary Brown. In 2011, Mary posted on an autism-community website that her son’s use of facilitated communication had “helped him keep up at grade level.” The post has since been taken down, and FC has given way in recent years to its purportedly more reliable offshoots: Rapid Prompting and a similar approach called Spelling to Communicate. Now, instead of holding the speller’s hand, most facilitators hold the letter board instead. At first glance, the risk of influence seems less acute.
Even so, spellers still require someone else’s constant presence for communication—and that leaves ample room for the Ouija-board effect. A speller’s aide may gently tilt the board in such a way that coaxes out the letters she’s expecting. Or her influence may be more direct: When I interviewed Mukhopadhyay last year, she told me that parents sometimes try to accelerate communication by guessing what their child means to say—like a human version of the “autocomplete” feature on a cellphone. I reached out to Mukhopadhyay again this week and asked her to explain the process shown in the Today show clip. “Sometimes spelling habits change over time, and film editing processes can be tricky,” she wrote in an email. “Spelling itself is a slow process.” She added, “You are free to interpret the video as you see fit—I cannot and would not ask otherwise.” Katie Anawalt, another Rapid Prompting expert who has worked with Brown, told me that “Woody uses multiple strategies and methods to communicate—not just one,” and that “what is shown in the video reflects the communication approach he and his mother have chosen for that particular moment.”
ASHA has described Rapid Prompting and Spelling to Communicate as bearing “considerable similarity” to FC and thus as “pseudoscience.” But a formal disavowal by experts simply isn’t what it used to be. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared himself a fan of these methods: Doubters are delusional, he said in 2021; they remind him of doctors who still deny the harms of childhood vaccines. In January, Kennedy appointed two letter-board users and an expert trainer in Spelling to Communicate to the federal government’s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee. Meanwhile, an audio series about nonspeaking autistic children who allegedly display their telepathic and clairvoyant powers via letter board has been listed among Apple’s most popular podcasts for more than a year.
Sales of Upward Bound are soaring too. Following the Today show segment, Brown’s book reached Amazon’s top-10 list for books of any kind. This was preceded by a platinum-level rollout that included starred advance reviews, awestruck and largely uncritical features in The New York Times and The Guardian, and testimonials from A-list novelists including Paul Beatty, Roddy Doyle, Rivka Galchen, and Mona Simpson. This is the kind of marketing that any debut literary author would kill to have.
Critics of Rapid Prompting and related methods are aghast. “This really feels like a crescendo,” Beals said. “It’s really, really out of control.”
Upward Bound is good. I recommend it. The novel takes the form of an interlocking set of stories about the clients and staff at a day-care center for adults with disabilities in Southern California. Its 12 chapters are written from the viewpoints of eight different characters. Their voices are engaging and distinct, and their efforts at communication—the tiny social cues they either catch or miss—are cataloged in careful detail. It’s as if the book were written to refute the classic notion that autistic people’s deficits result from a malfunctioning “theory of mind.” The book is, if nothing else, a master class in making sense of mental states—a perspective-taking flex.
For someone with Brown’s diagnosis—someone who was written off by the age of 3 as “mentally retarded,” according to his mother—this sort of literary output may seem astounding. Autistic people tend to be more literal-minded in communication than neurotypical people are; they have more difficulty picking up sarcasm, irony, or even idioms such as “Could you please give me a hand?” Studies find that struggles to engage with figurative language tend to scale with broader deficits—but Upward Bound would seem to give the lie to this correlation. In the book, Brown uses metaphors in much the way that any literate neurotypical person might: The adults in a room turn their heads in unison “like a den of meerkats”; a ray of sunlight is glimpsed “flaming off the pool”; people disappearing from view leave behind “a faint streak of loss.”
That a mostly nonspeaking autistic person should have produced those lines might be unusual, Matt Lerner, a professor who studies social development at the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute, told me, but it’s surely possible. He said that FC and FC-derived methods of communication can be suspect—that much has been shown through careful research—but that also, in some cases, they clearly work: “Two things are uncomfortably true at the same time.” Moreover, the old idea that a weak theory of mind defines autism is simply wrong. An autistic person might be highly skilled at perspective-taking but express it in a nontraditional way, and he might be highly capable of linguistic abstraction even if he has a disability in spoken language. “There is very much a route,” Lerner said, for such a person to write a book like Upward Bound.
And yet, history suggests that there is also a route for Brown’s letter board to convey someone else’s use of metaphor, someone else’s sense of character, someone else’s fine attunement to the art of narrative construction. According to her LinkedIn, Mary Brown holds a master’s degree in English literature from Northwestern, and for more than 20 years, until she quit her job in 2012 to care for Brown full-time, she evaluated movie scripts as a story analyst for Hollywood studios. She has been present at nearly every stage of Brown’s higher education, sitting with him in seminars, helping him write papers and stories, sharing his thoughts in class discussions. When the reporter from The Guardian asked Brown to describe his next book, Mary read his response: “It’s a bildungsroman about my search for camaraderie,” she said, before apologizing for the fact that she doesn’t even know how to say the word bildungsroman. (In a 2020 interview for a college publication, Brown spelled out with Mary’s help that he’d learned German by watching videos—and that he’d also learned Spanish, Hungarian, and Japanese.)
Was bildungsroman Brown’s word or hers? It’s an awful, awful question. To challenge his capacity for self-expression is to question who he is. To wonder if he has really written Upward Bound is to gesture at the false idea that those who cannot talk have nothing to communicate. But in the context of this book, championed as a vital work of art, acclaimed (and sold) for its firsthand authenticity, the question can’t be wished away.
Did Hogarth, Brown’s publisher, take any steps to verify the author of the text, maybe through a message-passing test of the kind that was deployed during the FC fervor of the early ’90s? Such scrutiny would have been uncomfortable but not without precedent. Less than two weeks before Brown’s book came out, a major publisher canceled the U.S. release of the horror novel Shy Girl after reviewing it for evidence of AI-generated text. (The author has denied using AI but said that an acquaintance who’d edited the novel had done so.) Hogarth would not say whether it had attempted to confirm Upward Bound’s authenticity, either before or after publication. The novel’s editor, David Ebershoff, told me via email that the book is “Woody’s” and that “it illuminates lives too often left out of society and literature. It does what some of my favorite books do—locates beauty and humanity in a place, and among a group of people, so many have underestimated and overlooked.”
The problem is, reasonable doubts about the book have been overlooked as well—by Penguin Random House and by the media outlets that have hyped it. (The dewy-eyed feature in the Times does provide, in passing, an attenuated paraphrase of ASHA's statement about Rapid Prompting.) Then there is the phalanx of established authors who have mentored Brown and endorsed his work. Those who responded to my questions told me that they’d found no reason to suspect that he had not written what they’d read. Rivka Galchen, a staff writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor at Columbia, worked closely with both Brown and his mother across four semesters. Although it had crossed her mind, at first, that his writing might be influenced, the worry vanished over time, based on what she saw. “I’m not a doofus,” she told me. And even if some doubts had lingered, she would have felt both unqualified and disinclined to investigate the question. “Do I have students whose girlfriends write their prose? Do I have students who use AI? I have no idea,” Galchen said. “I feel like I have to take it on faith.”
Mona Simpson taught Brown in two classes at UCLA and supervised his senior project, an early draft of Upward Bound. “He has a natural instinct for the shape of a story,” Simpson told me. “I truly have no doubts about Woody’s authorship.” But over the course of our conversation, she acknowledged the vagaries of collaboration—the possibility of some interpretation at play: “It could be that they’ve worked together so long that she can intuit some of what he’s intending. I don’t know.”
To these writers and the other people who have vouched for him, Brown has two, interlocking sides: an outward-facing self who loves Thomas the Tank Engine cartoons and watches them even as he sits in class or speaks with a reporter, and an inward-facing one who knows five languages, has a natural feel for story structure, and is working on a new bildungsroman about camaraderie. At one point in the feature for The Guardian, the interviewer comments on the Japanese-train design on Brown’s T-shirt. Brown says that it represents a merger of his interests: “I love trains and Murakami,” he taps out with Mary’s help. “Hence Japanese trains. Murakami’s my favourite author.”
Upward Bound provides that answer in a longer form, linking the person we observe with the intellect that dwells within. It explains the seeming contradictions of autistic people’s minds; it tries to offer a glimpse inside their brains. “I want mostly for neurotypical people to see that we have inner lives so they are more inclined to treat us like human beings,” Brown spelled, when he was being interviewed for the Today show. (In the video, he appears to point to letters spelling Wdeha brjum.)
Brown also spoke about his mother in the interview; you can see it for yourself on YouTube. He jabs his finger at the letter board. Mary speaks the words.
“Without … her … there … is … no … me.”
