Autistic genius novelist woos the literary world with novel composed using "Facilitated Communication"

[angrysoba]

This is an article from the Guardian titled "‘I was in the pit of despair’: Non-speaking autistic novelist Woody Brown on his journey from write-off to writer"

I read it while still waking up and was alarmed at how gullible the Guardian writer seems to be. That said, reading it again, I think the author deliberately put in the red flags to clue the reader in.

It's about an autistic "writer" who the educators and specialists "wrote off" (gettit! They wrote him off!), but whose mother learnt about facilitated communication, and since then, using a "word board" he was able to compose a novel.

To me, this comes across as one part Koko the Gorilla and one part a Million Little Pieces.

Brown, 28, is at home with his mother, Mary, in Los Angeles when we chat. Mary holds up the letter board on which he taps out his answers. She then speaks them back to me. Brown is not totally without speech.
Sometimes, he comes out with a word or phrase, often delivered in a high pitch and repeated. This is known as echolalia.
Brown and his mother are incredibly close. She hugs him tight as a blanket when he is stressed, waits patiently for his answers and seems to understand him almost as well as he does himself. “She has been at my side for every moment of my journey,” Brown taps. “Without her there is no me.”

His mother is the star, but the teachers didn't get it!

When he was a toddler Mary watched Soma Mukhopadhyay, whose son Tito is autistic and non-speaking, on the TV show 60 Minutes. Mukhopadhyay had taught Tito to type, and now he could communicate with the world. She thought it would be amazing if Woody could learn a fraction of what Tito had. Mary took him to see Mukhopadhyay, who wrote letters on slips of paper and jumbled them up.
“I’ve been told he’s mentally retarded, and she says ‘Woody spell cat’. And he pulls down the C and the A and the T. He’s three at that point!”
But it made little difference. When he went to school, teachers dismissed him as a no-hoper, and thought it wasn’t even worth trying to educate him. He was put in the lowest class and left to his own devices. At the age of eight, Mary tells me, the kids in his class were asked if they knew another word for sad. “When it gets to his turn he spells out ‘melancholy’ and he spells it correctly.”

This definitely happened!

“Sorry boss! Sorry boss!” he shouts in a high-pitched cartoon voice. It’s a shock when you first hear Brown speak.
...
Brown is wearing a lovely T-shirt, featuring Japanese trains. I ask him what it means. “I love trains and Murakami. Hence Japanese trains. Murakami’s my favourite author. I’ve read so many of his books. We read every day, and I can’t get enough!” Mary reads aloud to him because he has visuospatial issues that make it difficult to focus on the words on the page.

So he DOES speak, but not about Murakami, who he definitely has had read to him and which is the basis of his writing style.

As he taps, I notice he’s looking away from me. At first I assume he doesn’t like to make eye contact. But then I realise sometimes he looks straight at me, and that he seems to be engaged in an activity when he looks away. I ask what he’s doing.

“May I say I think better when I have my screens going?” Brown says.

Now it’s Mary’s turn to smile. “Should we show Simon?” she asks.

“Yes!!!” he bellows.

There are three computer screens on a mobile cart, and he’s playing or watching each one as we chat – one shows his favourite cartoon, Thomas the Tank Engine, on the second he plays Angry Birds and on the third there are videos of old-school steam locomotives.
I ask him if he’s occupying himself with all the screens because he finds me boring. “
No,” he taps. “May I say I have many screens running through my brain at all times. My brain is so busy that I have to occupy more than one channel at a time. If I only looked at you the top of my head might blow right off! It’s exhausting to narrow my vista to one window.”

Anyway, he is definitely very accomplished, definitely did a Masters degree all by himself (only the communication was facilitated by his mother), and his screenwriter mother definitely had nothing to do with the creation of the novel.

In 2022, Brown became the first non-speaking autistic graduate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he received the English department’s top writing honours. He completed his master’s at Columbia University in 2024. Mary attended both courses alongside him. He also took his cart and three screens to his studies. Multitasking was the only way he could focus on lectures and seminars. In his bedroom at home, he has far more screens all going at the same time.

Mary is also an English graduate, and worked for 20 years as a story analyst in the film industry with the likes of Steven Spielberg. Brown’s father Drew is head of production at Paramount TV. Mary anticipates there will be sceptics who suggest that she has helped Brown with his work, but she says she has had nothing to do with the creative process. Sure, she translates Brown’s sentences off the letterboard and then types them up, but apart from checking whether a comma or full stop is needed, and occasionally reminding him he’s used the same word twice in a paragraph, she insists she had no influence over the book.

 

[Helen]

Mother Mary should have followed those famous words of wisdom "let it be", I think.

 

[Darat]

I'm sure when she and him are shown different things he will telepathicly know what his mother has seen and will tap that out rather than tapping out what he was shown...

 

[Vixen]

I was about to say, 'Only in America', but to get a Masters in English from Columbia is not to be scoffed at. People think English is an easy option but it's not! Plus enormous competition to get on those courses.

 

[theprestige]

I was about to say, 'Only in America', but to get a Masters in English from Columbia is not to be scoffed at. People think English is an easy option but it's not! Plus enormous competition to get on those courses.

I suppose the intent is to burnish his reputation, but I wonder if it doesn't tarnish the school's instead.

 

[Vixen]

I've downloaded it to my Kindle on my gift card balance. The 'sample' reading looked good. I enjoyed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time plus Catcher in the Rye, etc. I think good novelists write from the viewpoint of an 'outsider' looking in. It's supposed to be hilariously funny/ironic so I am hoping for another Kurt Vonnegut Jnr.

 

[angrysoba]

I was about to say, 'Only in America',
but to get a Masters in English from Columbia is not to be scoffed at. People think English is an easy option but it's not! Plus enormous competition to get on those courses.

Then his mother should be proud of getting a Masters. Clearly he didn't.

 

[Vixen]

Then his mother should be proud of getting a Masters. Clearly he didn't.

He's disabled?

 

[angrysoba]

He's disabled?

Very.

 

[theprestige]

I've downloaded it to my Kindle on my gift card balance. The 'sample' reading looked good. I enjoyed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time plus Catcher in the Rye, etc. I think good novelists write from the viewpoint of an 'outsider' looking in. It's supposed to be hilariously funny/ironic so I am hoping for another Kurt Vonnegut Jnr.

You should consider adding The Salt Path and A Million Little Pieces to your reading list.

 

[Carrot Flower King]

NM

 

[Vixen]

You should consider adding The Salt Path and A Million Little Pieces to your reading list.

The author of that is a well-known scammer. ISTM if a neurodivergent person suffers extreme anxiety to the point of being overwhelmed by school or normal life, why shouldn't a carer provide support? If he was quadriplegic, would you object to a carer doing the dictation or typing?

 

[Darat]

The author of that is a well-known scammer. ISTM if a neurodivergent person suffers extreme anxiety to the point of being overwhelmed by school or normal life, why shouldn't a carer provide support? If he was quadriplegic, would you object to a carer doing the dictation or typing?

She isn't providing support - she is the input - look up the "Telepathic Tapes" to see how it is all done. If they tested him and her at the same time and showed one picture to one of them and a different one to the other he will always spell out the image she was shown.

 

[Gulliver Foyle]

She isn't providing support - she is the input - look up the "Telepathic Tapes" to see how it is all done. If they tested him and her at the same time and showed one picture to one of them and a different one to the other he will always spell out the image she was shown.

Here's a link to Professor Dave's video on the Telepath Tapes:


Warning, he does get het up on stuff like this and doesn't hold back.

On the Graun article, it's at times like this that shows they really need somebody like Ben Goldacre in there with a veto on science articles.

 

[Vixen]

Well, I started reading the novel, Upward Bound, the title of which turns out to refer to the adult daycare centre the protagonist is placed in. Kindle informed me I had read 12% of the book after barely half hour's reading. So I am expecting it to be short. The narrative is in the style of cynical teenager, as in Catcher in the Rye, with all too many nouns prefaced with 'big old', which made my lip curl a bit. Plus what annoyed me was the perfunctory insertion of how devoted his mother is and how much his dad cared and loved him. A creative writing tutor would rip that sort of bland sentiment up. A friend who did a PhD in Creative Writing had no end of bullying by her tutor to keep rewriting and rewriting 'cos he didn't find her voice authentic. But anyhoo, I intend to give it a fair reading before completely excoriating it.

 

[Helen]

Non-speaking, severly autistic children do not interact with the world in the same way as non-neurodivergent kids, and will not develop in the same way, since the input - sensory, as well as emotional and intellectual - is very different for them. This is not a judgement, it's just a fact. Children who are born deafblind, for instance, do not develop at all like children who are not, since their interaction with the world is severly restricted, as is their sensory input (and before anyone says Helen Keller; she was not born deafblind).

This is the sad truth. Trying to force these children to be something they are not is hurting them, not helping them. Value them for who they are instead, and help them live as well as possible on their own terms.

 

[Helen]

Well, I started reading the novel, Upward Bound, the title of which turns out to refer to the adult daycare centre the protagonist is placed in. Kindle informed me I had read 12% of the book after barely half hour's reading. So I am expecting it to be short. The narrative is in the style of cynical teenager, as in Catcher in the Rye, with all too many nouns prefaced with 'big old', which made my lip curl a bit. Plus what annoyed me was the perfunctory insertion of how devoted his mother is and how much his dad cared and loved him. A creative writing tutor would rip that sort of bland sentiment up. A friend who did a PhD in Creative Writing had no end of bullying by her tutor to keep rewriting and rewriting 'cos he didn't find her voice authentic. But anyhoo, I intend to give it a fair reading before completely excoriating it.

Why? It is a scam.

 

[Safe-Keeper]

(and before anyone says Helen Keller; she was not born deafblind).

Source?

 

[Helen]

Helen Keller - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

She was very young when she lost her vision and hearing, 19 months, but old enough to be able to process sensory input, she was very intelligent as well, and so was her teacher, Anne Sullivan. Children who are born deafblind can't, they have no frame of referrence with which to decode the world.

 

[Vixen]

Non-speaking, severly autistic children do not interact with the world in the same way as non-neurodivergent kids, and will not develop in the same way, since the input - sensory, as well as emotional and intellectual - is very different for them. This is not a judgement, it's just a fact. Children who are born deafblind, for instance, do not develop at all like children who are not, since their interaction with the world is severly restricted, as is their sensory input (and before anyone says Helen Keller; she was not born deafblind).

This is the sad truth. Trying to force these children to be something they are not is hurting them, not helping them. Value them for who they are instead, and help them live as well as possible on their own terms.

Well this guy graduated high school with an AA got a bachelors and got into Columbia (Ivy League), not dissimilar to Oxford. It seems unkind to claim that his mother scammed all his tutors? What if he really is this talented writer who just needed a different means than normal to communicate. What is your view on Dr. Stephen Hawking and his various machines?