“Name one nonspeaking autistic to get into an Ivy League grad school,” writes Woody Brown, a nonspeaking author with autism, via email, having recently received an MFA from Columbia University. “I’ll wait.” The remark both reveals Woody’s winking, well-earned swagger and rebukes an education system that gave him no reason to believe he could succeed.

Brown’s mother, Mary, whom he describes as “the hero of my story,” taught him at home when Brown’s teachers demanded little of him, despite his ability to use a letter board to communicate. Mary would eventually quit her job so she could support him while he took classes at Pasadena City College. “I surprised everyone, including myself, in slaying it,” Woody writes. There’s that swagger again.

He subsequently applied to and was accepted at UCLA, where the novelist Mona Simpson nurtured his literary ambitions. “I went from having zero prospects for a productive life to having the world laid before me glowing with opportunity,” Brown reflects. At Columbia, where his professors included Rivka Galchen, Mary attended every class and helped him compose his manuscripts using the letter board. Galchen, who worked with him throughout his enrollment, says that it is natural for people to wonder about the line between transcribing and cuing. “His mother is present in the sense that she’s with him all the time, but I didn’t have any more doubt than I would about someone else in the class having their boyfriend write their work,” she says.

Brown’s debut novel, Upward Bound (Hogarth, Mar.), is set in a cash-strapped adult daycare center for autistic and disabled adults. Shifting between the perspectives of various clients and staff members, the story illuminates their cherished moments of connection amid incomprehension. “The characters in the book meet on a level that depends less on words... and more on the feelings that arise when they are together,” Brown explains.

David Ebershoff, Hogarth’s VP and editor-in-chief, says that he became “possessed” by the book, which he calls “an extraordinary work of empathy” with an inventive structure and satisfying narrative arc. “It made me question the assumptions I make and the things I think I know.”

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