Donna Williams is an individual who has autism. From the age of three, Donna suffered from the inability to communicate with the outer world. Although it seemed to many, including her cruel mother, that she was just behaving badly, in her world she was reacting in the only way she could. To cope with being in a strange world forced on her by autism, she had to develop ways in which to cope and survive because that world was nested within the larger "real world."