Book review: Maybe I’m Amazed

“Autism illuminates the way all our minds work – not least our relationship with music.”

I’ve got two things in common with author John Harris’s son James. We are both autistic, and music is a big part of our lives. Well, three things if you count the fact that we both dislike Captain Beefheart. As his father says, James has good taste in music.

There is more that we don’t have in common. We are a different gender, and a different generation. I don’t have a learning disability. And I don’t have an amazing musical talent either: James is a musical savant with perfect pitch.

The book is subtitled A Story of Love and Connection in Ten Songs. There’s a lot of love in the book (love between family members, love for music) and a lot of connection (also with family members and music).

Some of the blurbs for the book say it is heartbreaking and inspirational but that’s how some people like to talk about disabled people. I’d rather say it is heart warming.

It’s not a good time to be autistic at the moment, and a lot of us are feeling pretty bruised about the current discourse. The search for the causes of autism feels increasingly sinister. We’d rather that those with  power focused on how to make autistic people’s lives better. 

That’s the fight that John Harris and his wife Ginny had after they found out that James was autistic: finding ways to make his life better. We all know, after all, that it’s not a good time to be a parent of a child with “special educational needs and disabilities”. 

So, yes, there are things in this book that are tough, but there is also a lot of joy. Harris describes how his son’s enthusiasm for music reignited his own, as a jaded former music journalist. 

There is also a lot of discovery, as the parents try to find out more about autism. The book shares the knowledge as they find it. It also acknowledges that the views of autism parents sometimes clashes with those of adult autistic advocates.

I’ve read a lot about autism since I had my diagnosis seven years ago, but not from this perspective, so I learnt new things from the book. In particular, I liked the theory that patterns can appear across a family tree before eventually resulting in an autistic individual.

James’ parents, after all, were obsessed with music beyond what is generally considered normal. Harris quotes Jah Wobble: “the music industry is full of oddballs”. That applies, of course, to both music-makers and music fans.

I enjoyed the biographical details of Harris’s own story with music and how it turned into a job. I also identified with a lot, like his thoughts about a career change: “Rather unnecessarily, I thought that the clock was ticking on my time as a music writer.”

I had to laugh at that: when I was working as a music journalist, I had the idea that I ought to stop before I was forty. Since then, I’ve watched my peers carry on until retirement and beyond.

I know I was right to stop when I did, though. As Harris recalls, the job “was starting to feel like it was getting in the way of why I had started writing about music in the first place… Due to sheer over-exposure, I began to lose touch with why I had become fascinated in the first place.” 

I have felt the same, but we both got our love for music back. The difference is that I don't have an amazing child to share it with.

Now, he shares with James “an intense, obsessional connection with music, and an insatiable appetite for it”. That’s love, and that’s connection.

And yes, Monotronic Superdrive would be a great name for a band.

 

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Buy Maybe I’m Amazed from Bookshop.org (affiliate link).