One of my favourite books growing up was my dad’s copy of The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics. I spent hours flicking through images of an eyeless, trombone-mouthed golden man swallowing naked bodies, and a full-page, black-and-white comic strip by legendary psychedelic artist Rick Griffin. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t yet listened to most of the songs – the surreal visual riffs felt like dispatches from an undiscovered country. Later, the Beatles became my favourite band. I chain-listened to the albums, read endless books, watched the movies and recited Beatles’ lore to anyone within earshot. “Oh dear,” said my mum one morning, as I reeled off an account of how a 40-piece orchestra improvised the rising crescendo in A Day in the Life, “you’ve become a Beatles bore.”
Maybe I’m Amazed opens with John Harris’s 15-year-old son, James, ecstatically absorbed in a live performance by Paul McCartney, “so held in the moment that he is almost in an altered state”. Harris then loops back to before James’s birth, and tells the story of his son’s arrival, his preschool diagnosis of autism, and how his differences manifest as he grows up. James loves music – the Beatles chief among a rich buffet of bands and tracks he listens to, over and over – and so Harris divides the book into 10 chapters named after songs, each with a particular resonance.
Harris writes about music with wit, clarity and a welcome lack of pretension. One chapter takes its cue from Funkadelic’s “weird … incongruous” track Fish, Chips and Sweat – about a carnal encounter that takes as its backdrop “the least sexy meal imaginable”. Another from Nick Drake’s Northern Sky, a song whose lyrics evoke “a sudden euphoria that leaves you silent, and still”. Harris even bravely attempts a rehabilitation of Baker Street, “a masterclass in the arts of arrangement and production”, so hackneyed from familiarity we might miss the complicated stories implied by its “sparse, carefully chosen words”.
Threaded throughout this are he and his wife Ginny’s struggles and anxieties around parenthood, and James’s emerging strengths and challenges. He demonstrates absolute pitch – the ability to instantly identify individual notes – and can name the keys of random songs played to him on Spotify. “Imagine having as instinctive and vivid a connection with music as this,” muses Harris. “From time to time, James speaks to me using songs,” he writes, recounting a moment when, after refusing to go to school, James commands Alexa to play the Smiths’ The Headmaster Ritual, with its lyrics “Give up education as a bad mistake”.
As a parent, I recognise the all‑consuming worry described here. Harris and his wife quickly find that support for children with special educational needs is callously absent – they spend their savings paying for early, intensive therapy for James, and preparing the legal case for the support he’ll need in school (local authorities routinely force parents to pursue them through the courts for the care they are legally obliged to offer, calculating that most will lack the resources to do so).
But, as an autistic person, I sometimes found it hard reading about behaviours and tendencies I’ve exhibited all my life viewed through the lens of neurotypicality. Harris is left “flummoxed and sad” when, on a trip to Chester zoo, James ignores the penguins and plays with the wood chips covering the path, picking them up and dropping them. “I get the sense if he was left to his own devices, he might repeat the cycle indefinitely.” James is absorbed by the wrong thing – wood chips’ splendid tactile diversity, and the miracle of gravity.
I don’t wish to punish Harris’s honesty. Like all parents, his journey involves plenty of learning on the job. He writes powerfully about “almost Victorian levels of cruelty” inflicted on autistic people in care, and how, through his and James’s shared love of music, his initial doomy grief gives way to a constellation of admiration, fear, humour, awe and, of course, love. I wept several times, and the book wouldn’t have that power without the author’s willingness to be real and vulnerable. As he observes, autistic traits appear throughout humankind. You might say we’re like everyone else – only more so.
• Maybe I’m Amazed: A Story of Love and Connection in Ten Songs by John Harris is published by John Murray (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
