Maybe I’m Amazed
By John Harris
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. Like all parents, Harris’s 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. Tim Clare
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