Tomorrow is publication day! So here's why I wrote Maybe I'm Amazed

My new book is about joy in difficult circumstances, and understanding the magic of human difference

Tomorrow is publication day for Maybe I’m Amazed! You can order it here. By way of sample of the story it tells, there’s a pretty substantial extract from The Guardian.

Oh, and next Monday, I’m talking about the book, autism, music, writing and much more with the brilliant Miranda Sawyer at the new Rough Trade shop on Denmark Street in central London. Details and tickets here.

Anyway, seeing as we’ve finally reached this point, it seemed like a good time to explain why and how the book was written, and a few of the key ideas that have gone into it.

The itch to write Maybe I’m Amazed arrived not long after the General Election of 2019. I’d chewed over writing a book about the turns Britain had taken since the Brexit referendum three years before, but I had the feeling that a)The story had got too grim and relentless to return to with the dedication that a book would need, and b)In any case, the whole saga showed no sign of coming to any kind of conclusion (it still hasn’t). In some way I couldn’t quite work out, after all the political turbulence and anger I had been reporting on, what I really wanted to write about was human happiness. And music.

And then two of my colleagues – Jonathan Freedland and Rafael Behr – suggested that the raw material was right in front of me. We’d had many conversations about my autistic son James, his musical talent, and his unquenchable appetite for songs – as well as all the arduous stuff that comes with being a Special Needs parent. I’d also had half an idea about somehow writing a book about – as strange as this may sound – how great music is, for which I only had a title nicked from Radiohead: For A Minute There I Lost Myself. But suddenly, everything fused together, along with the idea of organising the story around James’s favourite songs, and one or two that have soundtracked our lives as his parents.

So I started. Maybe I’m Amazed is really a story of joy in difficult circumstances. It’s about understanding human difference as a matter of everyday experience, how much – and how little – we know about autism, and a hidden story of music and neurodivergence that includes everyone from Mozart to Brian Wilson. It’s also about the clunky, cold institutions you have to deal with if you have an autistic child, what all that struggle and anxiety is really like – and, in our case, how songs saved us, again and again. In that sense, it was written to go well beyond our family’s experiences, into really universal stuff: basically, how music feels as if it’s one of life’s most basic essentials.

More specifically, it describes: watching the 3 year-old James carefully explore every last detail of The Beatles’ I Am The Walrus over a period of three months; playing The Velvet Underground’s I’m Waiting For The Man with him at a school concert and getting an unexpected ovation; discovering he had the off-the-scale talent of perfect pitch by playing him Electronic’s Forbidden City and Funkadelic’s Fish, Chips and Sweat; and what it was like watching him get completely immersed in watching Kraftwerk at the Blue Dot festival in rural Cheshire – magic, transcendent, and easily the best gig I’ve ever seen.

What ran through all these experiences defines the book’s plotline. When James was diagnosed, most of what we were told about him by experts and professionals was about what he couldn’t do, and words like ‘deficit’ and ‘impairment’. I know why all that happened. But in the 15 years that followed, what we have understood time and again is the plain fact that he is as full of fascination and complexity as anyone else, and capable of things that, in the best way, I still don’t fully understand. The most obvious example is what defines what I’ve written: how, like many people, he hears things in music that most people don’t.

The way society tends to deal with autism, unfortunately, is still a long way from reflecting most of that. Maybe I’m Amazed also touches on how our systems of care and education still have a long way to go in the way they view people with autism (and learning disabilities) and their families, and the fact that though there is a much better understanding of autistic children than there was 30 or 40 years ago, society still has no meaningful appreciation of the fact that kids on the spectrum turn into adults. They need infinitely better treatment that what they tend to receive now: all too often, a mixture of bafflement and neglect. Being James’s dad has vividly highlighted all that to me, in the most visceral way: the drive to write about it was a big part of what powered me through the book.

So, here we are. I hope you like Maybe I’m Amazed, and the story it tells. Whatever your perspective, it was written to explore things that are surely familiar to all of us, summarised in the opening pages:

“When he and I listen to songs, or play them…. we meet in the intersection between us, defined by the ineffable and magical, and what music ultimately is: a perfect soundtrack to life, and all its joy, sadness, tragedy and wonder.”

Further reading: Review by Mojo’s Danny Eccleston: “Uplifting memoir of music fandom, parenting and autism…”

Current listening! The almost-definitive Maybe I’m Amazed playlist, from Nick Drake’s Northern Sky to The Clash’s The Card Cheat

More events!
Waterstones in central Manchester with Dave Haslam on Wednesday April 16th

The Elysium Gallery in Swansea with Jude Rogers on Tuesday April 22nd

The Sheffield Festival of Debate with Melissa Simmonds on Thursday April 24th

Derby book festival on Wednesday May 28th (on sale soon). More dates to be announced.