John Harris: Maybe I'm Amazed — Music, Neurodivergence, and Connection
Guardian journalist John Harris discusses his memoir about raising his autistic son James through ten formative songs, tracing music's overlooked links to neurodivergent creativity.
Why we picked this
Harris is a music journalist who wrote for the NME and has covered British politics for decades — the fact that it took raising an autistic child to bring those two threads together gives this book and talk an emotional and intellectual specificity most memoir-as-lecture events never reach.
John Harris has spent three decades writing about music and politics — for the NME in the Britpop years, then as a long-running Guardian political correspondent. His new book, Maybe I’m Amazed, draws on both those worlds to tell the deeply personal story of raising his son James, who is autistic, and the way music became the primary language of their relationship.
The conceit of ten songs is not just a structuring device. Harris has written at length about how music functions as emotional infrastructure in a way that resists easy verbalization — and for neurodivergent individuals, that specific quality can be especially significant. The book makes a careful case for links between neurodivergence and creativity that have been systematically underexplored in how we talk about both music and autism. What does it mean that so many musicians we canonise displayed traits that today would attract clinical labels?
This RSA appearance offers something the book itself cannot: a conversation about all of it in real time, in a room where the audience can push back on the more ambitious claims and hear Harris think through the tensions between the personal and the structural. The Great Room at RSA House, from 6:00 PM. Also available via live stream on YouTube.