His son James’s autism diagnosis in 2009 sparked British writer John Harris’s latest book, a swiftly paced memoir that flows easily between personal family experience, music writing and reportage from the fields of autism, neurodivergence and the latest science in how music affects the mind, body and emotions.
When it becomes apparent to his parents that alongside his challenges, James has an ecstatic love of and exceptional gift for music – including perfect pitch, much more common among people with autism than in the neurotypical population – joy through music in the moment begins to replace the pessimistic fear that the diagnostic process had induced.
It’s a pleasure to read Harris on the artists who’ve soundtracked his family’s life, and on the power of music to create euphoric transcendent states in those listening and playing – both of which James does in most waking moments, with the autistic advantage of heightened sensory awareness and attunement.
Harris casts back over his years as a journalist interviewing musicians for the music magazine NME. He speculates that certain expressions of musical genius may be synonymous with types of autism. (Think of “eccentric”, “socially withdrawn” or “roadie-dependent” musical masters from Mozart to Van Morrison.)
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In broadening out to observe autistic traits within family lines – including his own obsessiveness with music – and within wider society, Harris loosens the tendency to ghettoise people like his son, who may simply have higher concentrations of the autistic tendencies that all of us have, to greater and lesser degrees.
Remaining ghettoised by Harris’s book, however, is that group who comprise about 30 per cent of those with autism: the “nonspeakers”, which includes unreliable speakers. In the past couple of decades, history has been made by the first-ever wave of nonspeaking autistics to be unlocked into real communication through being deliberately taught the motor skill – consistently, over time – to accurately point at letters, and hence spell their thoughts.
It’s a major oversight that Harris fails to reference nonspeaking autistic spellers and their paradigm-shifting books and blogs. Even best-sellers The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida (with its follow-on documentary), published in translation in 2007 by author David Mitchell, and Ido Kedar’s Ido in Autismland (2012), are absent in Harris’s bibliography.
In leaving out nonspeaking spellers, Harris’s book, despite its merits, perpetuates exclusion.
