The title of Jason Diamond’s new memoir, Searching for John Hughes: Or Everything I Thought I Needed to Know About Life I Learned From Watching 80s Movies, is deceptive—it suggests a series of cheerful reminiscences about lessons Diamond learned from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club and how he applied them to his own life. But Searching for John Hughes is both darker and more interesting. Diamond grew up mostly on the North Shore, close to where Hughes lived and set his greatest sequence of films, from Sixteen Candles in 1984 through Home Alone in 1990. These movies (especially the ones about teenagers) had a huge impact on a generation of kids who, like Diamond, grew up watching them on TV and believing they were an accurate representation of high school life.

Jason Diamond: I sort of had been hitting a wall professionally: I had an idea for a book that nobody wanted. My job was terrible, it was the middle of August in New York, I really felt like I was failing, and I was very disappointed in myself. And I started to think about the last time I felt like I had failed so spectacularly, and I finally came to this realization that trying to write a John Hughes biography was kind of not my thing.

It made me cry. I think it’s just something about abandoning a child. When you’re a douche in Brooklyn, that’s one thing, but a kid just being forced to be homeless—that’s tough stuff.

Do you still watch John Hughes movies?

I don’t know if you’ve ever done—actually, I’m going to say you’ve probably never done this, I think I’m just a weirdo, but there are so many good fan theories about Ferris Bueller, and my favorite one is that it’s just all imagined through the eyes of Cameron.

There are a lot of people who grew up with him in different eras, and I find that really fascinating, how people from each era take different things from his movies. And it’s sort of boiling down into one career. It’s not just the 80s, or Home Alone—it’s the whole thing.

By Jason Diamond (William Morrow)

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