BLOG WILL HUNTING: Did your travels as a published author, perhaps on your first book tour, affect the way you see the (white) world? I was struck by the similarities — looking from your book tour dates to the cities you profile in the new book.

CHRISTIAN LANDER: Absolutely. Like most people I fell into a bubble of only visiting cities where I had close friends or were absolute must stops for white people (New York, San Francisco). I had a rough idea about the makeup and attitudes of these other cities but it wasn’t until I actually visited them that I realized that they were as predictable as me. Which is to say, very predictable.

BWH: I suspect there are particular questions that authors get asked all the time. What is the quintessential question people ask of you at author talks?

CL: “Is there anyone who doesn’t get it?” And the answer is always yes. You can’t write about race, or you can’t write anything even close to satire without an drawing an audience that doesn’t get it.

BWH: Following up on that, I’d imagine you’ve been pitched some pretty esoteric blogs. Any that were particularly memorable?

CL: Not sure I’d call them esoteric. Most people won’t tell me their idea for a tumblr blog, they’ll just do it, and before you know it we have a site of “Cats that look look like this lesbian I know.” Boom. What I find are people who have done brilliant spin off sites: Stuff Educated Black People Like, Stuff Black People Hate, White Stuff People Like, etc.

BWH: I’m of course particularly interested in your Boston section. Why did you choose to kick off the book with Boston?

CL: I wish I could say I had a burning desire because I had my heart broken by a girl from Brookline or a particularly harsh rejection from Harvard. But the truth is when we were arranging the book we tried to do a rough geographical tour, and we figured we should start in the Northeast. After all, that’s exactly where white people started.

BWH: I feel like you sum up the Good Will Hunting phenomenon perfectly in your comment about Bostonians being “proud of their blue-collar roots” but “two generations is as close as they will ever get to a job requiring manual labor.” Matt and Ben made this film that was so intensely proud of its grittiness, and much is made of their true-blue Boston backgrounds, but they were Cambridge brats who were teachers’ kids and went to Cambridge Rindge and Latin. Assuming it wasn’t actually Damon and Affleck, what was your inspiration for this astute observation?

CL: The “Boston” movies help (Good Will Hunting, The Town, The Departed) and since I have a lot of friends from Boston (mostly classmates who I met at McGill), they all sort of take on this pride that Boston is somehow still a place where you can be white and tough and I guess sort of smart. It was fun to see people taking pride in these roots and then finding out that their parents were lawyers. It’s like when they call professional sports teams “blue collar.”

BWH: So… does Good Will Hunting fit? Is it something White People Like?

CL: Absolutely, because we all like to think we were smart enough to go to Harvard but chose not to.

Christian Lander will be signing books and speaking here in town, at Cambridge’s own Harvard Book Store, on Saturday, January 22.

Oh, and incidentally, here on Blog Will Hunting we’ve been known to whine “They got a book deal; why not me?” Check out our takes on LOLCats and Cake Wrecks.

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There are brief references to Will’s biological and foster parents, Skylar’s wealthy father, Sean’s abusive dad, and Chuckie’s Ma (and her VCR…). Certainly, Sean and Lambeau become a type of hybrid father figure to Will, together tumultuously strengthening Will’s ability to form healthy emotional attachment. But there are no actual moms or dads written into the script and we never witness any authentic parenting in the movie.

As a mother to two young children I sometimes find myself thinking back to this film and wondering, what about the parents? What’s their deal? What parenting successes led to Chuckie’s unabashed confidence? What drove the horrific foster parents to utterly ignore Will’s obvious genius?

Despite the lack of parental presence in the film there is still a lot of child-rearing wisdom to be reaped. In fact, I’ve managed to successfully incorporate several brilliant GWH one-liners into my own mothering repertoire.

For example, the baby hates to don his snow suit. By the time I stuff all four extremities into the ball of down fluff he is sobbing as if I’ve submitted him to some kind of torture device. But then once he’s strapped in the backpack or the stroller and he’s outside in the fresh air he is hands-down the happiest kid in the world. At this point I get right up in his face and declare, “How do you like me NOW?!”

Next example: My 2.5 year-old decides to dump out every single Lego, block and puzzle piece we own about 35 seconds before we’re supposed to leave for preschool. My response? “Jane! No more shenanigans. No more tomfoolery. No more ballyhoo. Put. On. Your. Shoes.” If my request is subsequently ignored I have been known to take a deep breath and mutter, “Keep antagonizing me, watch what happens.”

And my personal favorite: as I break up a scrum between my son and daughter a sudden stench makes my eyes sting. I ask, “OK, who made a poop?” <They both look innocent.> I point to the guiltiest-looking child and announce, “Ya suspect!”

Thank you, Good Will Hunting, for allowing me to share these truly awesome parenting gems with my kids, especially the most graceful way to exit an awkward social encounter: “I swallowed a bug.”

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Here is a list of some of my favorite of the hundreds of search terms that have brought people to the site.

I’m not sure everyone got what they were looking for. Nevertheless, enjoy.

• how to style hair like matt damon in good will hunting
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And as a part of our ongoing series THEY GOT A BOOK DEAL; WHY NOT ME, please enjoy a piece of birthday cake with us.

If a blog about ill-constructed cakes can get a book deal, why not a blog with brilliantly-constructed Good Will Hunting-themed cakes?

"How Do You Like Them Apples?" apple cake with brown sugar frosting and mini-cupcakes with red frosting

Many thanks to cake auteur Molly, who writes:

Well, it was supposed to be a “How Do You Like Them Apples?” Apple Cake, with Brown Sugar Frosting, with mini-cupcakes made to look like apples.  The cake recipe is from King Arthur Flour.  On the cake was a hand, holding a piece of paper with Skylar’s phone number. The background was decorated with cinnamon, and the paper made white with confectioner’s sugar, and the hand’s sleeve was green and black plaid. It was lovely.

But by the time it got to your house, it was a “Do you like apples? Well, I destroyed your cake on the 72 bus on the way over. How do you like THEM apples?” Apple Cake, with frosting mash. It was a literal cake wreck. I cried a little, just like I did the first time I saw Good Will Hunting.  Still tasted good, though.

Happy Birthday, Blog Will Hunting!

"Marky, Ricky, Danny, Terry, Mikey, Davey, Timmy, Tommy, Joey, Robby, Johnny, and Brian" yellow birthday cake with chocolate frosting and cupcakes

Thanks to cake creator Katherine, who ran into some cake-making issues, primarily fitting all Will’s fictional brothers onto one cake, explaining “I had to resort to cupcakes. Also, there was a giant sinkhole in ‘Danny’ that I could not, for the life of me, fix… no matter how much frosting i filled it with, it kept sinking in.”

"It's Not Your Fault" yellow cake with vanilla frosting and red roses icing

Happy Birthday, Blog Will Hunting!

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As a part of our occasional series THEY GOT A BOOK DEAL WHY NOT ME, Blog Will Hunting is putting out our first call for work.

To celebrate our upcoming first birthday, we want your best/worst Good Will Hunting themed cake or dessert item, à la Cake Wrecks.

Send photos to contact@blogwillhunting.com by June 13.

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Perhaps the publishing deluge has slowed down in recent months, but for a while there it seemed that every blog that tipped into the pop cultural consciousness would proceed to fall into a big bucket of book deals.

These days, blogging advice sites are full of tips on how to get your own book deal (discover yourself! get an agent!), and the excellent blog Look At This Fucking Idea For a Blog-to-Book Deal is thriving.

Ben Huh wrote the book “I Can Has Cheezburger?” based on a blog of the same name. It has sold more than 100,000 copies. | Photo by Kevin P. Casey for The New York Times

Not to be left behind, this particular blog, which happens to be about the 1997 film Good Will Hunting, is embarking on an exploration of some of these interweb memes that have made the transition from Twitter tiny url’s to your local bookstore’s new paperback section.  After all, if they got a book deal, WHY NOT ME??

Check back soon for MORE LOLMatts!! (In the mean time, there’s always more LOLCats at the original I Can Has Cheezburger.)

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Blog Will Hunting wishes you a good day, Valentine’s, or otherwise.  Have a bunch of caramels or something.

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Okay, I would be remiss not to praise the GWH2 moment wherein Mr. Ponytail intones the film’s somewhat obtuse before-and-after title.  Really, is anyone in the film really hunting for “good will” — “an attitude of kindness or friendliness; benevolence”?

Will Hunting is actually surrounded by this sort of unobtrusive support; what he ultimately needs is “to meet his match” (according to the trailer) — the kind of challenges he receives from Minnie Driver, Robin Williams, and Math. I would argue he’s “It’s Not Your Fault” Hunting.  But that is not the same as good will.  Will needs tough love, not merriness and good will towards men. (Though I guess he claims to need no one but the dead academics he so relishes…)

The other understanding of the play on words is that Will is just plain Good, as in Good [at Math] Will Hunting.  Good [at Burying it Deep Inside] Will Hunting.  But that’s stupid, right? But I digress — the film’s title is a compelling discussion to come.  Let’s just cut back to the punchline… “Applesauce, bitch.”  (And who doesn’t like applesauce?)

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For an “indie” film, it is widely recognized, and generally — I think — thought of with fondness. For a film that admittedly flirts with mediocrity, it resonates for those of us who were young adults in the late nineties.  References to the film, over a decade after its release, pepper my peer group’s daily interactions, almost unconsciously.

So.  Just what is it that makes Good Will Hunting so different, so appealing?

Welcome to BlogWillHunting, wherein a collective of Bostonian and Canterbridgian twenty-somethings embark, today, on a discussion of Matt and Ben’s great dissertation.  It is the story of a young man in Boston — a man among friends — knocking back some beers, sitting on a winning lottery ticket, and seeing about a girl.

Join us, won’t you?

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