That Was Then, This is Now

That Was Then, This Is Now by S.E. Hinton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I believe that the last time I read this, I was a teenager myself. A fan of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, TWTTIN was a logical follow up. I was prompted to re-read this via a tweet from a young man who had finished it and really identified with it. For it is about loss and growing up and growing apart and I can attest as the 48-year-old man I am, that you will grow up and grow old and grow apart a lot in a life. It was for this reason that I picked this back up off the shelf and gave it another read.

TWT, TIN is about Bryon and Mark, 2 teenagers who are born to different families but are raised as brothers. They do everything together. And in typical Hinton fashion, they live on the fringes, just trying to get by and trying to make their way in the world. Bryon meets Cathy and it forms a little wedge in their brotherhood. Cathy is sister to M&M, a sweet trusting kid that Bryon and Mark look out for. They spend their days hustling pool games at Charlie’s pool hall, hanging out, cruising the strip on weekends. They get into fights, they get into trouble, but that’s just the way it is. But Bryon begins to question the life he has…and runs into the stone-cold fact that in order to grow up, sometimes you have to lose the things that hold you back.

Writing about it at this point in my life, I see the simple wisdom of it. It will happen again and again and again. People will drop in and drop out of your life and you stop worrying about it after a while. Bryon and Mark may have been raised as brothers, but in the end, Mark is the one who doesn’t want to change, who doesn’t want to grow up.

And it’s heartbreaking to see it unfold. There is a lot of understated violence in Hinton’s novels, as well as themes of isolation and teenage angst but the type of angst you feel when you are poor and desperate and from a broken home.

Maybe this sort of book feels dated now, maybe it is just as accurate today but with different problems. This is a 154-page quick read, maybe not as good as The Outsiders but definitely in a similar vein (hey, Ponyboy Curtis is a character in this one!) and worth a read.





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