That Was Then, This Is Now

The Darker Sequel

S.E. Hinton’s follow-up to The Outsiders is a quieter, more psychologically complex book, and in some ways a more mature one. The gang world of the first novel is still present, but the story’s real subject is the interior life of Bryon Douglas as he begins to change in ways that place him in direct conflict with his best friend Mark — the boy he has thought of as a brother since childhood.

Bryon and Mark have grown up together in the same economic precarity, using charm, small-time hustling, and mutual loyalty to navigate a world that doesn’t offer them much. But Bryon is beginning to reflect in ways that Mark is not. His relationship with Cathy, his growing awareness of consequences, his capacity for guilt — these are the changes that will ultimately make their friendship impossible.

The Question of Moral Development

What Hinton explores, with more sophistication than the coming-of-age genre usually allows, is the question of whether moral development is itself a form of loss. Bryon becomes more ethical in some respects — more capable of empathy, more troubled by the drug culture around him — but his final act, turning Mark in to the police, is presented not as triumph but as something closer to tragedy. He does what he believes is right and in doing so destroys what he loved most.

Mark’s response — his withdrawal into silence, his refusal to ever forgive — is the novel’s most chilling element. It suggests that loyalty, once absolute and then broken, cannot be partially restored.

A Portrait of Early 1970s Youth

The novel’s drug subplot captures something real about the cultural landscape of the early 1970s: the casual availability of drugs, the way they moved through working-class youth culture, and the specific vulnerability of teenagers with nothing to anchor them. M&M, the young boy whose mind is destroyed by a bad trip, is the novel’s most heartbreaking casualty — a child who drifted into danger because no one was watching and the world is not organized to protect people like him.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A darker, more morally complex companion to The Outsiders, asking hard questions about loyalty, maturity, and what it costs to do the right thing.

That Was Then, This Is Now Review

Published in 1971, four years after The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton’s second novel revisits the same Tulsa world but turns its attention to a harder, more painful subject: the way two people who grew up as brothers in everything but blood can be pulled in opposite directions by the choices they make as they approach adulthood. Bryon and Mark have been inseparable since childhood, raised together under Bryon’s mother’s roof. The novel charts the slow, agonising fracture of that bond, and it does so with a moral seriousness that makes it, in some respects, a more mature book than its famous predecessor.

Brotherhood and Its Breaking

Where The Outsiders found tragedy in conflict between groups, That Was Then, This Is Now locates it inside a single relationship. Bryon begins to grow up — to think about consequences, to feel responsibility, to fall in love. Mark does not; he remains charming, reckless, and increasingly entangled in the drug trade that is spreading through their world. Hinton refuses to make either boy a simple case. Mark’s loyalty is real, his warmth is real, and his inability to change is presented less as villainy than as a kind of arrested development that the harder world around them will not forgive.

The Cost of Growing Up

The novel’s devastating climax forces Bryon to choose between his loyalty to Mark and his sense of right and wrong, and Hinton does not let him off easily. The decision Bryon makes is morally defensible and emotionally catastrophic, and the book’s final pages refuse the consolation of certainty — Bryon himself is left questioning whether he did the right thing. This refusal of easy resolution is what gives the novel its lasting power. Drugs, in Hinton’s hands, are not a moralising plot device but a force that accelerates the natural divergence between two people who were always, underneath their closeness, becoming different men.

A Darker Companion Piece

A 1985 film adaptation brought the novel to a wider audience, but the book’s reputation rests on its unflinching honesty about how friendships end — not in dramatic betrayal but in the slow accumulation of incompatible choices. For readers who came to Hinton through The Outsiders, this darker, sadder companion piece demonstrates the range of a writer who refused to repeat herself, and who understood that the most painful losses are often the ones we choose.

When Friendship Cannot Survive Growing Up

That Was Then, This Is Now (1971) is Hinton’s darker companion to The Outsiders, following the sworn brothers Bryon and Mark as drugs, money and divergent moral choices pull them apart. The novel’s hard center is Bryon’s wrenching decision to turn Mark in for dealing, an act of conscience that destroys their bond and the book’s elegiac title refrains. Where The Outsiders mourns class division, this one mourns the loss of innocence itself — the discovery that loyalty and right do not always point the same way. It was adapted into a 1985 film.

What lingers is the cost of Bryon’s choice: doing the right thing destroys the one relationship that mattered most to him, and Hinton refuses to tell the reader whether it was worth it.