S.E. Hinton, classic or dud

It was very very wrong of Ned to compare her to V.C. Andrews.

nostalgia

word. i was quite the fanboy around age 11. kinda disappointed in the outsiders movie when i finally saw it a couple of years after reading the book. EXTRMELY disappointed in the TWTTIN adaptation. Rumblefish i kinda dug though (when i was all of 13, haven't seen it since). stewart copeland did the music.

i liked how ponyboy shows up in that was then and the wayward kid from TWTTIS and the other dude's girlfriend are minor characters in Tex.

rumble fish was one of my favorite movies as a teenager. i can still get misty-eyed thinking about that scene where dennis hopper explains, in a wonderfully melodramatic way, what's wrong with the motorcycle boy: "he's merely miscast in a play..."

oh yeah he played the weirdo alcoholic dad!

I think it's cool that Coppola described Rumble Fish as "an art movie for kids."

And oh man, Diane Lane was so cute in that.

Extremely intoxicated: yeah, it's kind of cool how 3 of the 4 of her first set of novels all were linked.

I remember being disappointed by the Outsiders movie when it finally came out too, as I'd loved the book, because so much of it was cut out. Have you seen the director's cut, aka "The Outsiders: The Complete Novel?" Adds over half hour of footate (begins with Ponyboy getting jumped by the Socs, as the book did) and the entire soundtrack was changed -- Carmine Coppola's string score replaced by Elvis tunes, etc. It's interesting but measuring it against the original I can see why it was trimmed down, it gets rather melodramatic, one too many scenes of the Curtis Brothers crying and hugging. And much more Rob Lowe, who really could not act.

They made a movie of "That was Then, This is Now"? I think that's my favorite one of theirs and o_O imagining it in film form.

We had an assignment in eighth grade to write an epilogue chapter and I think everyone ended it with Mark killing himself. The teacher was so disgusted she decided just not to grade it and pretended it never happened.

That book has the best description of "feeling unreal" (other than Céline).

She was so good at describing women's attractiveness that I thought for a long time that she was gay.

Emilio Estevez is in the movie version of TWT,TIN. It's uh not good. Probably the worst of the four actually and I find the Outsiders film pretty hard to watch.

I love it for melodramatic Matt Dillon. But it is a terrible adaptation of the book.

TWT,TIN I have never even watched all the way through, it was just too bad.

She was so good at describing women's attractiveness that I thought for a long time that she was gay.

― Abbott of the Trapezoid Monks (Abbott), Friday, January 9, 2009 11:47 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Men (well, boys) too -- see the descriptions of Sodapop and the rest of the gang in the Outsinders.

impossible to think rationally about something so beloved as a preteen. probably classic anyway

Report on her appearance at the LA Festival of Books over the weekend.

When asked what books she read as a child, she said that she wasn’t a good reader back then but that she liked animal books such as "The Black Stallion" or those by Will James. She thought she might grow up to be a cowboy. She read David Copperfield while stuck in a cabin on a lake and discovered Jane Austen while in college. Now, she rereads Austen every year, and a few years ago she took an Austen course.

“It was one of the best things I’ve done in my life,” she said of that class. “Believe me. I’ve been hugged by Matt Dillon.”

When the panel finally opened up for audience questions, all of the questioners brought it back to those books that she’s best known for — "The Outsiders," "Rumble Fish," "Tex" and "That Was Then This Is Now" — each beginning with a heartfelt thanks to her for writing the YA books. It was clear from their gratitude that those books had changed people's lives.

Hinton said she wrote "The Outsiders" because she wanted to write something realistic, something that she had wanted to read when she was a teenager. It started as a short story, after her friend had gotten beaten up, and the story kept growing.

“When I was young, all the books were about a Mary Jane and the football player and the prom and ending up with the quiet guy and making your mom happy,” she said. “Well, I’d been to a few proms, and it was about who got killed in the parking lot and who's got the booze inside.”

why did johnny and dally have to die in the outsiders😤

— hailey😎 (@adoringfack) January 24, 2018

because I am a stone cold bitch https://t.co/kahsnvagMh

— S. E. Hinton (@se4realhinton) January 24, 2018

Some part of her has to be all "I write this one thing as a teenager and decades later..."

Read The Outsiders again this week for the first time since I was 11 or so. Unsurprisingly, I was unable to detect any queerness the first time around, but reading it now, it is positively dripping with it. Hinton has publicly stated that she intended nothing queer with the novel, but whatever: Ponyboy (14 years old but "not yet interested in girls") is clearly in love with Johnny. This isn't just Celluloid Closet-style queerspotting, either; Pony's love for Johnny and the romantic gaze that he deploys to all of the male characters in the novel, even the enemy "soc" that is killed, all fit in with the Hinton's idealization of youth. Yes, she claims--or at least would have claimed, at the time--that the novel was a "gritty" retort to a genre hung up on stories about proms or horses but, as with the queerness, I think a lot of what is great, and certainly a lot of what is enduring, about the novel has little to do with the author's intentions.