I opened the book and with the first words, “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.”

I was swept back to a time more than 30 years ago when "The Outsiders" was the book I read over and over and over again. And now my son, a 12-year-old seventh grader, has just read it. Upon reading the last sentence, he came into our bedroom where we had just turned off the lights to go to sleep because he just had to tell us how much he loved the book.

How can a book that was written almost 40 years ago be so timeless? How can it touch both a 12-year-old and a 46-year-old (the 46-year-old cried, the 12-year-old claims he didn’t)? Who can ever forget Ponyboy, Sodapop, Darry, Two Bit, Dallas, Johnny and Cherry Valance (perhaps the best name ever)?

I had not thought about "The Outsiders" for years, but when I saw Rory reading it, I knew I had to read it again to see what it was that captured me all those years ago. Upon rereading it, I realized that it is so timeless and so universal because everyone feels, at one time or another, like an outsider. S. E. Hinton, who was just 15 when she started writing the book and had just graduated from high school when it was published, captured the passion, the pain and the intensity of adolescence when everyone feels alienated and misunderstood. She also saw the absurdity of gangs, class differences and violence. I think that Hinton’s descriptions of boys experiencing and expressing emotion helped generations of adolescents to release their painful and unexpressed emotions as they cried over Ponyboy’s story.

I think the most amazing part about this book, considering the youth of its author, is how vividly the characters are drawn. I have pictures in my mind of every one of those boys along with Cherry Valance. In the edition that I read, there is a letter from S. E. Hinton telling about the social situation at her high school and how it provided the idea for the story. In a surreal turn of events, Francis Ford Coppola decided to make it into a movie. So Hinton found herself hanging out with “a group of sweet, goofy, incredibly talented and at the same time incredibly normal teenage boys” including Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, C. Thomas Howell, Emilio Estevez and Ralph Macchio. After reading that, I didn’t even want to look up the movie on IMDB (I am pretty sure I have never seen it) to see which actor played which character. I didn’t want my visualization to be confused by Hollywood’s interpretation of the characters.

In her letter, Hinton is incredibly humble about the book and still blown away when she receives letters from kids who say that "The Outsiders" changed their lives and influenced their life choices. She is insistent that it is the message and not the messenger. But I have to believe that if it weren’t for the incredible talent of a teenager, the message would not still be reaching kids today. Even if you don’t have a kid who is reading it for school, read it (it took me about two hours) and drift back. Remember the passion you felt at the age you were when you first read it. Remember how it called for you to read it over and over again … maybe just because you needed a good cry and didn’t have anything specific to cry about.

Diane appears every Saturday on TriangleMom2Mom. Read more about Diane at her blog Live and Let Di.