The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You by Ella Berthoud, Susan Elderkin Page B

herself from the damaging trio. Victims of bullying often don’t realize they’re being bullied at first, and in a perverse act of complicity, the bullied may even be drawn to the bully, craving acceptance while dreading rejection and scorn. Like Elaine, the bullied can become so browbeaten that they lack the strength and belief in themselves to overcome their abusers (if this applies to you, see: Self-esteem, low). Only when things finally go too far does Elaine wake up and discover the power to walk away, if she wants to: “It’s like stepping off a cliff,believing the air will hold you up. And it does.” If Elaine’s story resonates with you, learn to walk away before the numbness occurs.
    No such crumbling goes on between Tom and his bully Flashman in Thomas Hughes’s
Tom Brown’s School Days
. No sooner has Tom arrived at Rugby School than the appalling Flashman does his best to make Tom’s life a misery. Flashman threatens and physically attacks Tom, and it all comes to a head when the older boy instigates a “burning” of Tom in front of an open fire. It is at this point that Tom decides to do something about the injustices he and his fellows have experienced at the hands of all the school bullies. It helps that Tom has become strong and feisty and, crucially, that he has earned the respect of older boys, one of whom comes to his aid in bringing Flashman down.
    Tom’s triumph over his oppressors will leave you elated and inspired. It is Hughes’s acknowledgment of the lasting damage inflicted on Tom, though, you may find most cathartic: it takes Tom months to undo Flashman’s blackening of his name among his peers, even after the bullying has stopped. And who knows how long the emotional scars will remain (see: Scars, emotional)? For Elaine in
Cat’s Eye
they last into middle age, but by revisiting the scene of her childhood trauma, she achieves redemption. Take heart from these two literary victims. They may struggle with the effects of bullying for a long time, but they come out stronger in the end.
    See also:
Anxiety • Left out, feeling • Nightmares • Superhero, wishing you were a
BULLY, BEING A
    A Death in the Family
    JAMES AGEE
    Y ou may not think of yourself as a bully. But if you ever purposefully inflict pain on someone more vulnerable than you—even in an unthinking way, and perhaps verbally rather than physically—you may well be guilty of this shameful practice. If you know deep down that you do, we ask you to read
A Death
in the Family
, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 and one of the most moving accounts of bullying that we know.
    Rufus lives on a “mixed sort of block” in Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s a place where supper’s at six and over by half past, at which point the children go out to play while the mothers clean the kitchen and the fathers hose downthe lawns. Rufus, not yet old enough for school himself, likes to watch the older children going back and forth to school. First he watches them from the front window, then from the front yard, and then from the sidewalk outside his house. Finally he dares to stand on the street corner, where he can see them coming from three directions. He admires their different pencils and lunch boxes, and the way the boys swing their books in the brown canvas straps—until, that is, they start swinging them at his head. The bullying quickly builds to daily mockery and humiliation. Desperate to believe that they can be trusted—that their pretense of friendship is for real—Rufus walks into the traps they set for him again and again, much to the bullies’ mounting hilarity. He is younger than all of them, and their violation of his guileless trust is exquisitely painful to witness.
    Agee was a poet first and foremost and his agile prose delves into emotional crevices previously unexplored. When Rufus suffers a tragedy he is too young to fully comprehend—and the bullies make no amends—the reader’s heartbreak is complete.
    If