I went and pulled Blubber off the shelf. I didn’t know what to write on the back of one of my homemade bookmarks. Sometimes, I would write why I chose the book for that reader, hoping to nudge them into considering the lessons they might find inside. I thought about putting, “One good friend is worth dozens of silly people,” but that sounded patronizing. Instead, on the back of the bookmark, cut from Van Gogh’s Poppies and Butterflies painting, I wrote, “Cindy Crawford, Bill Clinton, and Jessica Simpson were all bullied as children.”
