Growing up with a boy by Nick Hornby About a boy is a novel that follows the lives of two people: Marcus and Will. Marcus is a strange boy who struggles to grow up, needs to be accepted outside his family, is looking for his own identity, is the victim of constant bullying and suffers from a lack of parental care. Will is the exact opposite of Marcus. He is 36 years old and lives his prolonged childhood, he is looking for his identity so as not to lose his youth, "he is proud of his coolness" and simply cannot find a way to grow up. It is when these two opposing characters meet that they soon act as catalysts for each other. From their dependence on others they find independence from each other. Like many kids, Marcus deals with bullying. Like most kids in these situations, he sees the world in a way where bullies rule his world the same way politicians dictate our future and the world we live in. Marcus' bullying leads to his low self-esteem and due to this he shows depressive tendencies through his thoughts presented in the book. If no one in the whole world laughed again for the rest of his life, he wouldn't care. Will tries to teach Marcus how to be "cool". It is in this that the author comments that to be cool Marcus must lose his individualism and eccentricities and become what Fiona and Marcus call "sheep" or, in other words, conform to society and, in essence, becoming more similar to Will. As much as a reader may disagree that to prevent bullying one must conform, it is difficult to say that this is not completely valid. Everyone faces bullying at some point in their lives. There is constant pressure to take responsibility for acting and dressing in the specific way that society deems appropriate. For example, as teenagers, often those girls who do not look, behave and dress in a certain feminist way are not considered as "popular" as some of the others. Although these aspects of a person are so petty and unimportant, the same thing nevertheless reoccurs across generations.