A Mother’s Reckoning by Sue Klebold review – why my son killed at Columbine

Perhaps the most unnerving thing about having a child is that you don’t know in advance who he or she or “they” will turn out to be. Yet we persist in believing (it would be hopeless not to) that, once they arrive, we will in some deep way know our children, even as we grasp that parts of them will remain a mystery to us. This tension is at the heart of Sue Klebold’s gripping, troubling and bestselling memoir, A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, which recounts one of the most horrible experiences a parent can endure: the death of a child, compounded by the shocking realisation that you failed to know him.

Klebold’s son became a murderer before he became a victim of suicide. In April 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris attacked Columbine High School in one of the largest school massacres in the US – setting a pattern for many that would follow. For nearly an hour, the pair, wearing black trench coats and carrying assault weapons, roved through their school, killing 12 students and one teacher and wounding 24 others before they killed themselves. They also planted bombs that – had they functioned as planned – would have taken the lives of hundreds more. In the dazed aftermath, stories abounded: the killers were goths, were bullied, were part of a terrifying “trenchcoat mafia”. The Klebolds and Harrises were vilified, abused and sued. “HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW??!” asked one of the many letters Sue received.

Meanwhile she was asking herself the same question: should she – could she – have seen it coming? As she tells the story, when Dylan called out “bye” the morning of the attacks, she heard in his tone “a sneer, almost, as if he’d been caught in the middle of a fight with someone”. On hearing there was a shooting at Columbine, she prayed her son was safe. Later, when she heard that her son was involved, she found herself praying he would die. She lost him twice: his actions that day meant the son she thought she had known was a fiction. Her “sunshine boy” was a mass murderer. “To the rest of the world, Dylan was a monster,” she writes, “but I had lost my child.”

A Mother’s Reckoning implicates the reader in its own search for understanding; it’s part confessional, part grief-memoir, part apology and part activist literature. In structure, the book relives Sue’s search for answers, drawing on her journals, memories and the research she has done since Dylan’s death, interviewing experts in “law enforcement” as well as “psychiatry and neurobiology”. The narrative arc takes us from denial to anger to acceptance and some kind of comprehension. The first section is devoted largely to her early memories of Dylan, a “loving” and “affectionate” boy with a halo of blond hair: “He was easy to raise, a pleasure to be with, a child who had always made us proud.” But she also remembers that he didn’t like to be teased or to fail, and “his humiliation sometimes turned to anger”.

Disbelief turns to understanding as she finds herself recalling how Dylan became more sullen and withdrawn – behaviour she attributed to normal adolescent crabbiness. At high school, he became absorbed in video games after failing to make the baseball team. A teacher flagged a story he had written – from the point of view of a gunman – as disturbingly violent. But She persisted in thinking everything was OK, even though Dylan had been suspended from school and arrested for stealing, with Harris, electronic equipment from a parked van. The Christmas before the shooting he asked her to buy him a gun.

It’s hard to criticise a book that so earnestly and willingly embraces self-exposure. “By telling my story as faithfully as possible,” Klebold writes, “even when it is unflattering to me, I hope to shine a light that will help other parents see past the faces their children present”. And yet there are many places in the book where it’s hard to believe she couldn’t see past the face Dylan was presenting.

There is no way we can expect her to have anticipated Columbine, especially as there was little precedent for it – she had the bad luck to be mother to a depressed teen whose anger intersected with Harris’s incipient psychopathy in a spectacularly toxic manner. And, as she says, she and her husband Tom were “good” parents.

Yet by her own account, Klebold seems to have viewed parenting mainly as an act of setting boundaries and providing a nice middle-class home, complete with after-school snacks, rather than really listening closely to her child. “We’re the last people others would expect to find in this situation,” she thinks repeatedly on the day of the shooting. This self-conception, it would seem, kept her from looking deeply at what Dylan was actually doing. (At the time, Tom had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and her older son had been found smoking pot, and she felt overtaxed.)

A Mother’s Reckoning is compelling as a grief memoir. To read it is to be unforgettably drawn into the devastation she endured: on the day of the attacks, Tom told her he was going to try to get into the school, and she tells him he could be killed. “So?” he says. Later, they make a pact not to kill themselves, so hard is surviving. On a work trip, she meets a computer teacher who pointedly says: “When you’re a good parent, you just sort of know what your kids are up to.” Eventually, the couple are sued, go bankrupt and divorce.

Implicitly, and perhaps inevitably, the memoir raises important questions it fails to answer. The most haunting part of the book is Klebold’s failure to find answers, her hard-won understanding of the fact that the stories we tell about each other are too simple. But once she realises that Dylan was depressed, she begins to simplify her narrative, ascribing his participation that day to his “brain” illness and the insidious influence of Harris. The diagnosis closes her questioning down.

Yet Dylan carried out horrific murders, depressed or not. He stockpiled assault weapons and murdered five of his peers during an extended rampage. How ought we to think about moral culpability in an age of psychiatric diagnoses? Why is Dylan’s violence a symptom of disease but not Eric’s psychopathy? Both come down to a kind of moral luck and accident of biology. These are probably questions for another book, but they are questions that linger.

Klebold is brave to try to tell her story. She wants to get it right. And this is why we have to think through our response to that story, noting her omissions, assumptions and blind spots – as well as her courageous insights into the unknowable nature of her son.