For those who don't know, A Mother's Reckoning is a memoir by Sue Klebold, the mother of Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold. It is generally well-liked as a story of Dylan's upbringing leading up to Columbine as well as a recollection of the grief, guilt and confusion Sue went through afterwards and her journey into becoming a mental health/suicide awareness advocate. I also thought it was great initially, but after spending the time to learn about Columbine, I've realized that not only are a lot of the facts in the book misleading or outright lies, the overarching message of the book also falls flat because of the author's blatant bias in favor of her son.
The first thing that irked me was the author's hypocrisy in how she views Dylan versus Eric Harris, the other Columbine shooter. One of the most poignant messages in the memoir is supposed to be the author's plea for the reader to view Dylan not as an irredeemable villain, but as a kid whose unchecked mental illness led him to commit a tragic act of murder-suicide at his own high school. She even writes that in her own search for answers, she saw her son "become a monster, and then a boy again," but on the contrary, she doesn't seem capable of viewing the other kid, Eric, as anything but a complete monster.
For example, she claims it's "not up for debate" that Dylan was seriously depressed and therefore incapable of making rational decisions (despite admitting that it's impossible to posthumously diagnose someone with depression), while also claiming that Eric was a psychopath who was incapable of feeling empathy, didn't have a conscience, "lied without compunction," and was a manipulative sadist. She brushes aside the fact that Eric was also dead and couldn't be diagnosed, saying that "expert analysis" of his journal showed that he exhibited a lot of psychopathic traits. And regarding the journal, she quotes a psychologist as saying,
[Dylan's] journal is markedly different from Eric's in both content and style. Whereas Eric's is full of narcissistic condescension and bloodthirsty rage, Dylan's is more focused on loneliness, depression, ruminations, and preoccupation with finding love. Eric drew pictures of weapons, swastikas, and soldiers; Dylan drew hearts. Eric lusted after sex and fantasized about rape; Dylan longed for true love."
She conveniently leaves out that Dylan also wrote about his condescension towards others and how he saw himself as a "god" compared to normal people ("zombies"), his rage at his supposed mistreatment at the hands of others, how he was willing to kill his friend's girlfriend for stealing him away from Dylan, or his excitement at the prospect of going on a killing spree with the girl he considered his true love.
The author doesn't stop there. She cites Eric's early dismissal from a diversion program as evidence he was an "overwhelmingly persuasive" psychopath, glossing over the fact that Dylan was also released early from the same program. She touts the fact that Eric indicated he had both homicidal and suicidal thoughts on his diversion form as evidence that he was disturbed, without even entertaining the possibility that Eric might have also been depressed and crying out for help like she believes Dylan was. On the other hand, she says she felt relieved when Dylan indicated he only had finance and job troubles on his form, and frames his lying as a symptom of depression instead of psychopathy. She admits that Dylan tricked her into thinking he had his alcohol consumption under control, but doesn't think he could have had manipulative (or psychopathic) tendencies.
Furthermore, she writes a lot about how everyone's been looking at the motivations for Columbine the wrong way—it was a murder-suicide, not a massacre—but is insistent that Eric's motivations were purely murder and Dylan's were purely suicide, even saying that Eric "went to the school to kill people and didn't care if he died, while Dylan wanted to die and didn't care if others died as well." Dylan and Eric both committed murder and they both committed suicide. I don't understand why she can say so confidently that Dylan's motivations were so different than Eric's when they both showed signs of depression (Eric through his diversion forms and Dylan through his journal) and both showed a willingness to kill other people. In fact, witness testimony (especially from John Savage) and the 911 call transcript suggest that Dylan acted more "psychopathic" than Eric during the shooting, not less. Dylan was the one acting excited and shouting during the shooting, Dylan was the one who yelled "Woohoo!" after gunning down Kyle Velasquez, a mentally disabled student, and while both Dylan and Eric acted racist towards Isaiah Shoels (to put it lightly), it was Dylan who first singled him out for being black before Eric killed him.
The author also believes that Dylan still had some amount of "good" in him trying to counteract the "evil" part of him even during the shooting, writing in chapter 12 that Dylan had let four people go during the shooting instead of killing them. Earlier in the book, the author even acknowledged that Eric had also let a person go—Brooks Brown, in front of the school—but she makes no mention of it here. She never considers if Eric could have also had ambivalent thoughts about what he was doing, if he was also struggling with depression, or if he was also a boy deserving of empathy and understanding. She even goes as far as to suggest that Eric's posthumously-diagnosed "psychopathy" was an unpreventable, untreatable mental illness while simultaneously lauding the efforts of psychologists in the fields of suicide prevention and treatment of depression. It's so annoying how she takes every opportunity to paint Eric as some kind of freak of nature destined to be evil while lamenting how Dylan's death was a failure of the people around him to recognize how much he was struggling mentally. It's not that Eric was some kind of misunderstood victim either, but I just don't understand how Sue Klebold could dedicate half her book to proving that Dylan was more than a monster—that he was a boy—without ever extending the same empathy she asks from us to the only other boy involved in this tragedy. Her book is bad not just because of all the excuses and downplaying of Dylan's behavior, or the oversimplified leader/follower narrative it pushes, but because its author doesn't even take her own lesson to heart. She hates the demonization of her own child but is more than willing to do the same to another if it makes Dylan look less evil.
—————
The other problem I had with the book is the author's misleading narrative that Eric was the leader and main culprit of Columbine, while Dylan was the "suggestible," "dependent," and "depressed" follower. "Eric was a failed Hitler; Dylan was a failed Holden Caulfield." She continuously romanticizes Dylan's journal, writing,
Besides sadness, the most common emotion expressed throughout Dylan's journals—and by far the most prevalent word—is "love." There are pages covered in huge, hand-drawn hearts… He fills pages with details of a passionate, painful infatuation with a girl who does not even know he exists.
When it comes to Dylan's bad acts though, she always downplays his actions or describes them in an extremely vague manner before moving on. Even while describing the actual massacre, she finds the time to say that "Eric had shot his rifle forty-seven times. Dylan had shot three times with his handgun and two with his shotgun." Why does the amount of bullets fired even matter? Dylan killed 5 people, Eric killed 8. The author never mentions this in her explanation of the shooting or (iirc) anywhere else in her book, so if you had no prior knowledge of Columbine, you'd be led to believe that the victim ratio was somewhere near 5:47 like she implies. In her description, she also leaves out Dylan's reaction after killing Kyle and says that both Dylan and Eric taunted Evan Todd, when Evan's own witness statement said that Dylan was the only one taunting him (by calling him a fat f**k) and Eric wasn't even paying attention.
To her credit, she does vaguely acknowledge that Dylan generally acted evil during the shooting. She says he "deliberately killed and injured people. He derided them as they begged for their lives. He had used racist, hateful language. He had not shown mercy, regret, or conscience." However, she contradicts herself just a few chapters later by suggesting it was Dylan's conscience that allowed him to spare the lives of four people during the shooting. She does her best to pin the blame for Dylan's racism on Eric too. When explaining the "Basement Tapes" recorded by the two, she writes that Dylan's racist tirades were a performance for Eric and that he was following Eric's instructions to "feel the rage." She pushes the leader/follower interpretation, saying that "Eric relied on Dylan's slow-burning, depressive anger to fuel and feed his sadism, while Dylan used Eric's destructive impulses to jolt him out of his passivity."
The author tries to distance Dylan from the shooting by stating it was Eric who created the whole plan for Columbine and that Dylan was conflicted about it all the way up until the shooting. She says he called Eric "crazy" and tried to distance himself, but his depression made him see "Eric's plan" as the only option. However, Dylan's own journal implies the opposite. Though we can't know for sure who planned it first, he was the first one to write about committing a shooting spree and the first to use the term NBK (Natural Born Killers), the term they later used to refer to their plan. The author also claims Eric tried to recruit two other people before settling on Dylan, but I couldn't find any proof of that either.
In order to dispute the notion that Dylan was a troubled kid prior to Columbine, the author downplays a lot of his offenses committed in high school, including an incident in which he, Eric, and another friend hacked into a school computer to steal the locker combination of another student so they could put a threatening note in his locker. In her book, Sue Klebold describes this as,
Digging around in the system, the boys discovered a list of locker combinations. Dylan opened an closed one or two locker doors to see if the list was current, then transferred the data to a disk and shared it with Eric. Zack took it a little further and left a note in the locker of his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend.
She then writes about how annoyed she was that Dylan got suspended for 5 days, saying that "he'd only opened the lockers to see if he could, and closed them without touching anything."
She also spends a good chunk of chapter 12 writing about how Dylan was bullied and at higher psychological risk for panic disorders, depressive disorders, and suicidal thoughts, but spends only two sentences explaining that Dylan had bullied kids himself. "Bullied kids often become bullies themselves, which appears to be what happened with Dylan and Eric. Larkin cites a student who claims they terrorized her brother, a student with special needs, so badly he was afraid to come to school." She never elaborates on this, and the statement itself is so brief I missed it my first time through. I don't know if he's the student in question, but Adam Kyler was a special needs kid who was bullied relentlessly by Dylan. During school spirit week, Dylan would paint swastikas on his face, and less than half a year before the shooting, Dylan had told him he would kill him if he went to class and would shoot him if he told anyone about it. The threats only stopped once Adam's mom contacted the school administration. I understand that Sue Klebold is obviously going to be more forgiving of her son's behavior, but the extreme level of omission and downplaying here is kind of insulting. I shouldn't have to go digging around on the Columbine subreddit or the 11k just to find out more about the time her son bullied someone to the verge of truancy; she should have come clean with the details instead of glossing over the ugly parts of his past.
—————
I didn't really make this post to call the author's character into question, but there's also some details about herself that she lies about or leaves out in this book. In chapter 3, she writes about how distraught she felt when she saw an ugly photo of Dylan in the newspaper. It was "the most terrible school picture Dylan ever had taken, so unflattering that when he brought it home, I urged him to have it reshot." What she leaves out is the fact that she hated the picture so much, she sent replacement photos to TIME so Dylan could look more photogenic… in an article written about the massacre of 13 people that he had just committed. Even if she was coping or in denial, it's still highly questionable (unhinged?) behavior to be so obsessed with her mass-murdering son looking good on the news.
In chapter 14, the author reveals that Dylan's English teacher had talked with her about an essay Dylan had written about a man dressed in black gunning down jocks at a school. However, she says that the teacher had never shown her the essay, only claiming the subject matter contained "dark themes and some bad language." She then writes that the teacher had compared Dylan's essay to Eric's and claimed that it was more inappropriate, and when her husband asked if they should be concerned with the essay, the teacher replied that she "thought it was under control." In 2019, the teacher in question actually wrote a article in Buzzfeed debunking almost the entirety of Sue's story.
I told them about the content of the story, the alarming imagery of people being gunned down. I told them about the disturbing tone. I shared that I had made a copy and given it to Dylan's guidance counselor, who was at conferences as well. I recall being dismayed when Mr. Klebold immediately shifted the conversation to a cerebral, philosophical discussion of teenagers today. I remember being surprised that they did not ask me more. Because of the depth of my concern over Dylan's work, and how adamant I was about it, I recall having the expectation that they would at least be talking to the counselor that night.
I'm not sure if it was Sue Klebold's intention to manipulate her readers or if she's just incredibly sympathetic towards her son, but either way, I feel like this book fails at being an honest look into the life of a school shooter. It tells Sue's side of the story, but anyone who hasn't dug super deep into Columbine would probably take her words on Dylan as gospel truth without realizing the amount of information she distorts or leaves out entirely. The other parts of the memoir weren't bad; it was interesting to see how she dealt with her own mental health problems and got into activism after Columbine, but I can't help but wonder how many people's opinions on Dylan and Eric have changed because of the narrative pushed in this book.
by purpleblue7
47 Comments
the whole things just sad really. Unfortunately people often make up false realities to avoid ugly truths. Makes total sense to me that she’d want to downplay any actual psychological issues in her son and foist them upon his accomplice to avoid having to live with such a depressing image of her own flesh and blood committing such atrocities. This book is obviously just her manufacturing her own copium
I don’t really think we could ever expect an objective view of Dylan from his mother. She’s obviously had to deal with a terrible crime and certainly has been subject to almost unbearable criticism in addition of course to the loss of her son under the most horrible of circumstances. I don’t say that to make her sympathetic, I just say that this book should be read in that context.
OP seems to be very well researched in Columbine, and as with OP I wouldn’t expect other readers to just read this book in isolation, but as part of a patchwork to understand what happened.
I felt it was very clear while reading that this was an incredibly biased version of events. I remember my mom asked me what I thought of it after I finished reading and I said she should have given the manuscript to her therapist not a publisher.
While I definitely raised my eyebrows at parts, the book never felt manipulative or malicious to me. More that there were truths she just hadn’t (and maybe can’t) fully confront and accept. Memoirs aren’t a research project, they’re based on one person’s experiences and memories and they aren’t fact checked.
I don’t know that there’s enough therapy in the world to ever be able to go through something like this and be able to write a memoir with the kind of clarity you would demand. And maybe she shouldn’t have written it at all but your post comes off as very angry and idk…I didn’t feel angry after reading her book even though I agree with much of what you pointed out. But I guess I tend not to assume malicious intent.
Oh and the whole Erik was the leader, Dylan was the follower was definitely a narrative before this book. True or not that’s always been floating around.
I’ve always been curious about this book. I think I’ll still give it a shot. I’m not surprised you didn’t find her objective, though. I expect some part of her still wants to blame something outside of her son.
Have you read “Columbine” by Dave Cullen? It’s probably the single best book you could ever read about what happened.
I had to study Columbine and other school massacres intensely in grad school so I definitely have thoughts.
I think it boils down to this, though. The Klebolds saw themselves as good, responsible, caring parents. They got Dylan help and went to family therapy when their elder child went off the rails.
One big issue I saw time and time again as an educator is what I call The Cloak of the Good Kid. Basically, a kid who has been a good student and never shown serious red flags. By the time they get to late middle school/high school the cloak is in place.
So when these kids start going off the rails adults don’t respond with the appropriate vigor. If you read the book Columbine you see this with the Klebolds, teachers, administrators, police, and probation officers. Everyone is more concerned with protecting this “good kid’s future” than they are in figuring out why this kid is slipping.
I saw it time and time again in education. Literally I watched a “good kid” bring a knife to school and threaten a teacher and it was handwaved away at the height of zero tolerance. Meanwhile kids who did much less were suspended or worse.
I think Sue Klebold is still deep in the idea Dylan was a Good Kid who got pulled down by a bad person.
The reality, in my opinion, is that Harris and Klebold fed off each other. Had they been seperated earlier it might have stopped the whole thing.
I feel like you can’t go into a book like that written by the perpetrator’s mom and expect it to be unbiased. Like of course it’s not going to be.
While I don’t disagree with you that her book is very biased it feels as though you are really angry about her book? She is a grieving person whose child did something horrific and who also lost that child. I think she’s been trying to make sense of that since then and will likely be doing so her entire life. If you want objectivity this is not the place to find it. I don’t think she is manipulative, just lost.
Also- the narrative that Eric was the leader and demonstrated more true psychopathic tendencies wasn’t created by her, it’s been advanced by many others.
I agree with another poster than separating the two would have prevented so much pain and suffering. Their mental illnesses fed on each other.
Really interesting points.
I couldn’t finish the book, it felt something I didn’t like. Manipulative? Forced? I don’t know but I couldn’t get passed it. One thing that bothered me was she went on about being middle class but talked later about all the buildings they owned as landlords, sorry, don’t pretend to be something you are not. If you are rich, just own it, don’t act like you’ve struggled. Maybe it’s a small thing but honestly as a parent who’s struggling to help a child without money it really bothered me.
I’ve read the book twice and I think that it is a raw look at the subject matter through Sue’s lens. The book can seem contradictory at times and leave you scratching your head because she’ll, as you say, paint a narrative of Eric Harris as leader and Dylan as follower and then in the next breath write a pretty clear paragraph admitting that Dylan did what he did actively, with deliberate cruelty, and with a lot of pre-planning. (I borrowed it from the library so I can’t quote from the book, my apologies.)
People contradict themselves in the midst of being people: they’re hypocrites, they waffle, change their minds, etc. I think this facet of the book shows how Sue’s view of her son is subject to change. I can’t imagine how such an event must have effected her very psyche, nobody can come out of that untouched, I don’t care who you are- so for her I think it’s magnified by quite a lot.
She is even able to directly say as much throughout the book in certain places. We see in the beginning her sheer stubborn denial: her and her husband hoping Dylan was under the influence of drugs or somehow coerced, to believing he had a merely passive role, to the change that the Basement Tapes brought to her (where she writes she could no longer hold the same image of Dylan in her mind).
I think coming to any memoir you have to think of what is being withheld, what the author’s biases are, and what narrative they are trying to present to you. I think *especially* in this case it is wise to look at this as a piece of a greater whole instead of taking Sue at her word.
Wait. So you are saying you somehow know more about this woman’s experience than she does? It was her version of what happened. Her opinions. Her feelings. You don’t get to invalidate that.
I worked with her husband, Dylan’s father, on a major engineering project in Florida a few years before the shooting and he’s a very decent likeable guy who was easy to be friends with. My wife at the time, had a business trip to Colorado and met the whole family a few years before and thought they were a good, happy family. I’ve never tried to read the book and can’t comment on it. But I’ve often thought about the pain that Dylan’s parents must endure forever. This whole story is so sad.
It’s interesting that you feel so strongly about the bias. I came out of the book surprised that she was as critical of Dylan as she was, I expected more bias from her. It reads like a grief process to me. Should it have been published? Maybe not, maybe it should’ve been kept private, but I don’t think anyone is going into this book expecting an objective, academic telling of events.
I read the book after listening to the Confronting Columbine podcast. The host is a survivor and she was pretty generous towards Sue and the book.
To be clear you; you find it strange that a person’s own mother would have more sympathy towards them than another unrelated person?
This…seems like a school essay or something? I read this a few years back and remember thinking she seemed still
in shock, and trying her best to explain what she could about Dylan. I don’t recall her trying to minimize Dylan’s role in Columbine in any way, she didn’t profit from the book and I think she was just trying to give people more information that they were curious about.
Someone seems to be going through the comments and downvoting anyone who doesn’t have a scathing take toward the book. Not sure what the point is.
I think this is a well written out post with good points.
However I think Sue is so brave for speaking out about her point of view. Of course it’s not going to be objective, it’s not a documentary, it’s a personal account. It’s natural that it’s going to be very biased. I can’t even imagine what she’s been through. Clinging on to some hope that maybe her child wasn’t a complete monster makes sense to me. She tries her best several times through the book to acknowledge the pain Dylan inflicted.
I also admire that she’s trying to bring some sense and do some good out of this mess. Trying to help with teenage depression/ suicide/ mental health is admirable. Especially since I feel many of us faced with that situation would likely just fall apart.
Regarding the TIME photos, she acknowledges how ridiculous it is to be worried about such a thing at the time. However I think that’s so realistic to what people often do in tragedies- focus on some small unimportant detail that doesn’t matter at all. I think it’s our brains way of trying to cope with things, focus on something small and ignore the big huge issue.
Overall I really enjoyed this book, probably not as a factual look at Columbine, but rather what it feels like as a mother to be thrust into a situation worse than your worst nightmare.
I recently read this book and found it interesting to read about Dylans upbringing. I’m Canadian and Columbine happened when I was a child so I’m not too well versed in it and don’t have too much of an opinion on how she words those things.
I personally really liked reading about her grieving process. I lost my mother unexpectedly in July and although we obviously experienced different losses it was comforting to read about how confusing the grief process was for her, as I felt the same way.
OP you seem a little biased yourself.
I just want to say how impressed I am with the comments here. I’ve been conditioned to expect the most reactionary comments from Reddit, and fully expected the worst, but I see most are fairly even-keel, acknowledging the bias and tempering that acknowledgment with understanding, and it’s a relief.
I read the book when it first came out. I remember Columbine very clearly because I was teaching HS English and it was a terrifying time to be a teacher. I tried to place my memories aside as I read her book, but the further I read the more frustrated I became.
I hated the fact that she placed the majority of the blame on Eric and his parents. Like OP, it was frustrating to read the numerous excuses for her son, who was apparently a bullied golden child until he met Eric. Eric got zero grace or compassion from Klebold in her book, and his parent’s very little.
I really appreciate this post and the facts you shared. Thank you.
This reminds me of the Timmy2cents video and Miorby’s criticism of it. I think this person read the book, expecting to have a neutral, historical discussion of events, which is not what you would ever get from the mother of one of the shooters. It’s called “a mother’s reckoning” because she is not sure what to make of this. I have not read the book in years, but I recall it is very much a mother trying to reconcile her version of events with what happened. I never expected that this book was going to be some sort of neutral analysis. I also really do not believe this is some sort of pursuit for fame, because none of her talks or books are for profit. they entirely go to charities and to victims.
What I do see a lot is people trying to find some sort of way to target anger at something horrible and so people take it out on her because she’s the only one who is relatively open in the public about it. I do remember one thing from the book and it’s that she talks about believing she failed as a mother , and failed to realize what was going on. I think someone who is a narcissist trying to shift the blame would say that.
Also, anytime someone brings up the photo issues, I need to just say that when something really horrible happens, people will do irrational things. It happens so often it is a trope in fiction to have someone being irrational at a loved one’s death (the “he can’t see without his glasses” bit in My Girl as played out in front of me at multiple funerals).
A psychologist did a deep dive into journals and other factual evidence/history of several your mass murderers. The book is “Why Kids Kill”. He very specifically says that Eric Harris was most likely Conduct Disordered and Dylan was depressed with psychotic features or schizotypal. Dylan most likely wouldn’t have done what he did without the “leadership” of Eric. This was true in several duos who killed. So what the mom wrote in that regard is not a lie even if there are other opinions. She will always blame herself for not noticing how depressed Dylan was. I imagine she saw him finally having a close friend and was delighted, not noticing the red flags.
Any mother that manages to write objectively and withOUT bias of their children seems suspect to me. Likewise, the reality is that there is more monster in her son than she is able to accept, and perhaps, more relatable and good human aspects to killers than any of US want to admit.
All else aside, I don’t find it that surprising that they weren’t very concerned about the story he wrote. I was in my first year of college when Columbine happened, so close to the same age. When I was in middle school, one of our teachers set us a creative writing assignment in which we were to kill off our teachers in the most creative way we could think of. Another a couple years before had us writing a story in which our class was shipwrecked on a desert island. For the first few weeks there was a rule that all characters had to remain alive, but eventually he said we could start killing people off. As you can perhaps imagine, we all relished both assignments. It’s weird to think back on, but it was a different time.
My senior year, a friend and I wrote out a list of who we were going to let live when we took over the world. It was not a long list. It was also not at all serious. If teachers had seen it, they would have rolled their eyes. A year later, we would have been expelled.
The mom is now an extension of her son’s mark on the world. The book in itself is probably more of a look in the Mom’s mind than it was an accurate depiction of her son
I read Columbine by Dave Cullen and from what I remember and for what it’s worth: he also comes to the conclusion that Eric Harris was a ‘budding young psychopath’ while Dylan Klebold was a suicidal and depressed teenager who’s life very well may have turned out different if he’d not gone to high school with Eric Harris.
I think this is a great critique of the author’s bias, though I very much agree with other commenters that the bias was always going to be inherent given the author and the subject matter.
I don’t think her providing a new picture is weird though. That is, perhaps, one of the most normal things. When my step-sister passed from a drug overdose, we used old pictures of her. Her time in the hospital (as well as the following wait while we scrounged up money for her embalming) made her very swollen and unlike herself. It’s upsetting. If that had been posted everywhere as some sort of poster child for the fentanyl laced drugs epidemic, we would have been sending new photos.
It’s easy for us to sit back and think, “Why would she do that? Why isn’t she comforting the victims?” But she was also grieving, and the extreme circumstances don’t change that.
What exactly were you expecting? An objective view from the shooter’s mother? I’m an old, nearly forty, and I remember the Jonesboro, Ark. shooting.
Columbine was the standard bearer for modern school shootings. We base everything on pre and post Columbine (as we do pre and post 9/11). I’m sure his mother feels a huge weight of responsibility.
I mean, it’s a memoir from the mother. I’d go into it expecting it to be very biased and filter it as such. Like, you’re not sure if she’s ‘just incredibly sympathetic towards her son’ – what else did you expect??
The issue primarily being discussed here by OP, and which a lot of comments seem to be ignoring, is that Sue Klebold is seemingly incapable of understanding Eric the same way she tries to understand Dylan. Absolutely nobody expects a mother to be unbiased. Humans are always biased. But that’s not the issue. The issue is the demonization of one boy and the rehabbing of another.
If you’re writing a book to try to understand what went wrong with two boys who committed the same atrocity, actively refusing to use any empathy to understand one killer, is just a sign of a lack of genuine self- and life reflection. She wants to clean up and fix Dylan’s image more than she wants to actually understand and reflect. That’s clear by the fact that she tries to pin everything on Eric.
“Look at my poor boy” vs. “Now look at this psycho”.
They committed the exact same crime. They both clearly needed help.
It’s not genuine, which makes it, in my opinion, kind of a waste of time to read. Had she been more honest in her introspection and treated Eric with the same reflection that she treated Dylan, I’d find it more worthy of reading. As it stands, it’s a vanity project loaded down by ego and a bigger interest in assigning fault than sharing a journey.
It should have been titled “how I attempted to cope with my share of my child’s multiple murders.” Sure, she’s guilty of failing to imagine the unimaginable.
I had a friend whose son committed a heinous act and is alive (in prison). His mother doesn’t condone his crime but still keeps contact and offers him unconditional love. It’s truly unsettling to discuss at length what crimes are a step too far. It’s easy to say serial killer or pedophelia , but the crime of mass shooter was not cut and dried, because it was theoretically one off and impulsive and often mental health related rather than straight up evil. Mass shooter with racist didn’t make the cut. But the one that doesn’t make the cut and gets far less attention is the highly planned high body count high terror Las Vegas shooter who was an adult. Why was that so quickly out of the news?
All this to say, this wasn’t my kid and I still found it traumatizing to go through scenarios where love would be impossible. There is definitely a line, and as a Mother of a dead son of such infamy none of us has the right to judge Sue and her struggle, especially as she is not profiting.
I can barely cope with being a friend of someone who did far less, i can’t imagine being in her shoes. It’s humbling and terrifying and incredibly disorienting.
Agreed. I was not a fan of her TED Talk or her book and I think she is a perfect example of someone who should have shut up, taken her lumps, and faded into obscurity. The more she tries to make excuses for her son and insists she was not a horrible mom, the less I believe her version of events. As Shakespeare wrote, “The lady doth protest too much.”
I think, even with declining media literacy rates, we can expect the average person to recognize that a mother’s memoir about her son’s crimes is going to be biased to hell, and not take it as a neutral truth.
It’s a mother trying to live with the fact that her child is a mass murderer. What did you expect?
Congratulations, you’ve already done more research about Columbine than Michael Moore did! (Still upset about this.) I don’t have much to add to what others have said other than just I would recommend reading the journals and Brooks Brown’s book. The journals do heavily paint the picture of Eric’s anger vs Dylan’s despair, though that isn’t to say this was entirely Eric’s idea or doing.
As far as the picture thing, as someone else said, that’s how a lot of people, including myself, cope with tragedy, by immediately going into a mode of trying to control details. Also she was going to be confronted with whatever picture was used a thousand times over many years. Her son is still dead too and she wants to remember him the way he was to her.
I certainly don’t think she meant to be malicious in this, and I think she has had to make up certain aspects and stretch the truth of others to help herself cope with both what her son did and how people treated her after the event.
However, I also find both her and her publisher highly irresponsible in publishing this.
This is the sort of book I honestly think should never have been published. I completely understand why someone in her position would be desperate to try to rehabilitate her son in her own mind, and I don’t fault her for it. If blaming Eric and making Dylan out to be an innocent victim is how she copes with such a horrific situation , that’s fine.
But that shouldn’t be done in public. As soon as she puts those thoughts out there, people are free to react to them, and they’re also free to take into consideration how her words will affect the families of her sons victims.
Thank you for sharing this.
Thank you for this in-depth and excellent review. A mythos has been established around Columbine and it influences how people think of school shootings as a whole – like falsely believing it is an issue of bullied kids lashing out. Probably because it provides a simplistic answer and a simple solution, just don’t bully and these things won’t happen.
That’s why it;s so important to counteract the falsehoods and misimpressions with well researched reviews like this. I feel very sorry for the teacher Judith Kelly after reading this; people who read Sue’s bok will be left with the impression that Ms Kelly failed to act.
This is a well thought out response and I truly appreciate having a reasonable person pointing out the obvious double-standards that can be overlooked because “they wrote a book!” The ability of a person to demonstrate they’ve learned the lessons they’re preaching about is a great indication of whether they’re worth listening to at all- in this case definitely not. Thanks for saving me the time I would’ve otherwise put into reading this book!
You may like the book We Need to Talk About Kevin.
I think there are two major influences here, aside from the obvious fact that a parent is always going to be biased to their own child.
The first is the prevalence of *Columbine* by Dave Cullen. Often touted as *the* book on the subject, it’s a monstrously researched, agenda-pushing pile of crap. Anyone who’s even tentatively researched Columbine could spot a million errors per chapter. Cullen was the first to push the idea that Eric was a cold, calculating psychopath and Dylan was the shy, impressionable follower. For whatever reason, Cullen really, *really* loves this theory and sticks by it even in the face of absolutely overwhelming evidence, even telling outright lies to back his theory up. (For example, part of his Eric myth is that Eric was this sauve, charming ladies man, like the stereotypical psychopath. In the book, Cullen literally writes “Eric got chicks. Lots of chicks.” Eric did not get chicks. Cullen also states that Eric slept with a 23-year-old woman as a teenager. Also false — Eric writes about his frustration that he’s going to die a virgin days before the massacre. It’s absolute bullshit.) Cullen also goes weirdly out of his way to protect and even excuse Dylan, because without Dylan’s innocence, his theory falls apart.
It seems that there are strains of this in Sue Klebold’s book. Part of the bias is due to her being Dylan’s mother, but I think a lot of it is unquestioning acceptance of something that most everyone believes to be fact. Cullen has a real reputation of being the expert on the subject, and the psychopath/follower theory is so often repeated that it’s taken for granted as truth. Sure, she could have questioned it more, but who’s going to question something that basically exonerates her son? I think if she’s guilty of anything, it’s writing the book too soon. She’s still not ready to face what her son did; she’s still not done grieving that part of it. She has no business writing an “aftermath” book or a memoir of something she’s not finished processing yet, but she probably doesn’t even realise the fact. I imagine it’s just too much to live with.
(Also, I believe that her attempts to send a “better” picture to the media is another part of this. She has always wanted people to see Dylan as a boy, a person past what he did. It’s important to realise this so we don’t set aside school shooters as evil monsters we’d surely notice in out midst. Using unflattering photographs of shooters helps feed the narrative that they’re Other; using pleasant pictures of goofy kids helps hammer home the fact it could happen in any household, as Sue found out herself. I think she wanted an *accurate* dipiction of her son, rather than a flattering or handsome one.)
The second is the fact that over the years, Eric’s family have said *nothing* about him. He has never been humanised like Dylan has. The Harris family shut up, moved away, never spoke publicly, never campaigned, never shared anything about Eric: what he was like before, their thoughts, their regrets, their worries, their experiences. They issued statements of grief and apology and then said not much else. Eric is a mystery to many, and with no statements from the people who love him unconditionally, all we have are statements from people who are… not best pleased with him, to say the least. We have many statements of bias, because when a kid shoots up a school people are more likely to remember all the nasty things he did, or the things that, with the new context, take on a more threatening light. Most people are not going to remember the kind things he did — his family would recall those. We also have the biggest analysis of his personality coming from Dave Cullen, who is determined to cast all the blame on him. There is nothing out there to balance our idea of Eric — not to excuse him, but to humanise him the way that Dylan has been.
I’ve dug around on the subject, pretty extensively. (On one momentous occasion I even got into an argument with Dave Cullen.) There’s not much in comparison to the bad things they did, but certainly Sue’s contribution helps humanise Dylan. People remember other things about him — not just what he did at the end, but how sensitive he was, how he could eat an entire box of cereal in a mixing bowl because he had an insane appetitie, how he fussed over his outfit for prom, how he was shy and sensitive and kind. Eric, on the other hand, doesn’t have that kind of testimony. You have to really dig for it. People only know about what he did at the end, plus the narrative that he was a psychopath who masterminded the whole entire thing and manipulated poor Dylan. They don’t know any human details about him: that he tended lovingly to his sick dog around the clock, that he was devastated beyond description when he realised he wouldn’t be able to get into the Marines, that he did dumb things to impress girls, that he designed his own levels for *Doom* and shared them with friends, that he asked girls questions about what they thought about when they looked at the night sky. He’s just as complex as Dylan, but there’s nobody speaking out who’s close enough to humanise him in the same way. Thus, he’ll always be the worse “villain.”
How much of what Sue has written is subconscious, I don’t know. But I do know that this stupid, overly simplistic narrative Cullen has been pushing for almost 25 years now absolutely has something to do with it. It’s become so engrained into Columbine that it’s impossible to avoid accepting it if you don’t already know the details, or you decide to do your own research. And unfortunately Cullen has crafted a persona as The Expert, so many people trust him and also the thousands of five-star reviews his shitty book has. Combine that with radio silence from Eric’s family, and a mother’s desperate attempt to find anything salvagable about the most horrific of situations, and I’m not surprised something like this happens. I really do think that Sue is still caught up in denial and grief, much more than even she realises.
When it came out all the reviews were basically, “Not accurate, but it’s a mother trying to come to terms with the unimaginable so we’re not really going to call her out on it. She’s just doing what she needs to do to go on with her life. But don’t read this for information about what actually happened.”
It was mostly seen as an interesting look at a person in a unique situation trying to cope by blaming someone else’s kid.
Weird that this came up just now, I was thinking about how Sue Klebold is an unreliable narrator and it’s weird that her spinning a story about her kid has made her mildly famous and lauded. She can’t speak on his intentions and shit while also maintaining that he’s not a bad person and she didn’t know what was happening. It’s all rhetoric to try and convince people she was a good parent and her kid was a wayward soul, but he was a mass murderer and *decent people do not commit mass murders*.
I don’t think anyone should go into a book like this and expect the mother of the subject to be *unbiased*. Seems like an odd expectation.
No matter what he did, he’s still her baby. I doubt she’d be able to see past that.
It’s even more insidious when you remember that the Harris family went to ground afterwards. They will not speak up even to refute these absurd claims.
She is a bad person.