‘A Mother’s Reckoning,’ by Sue Klebold (Published 2016) (2024)

[On this week’s Inside The New York Times Book Review podcast, Sue Klebold discusses “A Mother’s Reckoning.”]

Early on in her memoir, “A Mother’s Reckoning,” Sue Klebold recalls the most fateful day of her life, revealing, in some of the details, what seems to be a striking attunement to her 17-year-old son, Dylan. When he left for school that morning, he called out one word: “Bye.” She had detected, in that syllable, an edge she’d never heard before — “a sneer, almost, as if he’d been caught in the middle of a fight with someone.” The tone disturbed her enough that she turned to her husband, still in bed, and commented she was worried about Dylan. Something was amiss.

To say that she was right is an understatement. And yet, if there is one single, painful, recurring message in Klebold’s memoir, it is that she did not truly know her son — that they were in fact living in parallel universes, one of which was constructed with the elaborate machinery of serious mental illness, or as Klebold prefers to characterize it, “brain illness.” Her son Dylan Klebold was one of the two teenage boys who committed suicide ­after their devastating attack on Columbine High School in 1999, killing 12 students and one teacher and wounding more than 20 others. When the horror of that day was over, and all the facts had emerged, Klebold had lost both the son she thought she had raised, as well as the person he had actually become.

Andrew Solomon, who wrote the introduction for “A Mother’s Reckoning,” included a profile of the Klebolds, written with great compassion, in his book “Far From the Tree.” But for years, the Klebolds shunned the press out of fear for how their comments would be construed, and even fear for their lives, following threats they received in the first months after Columbine. In their silence, Sue Klebold later realized, they seemed to be selfishly withholding insights that might be of use to others. A father of one of the children killed in the attacks wrote to her, with questions. Had they spent much time with Dylan at the dinner table? What would they do differently? “Might people say you were terrible, neglectful parents?” he wrote, in his demand for answers. “Sure,” he continued. “But obviously many say that already.”

A memoir by the mother of one of the Columbine killers could seem distasteful on its face: at best, a defensive account from an unreliable narrator; at worst, an inevitable end point to the media circus. But that father’s understandably cruel letter, which Klebold excerpts and runs without comment, sets the agenda for much of her book, which reads as if she had written it under oath, while trying to answer, honestly and completely, an urgent question: What could a parent have done to prevent this tragedy?

Klebold describes a home life that was, if not perfect, better than ordinary. Dylan grew up with happily married parents: a work-from-home dad who shared a snack and the sports pages with his teenage son every day after school, and a mom who worked with disabled college students, setting a moral example at the office before coming home at night to make the “gloppy, layered Mexican casseroles” her two sons loved. Klebold and her husband, Tom, were distressed when Dylan and his friend Eric Harris were arrested during their junior year for breaking into a van and stealing electronic equipment, a crime for which they could have served time. But Dylan had sailed through a counseling program offered as an alternative, even graduating from it early. When Klebold does complain about Dylan in her journals in the year leading up to the attack, it is often to note that he was “crabby” or failed to feed the cats. She loved her son, but was also worried about him enough to be periodically searching his room for drugs or stolen goods after that first serious incident with the police. (She found nothing.)