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.
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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.
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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](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/judithkelly/opinion-i-taught-at-columbine-it-is-time-to-speak-my-truth) 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.
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by purpleblue7