A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy
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Average rating4.2
The acclaimed New York Times bestseller by Sue Klebold, mother of one of the Columbine shooters, about living in the aftermath of Columbine.
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill twelve students and a teacher and wound twenty-four others before taking their own lives.
For the last sixteen years, Sue Klebold, Dylan’s mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror? And how, as his mother, had she not known something was wrong? Were there subtle signs she had missed? What, if anything, could she have done differently?
These are questions that Klebold has grappled with every day since the Columbine tragedy. In A Mother’s Reckoning, she chronicles with unflinching honesty her journey as a mother trying to come to terms with the incomprehensible. In the hope that the insights and understanding she has gained may help other families recognize when a child is in distress, she tells her story in full, drawing upon her personal journals, the videos and writings that Dylan left behind, and on countless interviews with mental health experts.
Filled with hard-won wisdom and compassion, A Mother’s Reckoning is a powerful and haunting book that sheds light on one of the most pressing issues of our time. And with fresh wounds from the Newtown and Charleston shootings, never has the need for understanding been more urgent.
All author profits from the book will be donated to research and to charitable organizations focusing on mental health issues.
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I have decided to not finish this book for many reasons, but the final straw was this thoughtful and heartfelt essay written by Dylan's English teacher, the one who received the eerie short story he wrote:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/judithkelly/opinion-i-taught-at-columbine-it-is-time-to-speak-my-truth
I read almost half of this book, trying, trying, understanding that she was a mother above all. But she minimized and deflected, and retold incidents that had several witnesses—like the time at the river with friends when Dylan accidentally got wet and tantrumed-raged-because he was embarrassed.
In this book, Dylan is this family-centered, amazingly sensitive boy who makes his bed every morning, as if good people—or people with good traits—cannot do horrible things.
And then this article. Mrs. Klebold changed many significant details about her and her husband's meeting with Dylan's teacher about the school shooting fantasy short story. In Klebold's version, they were told little, knew less, and were instructed not to worry. I can't continue listening to her read her words and tell her journey on this audiobook, because that is a significant lie. I trusted her to share her heart truthfully. She didn't do so, so I have to walk away from the dialogue and not continue reading. Which, on the 20th anniversary of Columbine, breaks my heart a little. Because I wanted to feel for her. Her true story is so painful; it doesn't need to be embellished. And if she so fears still being judged, perhaps a memoir was not for her.
And shame on the publisher: this information specifically about this meeting with the teacher is in the FBI files, testified to under oath. Klebold's manuscript should have been vetted more carefully.
In contemplating Slaughterhouse-Five, George Saunders wrote something that always sticks in my mind:
Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. . .We are meant to exit the book altered.
When Saunders wrote about Slaughterhouse-Five, he was speaking specifically about fiction, and even more specifically about the “absurd, invented material” Vonnegut employed to evoke genuine, “nontrivial” change in the reader's life – but I found myself thinking about his words as I read an account that is all too real, and unflinching. The amount of empathy and insight the mother of Dylan Klebold displays in this book is staggering. It seems impossible that a person could read this book and not emerge altered, which, when you think about it, is one of the highest compliments you could ever give to art.
I picked this up and put it back down a few times because it was so emotionally raw that I couldn't read for long stretches
