A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy

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.