In this undated image provided by ABC News, television anchor Diane Sawyer, left, interviews Sue Klebold, right, the mother of Columbine High School shooter Dylan Klebold on "20/20," in Denver. The special edition exclusive interview aired Friday, Feb. 12, 2016.ABC NEWS/The Associated Press
Sue Klebold's son Dylan was one of two teenaged gunmen at Columbine High School in Colorado who, in 1999, killed 12 students and a teacher and injured 21 others before turning his gun on himself.
At the time, the massacre was the largest school shooting in U.S. history. It sparked an outpouring of public grief and anger that would affect many families, including the Klebolds, who had their own discrete tragedy: Having unwittingly raised a killer, they also lost a son.
Klebold's new memoir, A Mother's Reckoning, is her attempt to sift through the ashes of this unspeakable experience. As misery memoirs go, it is conspicuously lacking in self-pity or wallowing regret. In simple terms, it is an account of the days and months after the massacre and her efforts to make sense of an almost incomprehensible situation while remaining embedded in the community where the tragedy struck.
Official medical reports have suggested that, while the other Columbine shooter, Eric Harris, was a psychopath with sadistic tendencies, Dylan Klebold was a depressive teen with suicidal impulses. Together, their pathologies combined to make the perfect storm.
What is striking about Sue Klebold's memoir is how little she knew of her son's profound darkness even though, in some ways, she feels as though she understood him very well.
The ultimate message of the book is actually quite terrifying. As psychologist Andrew Solomon writes in his introduction: "you may not know your own children, and, worst yet, your children may be unknowable to you."
Klebold's account of her son's childhood contradicts every stereotype of the "angry young man" we generally ascribe to school shooters. Neither a loner nor a superficially "disaffected youth," Dylan was a good student with many friends who, the weekend before the shooting, danced until the wee hours at his high-school prom. His family nickname was Sunshine Boy, "not just because of his halo of blond hair, but because everything seemed to come easily to him," she writes.
Dylan had been accepted to the University of Arizona and the week before the shootings spent hours poring over the floor plans of various dorm rooms with his father, trying to work out the ideal set up for his freshman year.
None of this behaviour is incompatible with the broken logic that drives the suicidal brain, but it does fly in the face of the isolated, enraged and frankly deranged sort of mind that we normally imagine conceiving of and committing carnage such as the massacre at Columbine High.
What is most compelling about Klebold's book is the fact that she doesn't try to make pat logical sense of her son's actions as an attempt to face up to and accept them. She writes of her profound disagreement with those who put her son's crime down to "the work of Satan" or simply dismiss him as pure evil – a creature unconnected to the engaged and thoughtful boy she loved. As Solomon puts it, she does not "try to elucidate the permanently confused borderline between evil and disease."
Amid her unwavering rationality is one moment of magical thinking. She writes of Dylan's calm and uneventful birth, followed by the moment she first held him quiet in her arms. "I experienced a deep and unsettling sense of foreboding, strong enough to make me shiver. … Looking down at the perfect bundle in my arms I was overcome by a strong premonition: this child would bring me terrible sorrow."
Klebold's account of her son is that of a boy who was easy to love but impossible to know. A "perfect bundle" with strange and unfathomable aspects – in a sense, a child like any other. For what mother, holding a newborn, hasn't felt that ominous and magical sense of touching the void?
The process of parenting, and motherhood in particular, is really a kind of parting. From the very moment your children are born, they become, quite literally, less one with you and more entirely themselves. In a way, having a child is a process of unlearning – the more we get to know our children, the less we are meant to fully understand them and the more the multitudes of their character deepen and evolve.
And all of this is perfectly normal, of course, since the point of raising children is not to draw them closer, but to ultimately set them free. Our children will naturally become less and less fully known to us until (with any luck) we die long before they do. It's a strange trip, but one that many of us are compelled to take.
If there is an overarching moral to Sue Klebold's story, it would be that we must try to know our children to the extent that we can in the short time that we have. For Klebold, this is no longer possible with Dylan, but even in her grief, she urges us to try.