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

by Sue Klebold, Andrew Solomon (Introduction)

Overview

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.

— Washington Post, Best Memoirs of 2016

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101902776
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/07/2017
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	99,015
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Sue Klebold is the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the two shooters at Columbine High School in 1999 who killed 13 people before ending their own lives, a tragedy that saddened and galvanized the nation. She has spent the last 15 years excavating every detail of her family life, and trying to understand the crucial intersection between mental health problems and violence. Instead of becoming paralyzed by her grief and remorse, she has become a passionate and effective agent working tirelessly to advance mental health awareness and intervention.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "A Mother's Reckoning"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Sue Klebold.
Excerpted by permission of Crown/Archetype.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction Andrew Solomon 9

Preface 25

Part I The Last People on Earth

Chapter 1 "There's Been a Shooting at Columbine High School" 35

Chapter 2 Slivers of Glass 62

Chapter 3 Someone Else's Life 86

Chapter 4 A Resting Place 116

Chapter 5 Premonition 120

Chapter 6 Boyhood 128

Chapter 7 One Mother to Another 172

Chapter 8 A Place of Sorrow 216

Chapter 9 Life with Grief 219

Chapter 10 The End of Denial 248

Part II Toward Understanding

Chapter 11 The Depths of His Despair 291

Chapter 12 Fateful Dynamic 316

Chapter 13 Pathway to Suicide: Dylan's Junior Year 330

Chapter 14 Pathway to Violence: Dylan's Senior Year 391

Chapter 15 Collateral Damage 447

Chapter 16 A New Awareness 451

Chapter 17 Judgment 475

Chapter 18 The Wrong Question 498

Conclusion: Knowable Folds 517

Acknowledgments 521

Notes 529

Resources 551

Editorial Reviews

…[U]nimaginably detailed, raw, minute-by-minute, illuminating, and just plain gripping. It's also the most extraordinary testament—to honesty, love, pain, doubt, and resilience.… This book is nothing less than a public service. I beseech you to read it.”
– Bruce Feiller

“As people read Sue’s memoir, what they will find is that her book is honest, and her pain genuine.  Her story may be uncomfortable to read, but it will raise awareness about brain health and the importance of early identification and intervention to maintain it.  If people listen to her – to all that she has experienced, and to how this has changed her – they will be quicker to respond to depression in young people, to the suicidal thinking that can accompany it, and to the rage that can build almost unnoticed in young people when the people who truly and completely love and care for them are distracted by other challenges in life.”
—Paul Gionfriddo, President and CEO of Mental Health America

“Required reading for all parents of adolescents...soul-piercingly honest, written with bravery and intelligence... A book of nobility and importance.” –The Times

 “Reading this book as a critic is hard; reading it as a parent is devastating….I imagine snippets of my own young children in Dylan Klebold, shades of my parenting in Sue and Tom.  I suspect that many families will find their own parallels….This book’s insights are painful and necessary and its contradictions inevitable.”
—Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post

 “[Sue Klebold’s book] 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?…
She earns our pity, our empathy and, often, our admiration; and yet the book’s ultimate purpose is to serve as a cautionary tale, not an exoneration.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“[T]he parenting book everyone should read.”
—Parents.com

 “I believe Sue Klebold.  So will you.”
—LA Times

“At times her story is so chilling you want to turn away, but Klebold’s compassion and honesty –and realization that parents and institutions must work to discover kids’ hidden suffering-will keep you riveted.”
—People.com

“This book which can be tough to read in places is an important one. It helps us arrive at a new understanding of how Columbine happened and, in the process, may help avert other tragedies.” Rated: A.
—Entertainment Weekly

From the Publisher

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…[A Mother's Reckoning] reads as if [Klebold] 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?…Politely, methodically, she eviscerates in the reader the dearly held conviction that had he or she been in Sue Klebold's place, all could have been prevented…She earns our pity, our empathy and, often, our admiration; and yet the book's ultimate purpose is to serve as a cautionary tale, not an exoneration.

The New York Times Book Review - Susan Dominus

09/15/2015
The author, whose son Dylan was one of two shooters who massacred 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in 1999, uses recollections, journals, and the profoundly disturbing writings and video recordings he left behind to reconstruct events and ask hard questions: Why did Dylan go so very wrong? And what could she have done? With a 200,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal