The Cat Medicine Moment
my review of Sue Klebold's book about her son
This book, and hence this book review, covers a disturbing topic in fairly graphic detail. Reader discretion advised.
“The only thing I could think of to be thankful for was that the bombs hadn’t gone off.”
That’s Sue Klebold, writing about Thanksgiving 1999, seven months after her son Dylan and Eric Harris killed twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School and one month after she finally accepted that he had participated willingly.
It is one of the most honest sentences in A Mother’s Reckoning, her 2016 memoir about being Dylan’s mother.
It also quietly undermines the thesis the book is organized around.
This review is about how I came to that reading.
I’ve been carrying this book around in my head for years, and I want to lay out my priors before getting into it because they pull in conflicting directions.
A book review is always partly an account of who is doing the reading. With this book, more than most, that matters.
I have unusual standing to read it, and the standing comes from places that make some of the readings sharper and other readings harder.
My Declared Priors
The first prior is that I am a member of a club Sue Klebold is adjacent to but not in. I have found a body. She has not.
She is a suicide-loss survivor — a category that overlaps with mine in some ways and not others — but the structural fact of having found someone is its own thing, and I have written about it elsewhere. What matters for this review is that I read certain passages in Sue’s book from inside adjacent experience rather than from clinical distance.
The chapter on the morning of April 20 — the texture of the hours between knowing something terrible has happened and knowing what specifically, the strange material details that anchor catastrophic days — reads differently when you have been near this kind of thing yourself, when cops and coroner’s reports and where did he get the gun? are familiar territory.
The second prior is that I have my own attempt history. I have been inside the headspace where it seems rational, and I am the author of a widely read discussion of suicide, “How to Keep Breathing, No Matter How Much Things Suck,” that 30-odd people have credited with helping them decide to stick around.
That gives me a kind of internal calibration when reading Sue’s reconstruction of Dylan’s depression and suicidality. I cannot know what Dylan was thinking in his last months, but I can recognize whether the interior she describes feels psychologically real or whether it reads as a mother retroactively softening edges. Often, it feels real.
The third prior is that I am skeptical of the cultural reflex to treat every dark interior state as a medical problem requiring intervention. I think depression is often a rational response to depressing circumstances, and I place more weight than Sue does on agency, meaning-making, and the human capacity to interpret suffering.
I do not fully share the brain-health frame she later builds her advocacy around, and I am reading her thesis through that skepticism while trying to give it a fair hearing.
Where I think she is right, I’ll say so. Where I think the framework is carrying more explanatory weight than it can bear, I’ll say that too. This is neither a hatchet job nor a polite endorsement.
A fourth prior, briefly. My own awful childhood gives me a particular calibration when evaluating the absence of abuse claims around Dylan. I know, viscerally, what it is to have parents who did damage no investigator would find, and I am far less prone than most readers to grant parents the benefit of the doubt by default.
Even with that calibration in place, I do not find evidence that Dylan was abused.
Whatever was wrong in his interior, it was not that.
A fifth prior, more intellectual than experiential. Columbine was one of my periodic special interests — the O in my OCD, and why I keep getting tagged by ridiculous autism screenings — for about a year, and during that period I read obsessively: Cullen, Langman, the Jefferson County materials, the news archives, the secondary literature.
So I am not coming to A Mother’s Reckoning cold. Some of my readings will diverge from the dominant Cullen-influenced narrative, and I want the reader to know the disagreement is informed rather than reflexive. Sue’s book sits inside a literature, and I have spent time in it.
These five priors do not point in the same direction. The adjacent-club standing and attempt history make me unusually sympathetic to Sue’s interior. The anti-medicalization stance makes me skeptical of the framework she built her advocacy around. My childhood calibration removes the instinct to absolve the parents by default. And my familiarity with the Columbine literature means I am unlikely to be persuaded by claims that are widely repeated but thinly supported.
The composite is unusual, and I have not seen it brought to this book elsewhere.
There is a body count to register before any of that begins. On February 16, 2025, Anne Marie Hochhalter died at age 43 from medical complications of the paralysis Dylan and Eric inflicted on her in 1999. Her death was officially classified as the fourteenth homicide of Columbine the following month. Hochhalter had publicly forgiven Sue Klebold during her lifetime. Her mother died by suicide six months after the attack.
Whatever else A Mother’s Reckoning is, it is a book whose author is still in moral relationship with the people her son maimed, some of whom are still dying from what he did. The book has to be read against that ongoing fact.
The Basement Tapes
The structural hinge of A Mother’s Reckoning — and the place where the review’s real work has to begin — is the Basement Tapes. In the weeks before the attack, Eric and Dylan recorded a series of videotapes in Eric’s basement, brandishing weapons, rehearsing the ideology of what they were about to do, naming people they hated, and explicitly producing the tapes for posterity. They wanted to control the explanation after the fact.
The tapes were seized by police, shown to Sue and Tom Klebold roughly six months after the attack, and have since been seen by only a small number of people: the Klebolds, the Harris parents, some law enforcement personnel, and a handful of journalists under supervised access.
They have never been released publicly. They should not be.
Sue spends a full chapter on the Basement Tapes and what watching them did to her.
She is rebuilding, in something close to real time, the cognitive demolition that the tapes performed. Until October 1999, six months after the attack, she and Tom believed Dylan had been coerced, brainwashed, or drugged into participating — that he was, in some functional sense, also a victim. She had fantasized about a public memorial service for him. Watching the tapes ended both the belief and the fantasy.
Dylan, on tape, animated and recognizably himself, was choosing it.
What Sue does with that realization — both in the immediate aftermath and across the decades since — is the central question of the book.
Some of what she does with it is, in my judgment, exactly right. Some of it becomes the construction of a framework the evidence in her own book does not fully support.
The Basement Tapes are the moment the book either earns its authority or doesn’t. I think it earns it as testimony while also revealing the limits of the framework Sue would later build around it.
Where she is most honest, her honesty exceeds her argument. Those are the most important passages in the book.
The rest of this review is my take, and it focuses on those places.
What the Book Gets Right
Before I get into where I think Sue’s book overreaches, I want to spend real time on where it doesn’t, because the standard takes on A Mother’s Reckoning tend to flatten in one of two directions. Hostile readers treat it as maternal denial. Sympathetic readers treat it as brave advocacy and stop there. Neither captures what is actually happening in the book’s best passages.
In those passages, Sue is one of the most honest memoirists I have read writing about a child who did something terrible. She is willing to threaten her own parenting record in order to describe Dylan accurately, and she acknowledges things a less honest writer would have omitted because they complicate the book’s sympathy structure.
She does this most clearly in three places.
She admits Dylan’s rage was a foundation in the massacre, and she admits the grievances feeding it were manufactured.
A less honest memoirist would have framed Dylan’s rage primarily as a symptom she failed to recognize in time.
Sue writes something harder.
She acknowledges that Dylan was furious, that the fury was foundational to the massacre, and that it was built from grievances so trivial that calling them grievances strains the word. She specifically mentions preschool slights Dylan ranted about in the Basement Tapes.
The absurdity of the grievances is itself evidence. A reader who wants to believe in a hidden wound has to believe Dylan, with full access to his own history, could not find anything more substantial than preschool. Sue closes that escape hatch without lawyering.
This is a different claim than depression-with-suicidality. A kid whose rage manufactures grievances to feed itself is cultivating something. There is agency in that, and Sue acknowledges it even though the acknowledgment complicates the later brain-health framework she builds around Dylan.
In the book’s best passages, her honesty exceeds the framework.
She explicitly refuses the passive-follower reading.
“I resist the idea that Dylan was a passive follower,” she writes. “Yes, Eric was adroit at fooling adults, including mental health professionals. But Dylan went along. He did not tell us. He did not tell a teacher or a counselor.”
This is the strongest rebuttal to the common claim that Sue blames Eric too much and Dylan not enough. She is making a structural claim about the dyad: Eric was the dominant partner, recruiter, and architect. Dylan was the follower. Both were fully responsible.
That reading is supported not just by Sue, but by the FBI’s lead investigator, Langman’s later clinical work, Larkin’s sociology, and most serious examinations of the case.
Eric was dominant. Dylan was follower. Both were fully responsible. Sue holds both, and the line above is her holding them out loud.
Yes, it’s convenient for her to believe that Dylan wouldn’t have done this without Eric. But it’s also, almost certainly, the truth.
Where she occasionally softens Dylan’s agency is not in the dyad analysis but in the advocacy-facing sections, where the brain-health framework struggles to fully metabolize the kid who calmly participated in planning a mass-casualty attack.
The critics are right to push back there. They are wrong about the dyad. Sue’s reading of the relationship is correct, and saying it out loud has cost her a decade of public scorn.
She handles the bullying question with a discipline the broader Columbine discourse has rarely matched.
Sue makes three separate claims about bullying. Dylan was bullied to some extent. Dylan and Eric also bullied others. And bullying is never an excuse for mass murder or retaliatory violence.
The distinction matters because she refuses to let the empirical claims do moral work they cannot support.
This is more than rhetorical hygiene. Early post-Columbine culture collapsed all three claims into one and produced the bullied-kids-snap narrative that fueled both zero-tolerance policies and the romanticization of the shooters as misunderstood outcasts.
Dave Cullen’s Columbine, working against that mythology, sometimes over-corrected in the opposite direction — Eric and Dylan as un-bullied, the bullying narrative as wholesale fiction. The truth is closer to Sue’s version. The bullying was real. Eric and Dylan also participated in the school’s ordinary adolescent cruelty. None of it excuses what they did.
The moral claim matters because contagion matters. Once bullying becomes moral justification, future attackers can construct grievance narratives around increasingly thin material, exactly as Dylan did.
Refusing that framework removes part of the script available to the next kid. Sue is right to refuse it, and she does so without the equivocations that often soften this kind of claim in advocacy memoirs.
The Parenting
Sue and Tom Klebold divorced in 2014, fifteen years after their son’s death. During their marriage and the childhoods of both Dylan and their older son, Byron, he worked from home and was an active, engaged father.
Whatever parenting failures were present in the home belonged to both of them, and I don’t want my focus on Sue to imply that I think mothers have the majority of responsibility for how their kids turn out. If anything, I think the opposite — most kids, male and female, need their father desperately and our society expects far too little from men in the context of parenting.
Tom didn’t write a book. That’s the only reason I’m not going to mention him much. If he ever finds the courage to put his parenting on display for the world, I will read his book and critique it thoroughly at that time.
The hardest part of writing about Sue Klebold’s parenting is that the critique I want to make is not the critique most readers expect, and the critique most readers expect is wrong. The expected critique is some version of they missed obvious warning signs or they failed to discipline him or they let him get away with too much, or they abused him, obviously. None of these is right.
Let me dispose of the abuse possibility before I go further, because if it were true, none of the rest of the analysis would matter very much. I came to the book primed to find evidence of abuse — my own background tilts me strongly toward suspicion of parents, and I absolutely do not grant the benefit of the doubt the way most readers do. I did not find it. The evidence I would expect to see is not there, and the evidence that is there cuts against the abuse reading.
The most telling piece is from the Basement Tapes themselves. Eric, at one point, suggested Dylan say something about his parents on camera — an obvious invitation to produce a justifying grievance against them on the way out the door.
Dylan declined. “My parents have been good to me. I don’t want to browse there.” He used the word browse, which implies searching, which implies he could have searched and chose not to.
This is a kid who manufactured grievances out of preschool slights when nothing more recent would do. If he had a parental grievance worth using, he would have used it. He did not, because there was not one available to him. A kid who is willing to weaponize preschool against the world is not a kid who is protecting his abusers out of loyalty. He is a kid telling you, on camera, posthumously, that his parents were not the wound. I believe him.
If Sue is a reliable narrator about her parenting — and I believe she is, because she admits to her own faults and because she has a living son who has never said that his brother’s parenting contributed. And the Brown family (parents of Brooks, the boy Eric had once fought with and let go home on the day of the massacre) knew the Klebolds for many years, going back to Dylan’s early childhood. They have not been shy about calling out everything and everyone — they have been aggressively calling out the failures of institutions and authorities for 27 years — and while they think Sue short-shrifts the bullying at Columbine too much, they have never even hinted that Dylan was abused as a child.
The Klebolds were attentive, engaged, conscientious parents by every standard available to them in 1998.
They knew their son’s friends. They monitored his grades. They imposed consequences when he got in trouble. They took a teenage Dylan out for private dinners to ask sincere questions when they noticed he had become withdrawn.
They were not negligent. They were not absent. They were, by the visible markers of good parenting, doing it right.
And what they were doing was not enough.
The diagnosis I want to make is more uncomfortable than the standard one, because it does not let most American parents off the hook by distinguishing the Klebolds from us.
The Klebolds were running a parenting operating system that is extremely common in non-poor American households — and I suspect it is the dominant mode in middle-class white America — and the system was running as designed.
The problem was not malfunction.
The problem was the system itself, and what it cannot do.
I am going to call this mode role-execution parenting, because performative parenting sounds like an accusation of phoniness and that is not what I mean. Role-execution parenting is sincere. It is loving. It is competent. It is the mode in which parents identify the tasks and milestones and observable indicators of good parenting, execute them well, and treat successful execution as evidence that the parenting itself is succeeding.
Feed the child nutritious meals. Read to the child at bedtime. Drive the child to soccer practice. Attend the parent-teacher conferences. Set bedtimes and curfews. Provide structure. Provide opportunities. Provide consequences when warranted. Provide praise when earned. Do the things the parenting books say to do, with sincerity and attention.
Most American parents who are not poor are running some version of this mode. It mostly works. Most children raised in it grow up reasonably well.
The mode has a feature that becomes a bug under specific conditions: it accepts surface compliance as evidence of system health. If the child is doing the things, the system is working. If the system is working, no further investigation of the child’s interior is required.
Role-execution parenting tends not to develop the skills of interior attunement — the slow, patient, often uncomfortable practice of being present to a child’s internal weather independent of the child’s external performance.
The skills it develops instead are scheduling skills, monitoring skills, intervention skills, encouragement skills.
These are real skills. They are valuable.
They are not the same as interior attunement, and they do not, by themselves, produce it.
The signature of role-execution parenting in operation is what I think of as the internal evaluator — a kind of always-on watcher inside the parent that scores parental performance against a standard of what good parenting looks like.
Sue gives us a beautiful, devastating instance of this watcher in a small detail from the night of April 20, 1999. As she and Tom were packing to leave their house so the police could search it, Sue worried about whether their cat had been given his medication. She notes, in the book, that she was aware of how ridiculous it was to worry about cat medicine in light of the tragedy.
I want to dwell on this for a moment, because the tell is not the cat. The tell is her registering the cat as ridiculous in real time.
There was no external audience yet for that judgment to be calibrated to. Sue still did not know what Dylan had done. The evaluator inside her was running independently of any actual observer, grading her behavior against some standard of what an appropriate person looks like in this situation.
The appropriate person is consumed by the tragedy. The appropriate person does not worry about the cat. She is worrying about the cat.
The evaluator notes this and marks it ridiculous.
That evaluator was always on. It was on for every parenting moment of Dylan’s life. Which means there was no parenting moment that was just Sue and her son, unwitnessed, unjudged, with the internal observer turned off.
The evaluator occupies the channel that interior contact would have to travel through.
You cannot be alone with another person — even your own child — if there is always a third party in the room scoring the encounter.
This is, I think, the deepest version of the parenting critique. It is not that the Klebolds failed to do enough. It is that the mode of parenting they were running, however competently, structurally precluded the kind of interior contact Dylan may have needed.
Not because they were cold. Because the channel was occupied.
Once you see the pattern, you can see it throughout the book.
The ketchup incident: Dylan comes home visibly marked from some hallway humiliation Sue would only fully learn about years later. He refuses to explain. Sue does not press.
Role-execution mode honors the stated preference and moves on.
Interior-attunement mode would have treated the silence itself as data — returning to it later, sitting with it, refusing to accept the wall as final.
The car-damage scene: freshmen damage Dylan’s car, he wants to retaliate, Tom talks him out of it on grounds of status — a six-foot-four junior fighting freshmen would look bad. The advice is conventional and defensible.
It is also not problem-solving. Tom does not help Dylan address the actual grievance through any legitimate channel — talking to the freshmen’s parents, involving the school, getting the car repaired, holding the kids accountable. He teaches Dylan a frame for not handling the problem and presents it as a moral lesson. The grievance gets filed in the same internal drawer where Dylan’s other unresolved grievances were accumulating.
Role-execution mode is good at teaching values. It is less good at helping the kid actually fix the thing that’s wrong.
The January 1999 dinner: this is the scene I want to dwell on, because it is the strongest evidence against the parenting critique in its lazy form. Three months before the attack, Sue and Tom notice that Dylan has become withdrawn and unreliable — he is sleeping through school, failing to feed the pets while Tom recovers from surgery. They take him out to dinner specifically to ask what is going on. They create a low-stakes private setting. They ask the open question. Whatever Dylan tells them satisfies them enough to close the conversation.
This is competent, attentive parenting by every available standard. They noticed a pattern, named it, intervened sympathetically, and asked. The intervention surfaced nothing actionable because Dylan was competent enough to produce a covering story under direct loving questioning by the people who loved him most. Three months from the attack, with the planning well underway, with the journals full of suicide notes, with the weapons being acquired, Dylan sat across from his parents at dinner and gave them a story that resolved their concern. That is the ceiling of detection by sympathetic adults who are doing everything right.
This is where the parenting critique has to be calibrated honestly. The role-execution mode is not the explanation for Columbine. Dylan was actively and competently concealing.
Even the FBI, with full warrants and certainty of guilt, initially missed one of Eric’s hiding places.
The ceiling of detection for two competently concealing adolescents was beyond what any parents of that era could plausibly have achieved.
The critique is narrower, and harder. Role-execution parenting produced a household where covering stories worked because surface performance was the unit of measurement, and where interior contact was partially blocked by the ever-present evaluator.
It did not produce a school shooter. It produced one of the conditions that made Eric’s recruitment unusually effective on Dylan specifically.
That is the question the next section takes up: what made Dylan selectable.
The Recruitment Process
The role of recruitment in Columbine is under appreciated. Eric did not merely bring Dylan along. He recruited him, in the sense the term is used in the literature on cults, gangs, and predatory friendships.
The plan was Eric’s. He had been working on it before Dylan committed to it. He approached other peers first. They said no. Dylan said yes.
Whatever made Dylan a yes was something specific about Dylan that the other targets lacked, and identifying that something is the harder version of the question this book is asking.
The most well-documented case of a refused recruitment is Chris Morris, a Blackjack Pizza coworker of Eric and Dylan’s and a member of their broader social orbit. The Jefferson County investigative materials and Cullen’s reporting confirm that Eric approached Morris about the plan at least three times, including around March 20, 1999 — roughly a month before the attack. Morris declined each time. After the massacre, he reported himself to 911 out of fear and guilt that he had known the boys were making pipe bombs and had not taken it seriously enough.
Three things follow from the recruitment frame, and they are the things the standard “she blames Eric too much” critique cannot account for.
First: the plan preceded Dylan’s commitment to it. This was not two boys arriving at the same conclusion together. Eric had a plan and was looking for a partner.
The common fully symmetric reading does not survive the recruitment record. Eric was running the operation. Dylan was the successful applicant.
The other candidates declined. This is the part of the story that has not gotten the attention it deserves. Chris Morris was deep enough in the social orbit to know about the pipe bombs. He was, by every available measure, a similarly disaffected teenager — a member of the Trench Coat Mafia loose association, an outsider, a kid with his own grievances about the school’s social order. He had every surface feature in common with Dylan. He was offered the same opportunity Dylan was offered, three separate times, and he said no. Three times.
The pool of available co-offenders for a competently planned mass-casualty attack is much smaller than the pool of ordinary disaffected adolescents. Most kids Eric approached said no.
Which brings us back to the real question: what was different about Dylan?
Not his demographics, social position, or generic unhappiness. Something more specific — something Eric identified and the others lacked.
The answer the rest of this review will work toward is that Dylan had an interior absence that Eric’s offer happened to fit precisely, and that the absence had a particular shape — the shape of having grown up loved operationally but not known interiorly — that made Eric’s recruitment play unusually effective on him specifically.
This also cuts against the popular peer-pressure model. The recruitment frame is more targeted than that. The predator identifies the specific vulnerable kid and runs the play on him.
Most of the surrounding kids decline the offer. The vulnerable one says yes.
That is a more disturbing model of how these events happen, because it cannot be addressed by the standard interventions — restricting friend groups, monitoring peer influences, breaking up cliques. The play is targeted. The target is identified by the predator with a precision that the surrounding adults cannot match.
Eric was running a real recruitment process. Dylan was selectable for reasons specific to him.
The next question is why.
The Diagnostic Question
Sue’s evaluators landed on schizotypal personality disorder as the most likely diagnosis for Dylan, based on his journals and on what she and others were able to reconstruct of his interior life. The diagnosis is worth defining briefly, because most readers will not know the term and will conflate it with related conditions that are meaningfully different.
Schizotypal personality disorder sits on the schizophrenia spectrum but does not require psychotic episodes. It is marked by eccentric thinking and behavior, magical or odd beliefs, social discomfort and limited capacity for close relationships, suspicious or paranoid ideation, inappropriate or constricted emotional range, and an interior life that often gets sustained largely through writing or other private creative work rather than through ordinary social exchange. People with schizotypal disorder are often quietly functional, often go undiagnosed for life, and often present to the people around them as “the odd kid” rather than as patients.
It is also one of the more biologically loaded personality disorders, with strong genetic and neurodevelopmental components. Parenting may shape outcomes around the disorder, but it does not create the underlying condition.
The diagnosis fits Dylan’s journals better than heavier alternatives sometimes proposed in the Columbine literature: schizoaffective disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, frank psychosis.
The journals show paranoid and grandiose ideation, isolation, eccentricity, intermittent rage, and an interior sustained largely through writing. That profile is broadly consistent with schizotypal features layered onto severe depression, but not with the more overt psychotic disorders sometimes proposed.
It also fits his social pattern. The diagnosis also fits the dyad. A schizotypal interior can produce unusual vulnerability to charismatic figures who appear to understand the hidden self ordinary social contact never reaches.
Eric, with his predatory acuity about what people needed to hear, would have been extraordinarily potent for someone like Dylan. The dynamic was not merely depressed kid plus dominant kid. It was recognition-starved kid plus someone capable of producing the simulacrum of recognition.
That said, I maintain my general skepticism about retrospective diagnosis from writings alone.
Sue had Dylan’s journals evaluated by qualified professionals after his death. The evaluators gave her schizotypal as the most likely fit. I want to note two things about this process that I think Sue does not fully foreground.
Evaluators reconstructing a dead patient from journals alone operate under an asymmetric incentive structure. “Consistent with schizotypal traits” is an easier and more usable conclusion than “inconclusive given only writings and retrospective reconstruction.”
I do not think Sue’s evaluators were dishonest. I do think the diagnosis is better understood as consistent with the evidence than conclusively established by it.
The second is more telling. By the time Sue’s evaluators offered the schizotypal reading, she and Tom had already had six months with Dylan’s journals — and had spent those six months believing he had been coerced or drugged into participating in the attack. The journals were available to them. The journals alone did not force the conclusion that something was clinically wrong with Dylan’s thought process.
It took the Basement Tapes — Dylan embodied, in his own voice, in his own body, choosing it — to break the holdout. The journals were compatible with the son she knew. They were compatible enough that even with them in hand, two intelligent parents who were paying close attention could not be made to accept that Dylan had chosen.
That tells you something about what the journals look like absent retrospective framing. Not nothing — the schizotypal features are there. But not the involuntary leakage of a thought process losing control either. The journals were partially curated. Dylan kept them.
Eric had hiding places good enough to defeat the FBI’s search of his bedroom — literally; after seeing the Basement Tapes, the FBI realized they’d missed some weapons so they returned to the Harris home and tore his bedroom up again.
Dylan, with full access to a competent partner in concealment, kept journals where they could plausibly be found. Which means the journals are not pure interior expression. They are the version of Dylan he was willing to leave traceable. That partial curation reduces their diagnostic value, because a schizotypal interior in the strictest sense is not fully controllable by the person experiencing it.
Dylan’s journals are too composed, literary, and audience-aware to read as pure involuntary leakage from a collapsing mind.
They are a writer’s journals. Possibly a schizotypal writer’s journals. Not simply a patient’s record.
So: probably but not sure. I credit the diagnosis as the most plausible available reading. I maintain that retrospective psychiatric assessment from writings has real limits, and that Sue’s framework leans on the diagnosis more confidently than the basis fully supports.
Why Dylan Was the Yes
If Eric was running a recruitment process, and others said no, the question becomes what made Dylan say yes.
The standard explanations — depression, bullying, alienation, anger — are insufficient because they describe millions of adolescents who never commit massacres. The real question is what specific shape Dylan’s unhappiness took such that Eric’s offer fit it.
I think the answer is visible in two scenes the book gives us, and it connects directly back to the parenting argument.
The first clue is Dylan’s years-long obsession with a girl he never spoke to. He filled journals with hearts, drawings, and declarations of love for someone who likely did not know he existed.
The fixation endured precisely because it remained uncommunicated. He never approached her, asked her out, or tested the fantasy against reality. He sustained the entire structure privately, in writing.
This pattern is worth thinking carefully about, because the standard frame for it — lonely teenage boy crushes on inaccessible girl, classic adolescent stuff — misses what is actually happening.
Ordinary adolescent crushes eventually encounter reality. The fantasy adjusts, collapses, matures, or ends. That friction is part of how adolescents learn other people are real.
He was not fantasizing primarily about sex, popularity, or achievement. He was fantasizing about being seen and specifically chosen.
The absence he was trying to fill was the absence of being known.
This is the kind of absence role-execution parenting can produce: operationally loved, attentively supervised, faithfully cared for, but not deeply known.
The child grows up sensing something missing without having language for it, because nobody obviously failed him. The parents did all the prescribed things.
The kid feels the gap as a shape inside him that nothing fits, and he locates the answer externally in The One Thing — if only this specific person knew me and chose me, the shape would resolve.
The fantasy had to remain pristine because real contact risked reproducing the original absence. If she failed to see him the way the fantasy promised, the structure would collapse.
So the distance became necessary. The obsession looked like longing for her but functioned as maintenance of his interior equilibrium.
Now consider what Eric was offering.
Eric could see Dylan. Not with care, with use. But the experience from Dylan’s side would have been indistinguishable from being seen with care, especially for a kid whose interior was structured around the absence of being seen at all.
Eric’s offer was simple: I see you. You are chosen. You belong with me. The world does not understand what we are.
That is the exact content the unreachable girl could not provide, because she did not know he existed. Eric did know. Eric named him. Eric included him. Eric’s recognition was real in the sense that mattered — it was directed at Dylan specifically, it acknowledged the interior Dylan had been carrying alone, and it required nothing of Dylan except continued membership in the dyad.
Chris Morris and the others did not need what Eric was offering. Whatever gaps existed in their interiors were buffered by enough ordinary human scaffolding — friendships, family connection, reciprocal relationships, ordinary social life — to make the offer nonessential.
They could decline Eric’s offer without losing anything they could not replace.
Dylan could not decline because Eric’s offer fit the shape of the absence precisely. Saying no meant returning to the interior he had been alone with for years.
So he took the offer.
This is what made Dylan selectable. Not generic depression or alienation, but the specific architecture of the absence inside him and the precise way Eric’s offer mapped onto it.
A different kid with the same depression and the same social position and the same demographics, but a different interior — one that had been interiorly contacted by adults in his life, one whose hunger to be seen was already being addressed somewhere — would have heard Eric’s offer as the disturbing pitch of a disturbed friend and said no.
Dylan heard it as the answer.
And here is the part of the argument that most readers will resist, so I want to say it plainly: this is not an exculpation of Dylan, and it is not a damnation of the Klebolds beyond the calibrated critique I have already made. It is a description of how recruitment works. Predators identify the kids whose interiors are shaped to fit their offer. Most of the kids around any given predator are not shaped that way. The ones who are, are. The Klebolds did not produce Dylan’s interior on purpose. They produced it by running the parenting operating system most of us run, which mostly works, except in the small percentage of cases where it produces a kid whose particular interior is particularly catchable by a particular predator.
Most kids raised this way do not commit massacres. Most simply become adults who are not quite okay in ways neither they nor their parents can fully articulate.
A very small number meet the right predator at the right moment and become Dylan.
The parenting critique survives this section. It also gets honestly limited by it. Sue and Tom did not produce a school shooter through bad parenting. They produced one of the conditions that made their son catchable by a specific predator who was actively shopping the offer. The condition is common. The catching is rare. The rarity does not redeem the condition.
The Teacher and the Paradigm
This is also the place to address Judith Kelly, the English teacher who later disputed Sue’s account of how seriously she had raised concerns about Dylan’s violent creative writing to his parents. Kelly remembers conveying alarm. Sue remembers concern, but not at the level that same story would generate today.
I don’t think either woman is lying. Columbine itself changed the template for what adults now recognize as alarming. Sue remembers a story that generated mild concern because, at the time, Dylan was still Dylan, and adolescent fascination with violence still fell within the bounds of normal.
This is one example of how radically Columbine changed the interpretive framework around adolescent behavior.
Before April 20, 1999, the standard law-enforcement response to an active shooter was to hold the perimeter and wait for SWAT. Officers at Columbine followed that protocol while Dave Sanders bled to death and Eric and Dylan continued moving through the school.
The protocol that day was followed correctly. The protocol was wrong.
Within a few years it had been replaced everywhere in the country by what is now standard: first officers on scene go in immediately, step over bleeding victims, and do not stop until the shooter is neutralized.
Kill the killer(s) first, sort the rest out later.
That paradigm shift was one of many Columbine produced. Threat-assessment systems that would now treat Dylan’s writing as actionable barely existed. School lockdown drills did not yet exist in recognizable form. Neither did the modern “see something, say something” framework around adolescent warning signs.
These systems were built using Columbine itself as founding data. Asking why 1999 failed to recognize the warning signs is partly asking 1999 to already possess lessons it had not yet learned.
The lesson was being written that day.
The teachers were the dead.
The Safe Schools Initiative
Sue leans heavily on the 2002 Safe School Initiative, the Secret Service and Department of Education study that examined 37 school attacks from 1974 to 2000 and concluded that while there is no profile of a school shooter, nearly every attacker had engaged in pre-attack behavior that concerned at least one adult, and that targeted violence is the end of a discernible process rather than a sudden event.
The study is real, methodologically careful for what it is, and it is the empirical foundation of Sue’s advocacy. It also has limits she does not foreground.
The “discernible” process is usually discernible only in retrospect, once investigators pool scattered fragments from multiple adults and reconstruct the pattern after the fact.
Before an attack, those fragments are isolated and ambiguous. The finding that multiple adults noticed concerning behavior rarely means any single adult possessed enough information to justify decisive intervention.
The “concerning behavior” framework also carries an unavoidable false-positive problem. Large numbers of adolescents exhibit warning signs, communicate distress, or alarm adults without ever becoming violent.
The SSI cannot reliably distinguish future attackers from the much larger pool of troubled but nonviolent kids.
The framework also fits the average school shooting better than it fits Columbine itself. Eric and Dylan ran a concealment operation sophisticated enough to frustrate even the FBI after the attack.
The warning-signs model works best when interiors are leaking. Columbine was planned by kids whose interiors were actively sealed.
None of this invalidates Sue’s advocacy. It locates it. The SSI supports her broader framework, but it cannot establish that Dylan’s specific case was preventable if only the warning-signs model had existed in 1998.
There is something tragic in that: Sue building her advocacy around a framework least suited to the very case that created it.
The advocacy still does real work for more ordinary cases. Kids whose interiors are leaking can sometimes be caught by adults who know what to look for.
That’s important, yes. It is simply not the whole story.
The Mother’s Day Moment
I want to pause on a scene that is easy to misread, because it complicates everything I have just argued and the complication is, in my judgment, both very nuanced and very important.
In May 1998, less than a year before the attack, Dylan forgot Mother’s Day. Sue confronted him about it, got in his face, waved her finger at him. Dylan asked her to step back. His words, by her recollection: I’m getting angry and I don’t know how well I can control it. He left the house, came back a few hours later with a potted plant, and the two of them apologized to each other. Sue reads the moment as a normal rupture-and-repair cycle of the kind teenagers and parents go through, and she is largely correct.
What matters is that Dylan’s response was, if anything, to his credit.
A six-foot-four sixteen-year-old boy who recognizes his own escalation, names it out loud, asks for space, and removes himself from the situation is demonstrating emotional regulation many adult men never fully develop.
The standard failure mode is to either suppress until eruption, or to escalate without warning. Dylan did neither. He noticed his own state, communicated it accurately, requested distance, and acted on his own request.
That is above-average emotional self-management for sixteen, and exactly the behavior we would want a large young man to learn in conflict, particularly with women. Returning later with the plant was a competent repair gesture on top of competent de-escalation.
This scene matters for two reasons.
First, it demonstrates that Dylan possessed real emotional resources. He was not a kid incapable of self-regulation or awareness. He had tools, and he used them here.
Which means April 20 was not the inevitable endpoint of someone wholly consumed by pathology. Part of the tragedy is that he once possessed capacities he later abandoned, lost, or chose not to use.
Second, the scene complicates any deterministic reading of Dylan as merely mentally ill. A kid with that much self-awareness and regulation capacity is not a kid wholly driven by disorder.
There is real agency in this scene. Later, there is real agency in the attack. The same person did both.
This is also where a writer has to be careful not to romanticize Dylan. Close reading can create the temptation to start liking the subject, and that is dangerous territory with a school shooter.
So let me say it directly: the Mother’s Day moment is not evidence that Dylan was secretly good. It is evidence that he was a person, with the full complement of capacities a person has, deploying those capacities sometimes well and sometimes monstrously. The monstrousness does not erase the personhood. The personhood does not redeem the monstrousness.
He was both things, in the same kid, in the same year of his life.
What this scene tells us is that the catastrophic outcome was not architecturally inevitable. Dylan’s interior was not, in May 1998, sealed against intervention. He could still notice himself. He could still ask for help managing his own escalation. Someone with the right tools, paying close enough attention, might have caught the moment and used it differently than Sue did.
Sue did not have those tools. Which is tragic but understandable.
Almost no parents did, in 1998. Almost no parents do now.
The role-execution mode in which she was operating handled the moment well, by its own standards, by treating his de-escalation and repair at face value. Which was the correct read of his behavior. And which was also a missed opportunity, visible only in retrospect, to engage with what he had just told her about his own interior pressure.
The tragedy lives in both readings being true.
The Brain Health Frame and Its Limits
Sue has organized her post-2016 advocacy life around what she calls brain health — her preferred term for what most of us would call mental health. The frame holds that the deepest cause of Columbine was Dylan’s untreated depression, that recognizing the warning signs would have made intervention possible, and that suicide prevention and brain-health awareness are the most powerful tools we have for preventing future Columbines. Suicide is a top-ten cause of death in the United States. Research on it is underfunded relative to the burden it carries. And — both literally and as a syllogism — suicide prevention is murder-suicide prevention.
The factual core of this argument is solid. It survives every critique I have made elsewhere in this review. Sue’s advocacy work has, by every available measure, helped real people, and the frame she has built is more useful than no frame at all.
But the frame is doing work it cannot fully bear, and the place where the work exceeds the frame is the sentence I opened this review with.
The only thing I could think of to be thankful for was that the bombs hadn’t gone off.
That is Sue at Thanksgiving 1999, seven months after the attack and one month after the Basement Tapes ended her belief that Dylan had been coerced. She is sitting at the most ritualized gratitude moment in American life, and the operating system that would, on any other year, have generated a competent recitation of blessings cannot produce output. The standard inputs are all corrupted. The only thing she can find to be thankful for is a counterfactual — gratitude for something that did not happen.
The bombs not going off was not a thing she did. She did not prevent it. They were prevented from going off by being incompetently built. She is thanking the universe for her son’s mechanical failure. The pivot from I am the mother of a good son to I am the mother of a son who is a mass murderer but at least an incompetent one is the entire arc of the second demolition compressed into one Thanksgiving sentence.
What she is doing in that sentence is the most honest thing in the book. What she is doing in her advocacy life is something else, and the two are in quiet tension.
Severe depression does not assemble propane devices. Severe depression does not build a hundred bombs, plan timing around the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday, select Natural Selection as the ideology, choose targets, acquire weapons through illegal channels, conceal the operation from the FBI level of scrutiny, and produce the Basement Tapes for posterity. Whatever Dylan was, he was not only depressed. The original plan was a mass-casualty bombing with shooters picking off survivors. The bombs would have killed an order of magnitude more people than the guns did. The brain-health frame can metabolize the suicidal interior. It cannot metabolize the propane tanks.
Sue’s Thanksgiving sentence sits inside the knowledge of what those tanks were trying to accomplish. She does not return to the bombs often in the rest of the book. They appear and recede. The advocacy frame she built afterward addresses the interior that wrote the journals. It does not address the interior that built the bombs, because the interior that built the bombs is the part the frame cannot reach. There is no clean clinical answer to it. There is no warning sign she can teach parents to spot that would have caught the kid who, on tape, calmly walked through the schematics of a planned massacre with a friend.
I think Sue’s narrowing to brain health is intellectually incomplete and psychologically necessary. She narrows because brain health is something she can do — learn about, advocate for, build a frame around, hand to other parents in a usable shape. The bombs are something nobody can do anything about as a frame. There is no advocacy career to be built on some teenagers acquire ideologies and build explosives and there is very little to be done about it once they have. Even if it is true.
The book she gestured at in her preface, where the slow-burn tragedies vastly outnumber the flameouts and the parenting failure is much wider than the warning-signs frame can address, is a harder book than the one she eventually wrote. Both books are honest. The one she wrote is the one she could finish and live inside.
I do not fault her for that. I do think the review has to name it.
Diversion and the Solidified Bond
There is one piece of the story that belongs to nobody’s individual failure and that I want to flag before the close, because it is genuinely systemic.
In January 1998, Eric and Dylan were arrested for breaking into a van and stealing electronics. Neither set of parents had ever dealt with anything like this. The Klebolds consulted a lawyer-neighbor whose advice — have Dylan tell the whole truth, good kids from good homes who confess get lighter treatment — was strategically correct for 1998 and worked. Both boys entered a diversion program. Restitution, community service, anger management, restricted activities, periodic room searches at home. By every available measure, the parents handled the arrest exactly the way the system was designed to be handled. Sue confronted Dylan on the moral substance. Dylan performed contrition. The program ran its course. Both boys completed it with positive evaluations and the records were eventually sealed.
The system worked, in its own terms. The boys were not separated.
Their diversion appointments were frequently scheduled together. The intervention designed to interrupt the pattern of bad behavior the two of them had produced as a unit treated them as a unit while administering the correction. They went to anger management together. They sat in waiting rooms together. They talked, presumably, about the program together, and about what each was telling his counselor, and about how each was performing the recovery the program required.
The diversion program, in other words, solidified the bond it was supposed to fracture.
This is not the Klebolds’ failure. The parents had no control over how the program scheduled appointments. It is also not the diversion program’s failure in any individual-actor sense; the counselors who scheduled the appointments were doing the expected administrative thing. It is a systems failure, of the kind that happens when an intervention designed for the modal case is applied to a case whose specific risk factor is the partnership being intervened on. The system saw two kids with a shared offense and treated them as a shared case. The shared case was the problem.
A small detail with large implications: the diversion program also raised the stakes of getting caught at anything else, which gave Dylan strong incentives to develop better concealment skills in his ongoing dealings with his parents. The Rampart Range cover story — I’m filming a project for my advanced film production class on public land — is the work of a kid who has learned to satisfy parental questions with engineered specifics, in part because the consequences of failing that test were now considerably steeper.
Worth knowing. Not worth blaming anyone for. The system did what it was designed to do, and what it was designed to do was the wrong thing for these two particular boys.
The Sealing of the Basement Tapes
I promised earlier in this review that I would return to the decision to seal the Basement Tapes. This is that return.
The tapes have never been released publicly. They will not be. The Klebolds have seen them. The Harris parents have seen them. A small number of law enforcement personnel and supervised journalists have seen them. The general public has not, and the general public never will.
This is one of the cleanest moral wins in the entire post-Columbine institutional response.
The contagion case is open and shut. The Basement Tapes are Eric and Dylan in their own voices, in their own bodies, making the case for what they were about to do, naming the people they hated, brandishing the weapons, performing the ideology with all the adolescent grandiosity that imitators would find irresistible. If they were released today, they would have a billion views on YouTube in a week. Some non-trivial number of those views would be by kids whose interiors are shaped, like Dylan’s was, to find the offer compelling. Some non-trivial number of those kids would imitate. We would have more attacks. The number is not zero, and the harm is not abstract. The post-Columbine record contains more than seventy copycat attacks already, produced by what the public already knows. Releasing the tapes would compound the contagion incalculably.
The cost of the sealing is real. Sue’s book turns on material the reader cannot evaluate. The central hinge of her narrative — Dylan, embodied, choosing it — is described by Sue and cannot be checked by us. We have to trust her. This is a meaningful constraint on the book’s verifiability, and an honest critic has to name it.
The constraint is worth accepting. The verifiability cost is a cost we pay so that the contagion cost is not paid by other people’s children.
The sealing is the kind of institutional decision that aged perfectly. The reflex that produced it — do not give the killers the platform they planned for — has, in other contexts, been over-applied. But the Basement Tapes are the clean case. They are the case that justifies the reflex. They should stay sealed, forever, and Sue’s book has to be read with that constraint in view.
What This Book Is For
Before the close, I want to name what A Mother’s Reckoning actually accomplishes when you separate the book Sue wrote from the advocacy thesis the book is partly organized to advance. The two are separable. The first survives the critique of the second.
Sue Klebold’s book is, at its best, a record of a parent trying to understand her child after the worst possible end. It is not, in those passages, a thesis-driven document. It is a person looking. The looking is unusually honest. She admits things she does not have to admit. She names the manufactured quality of Dylan’s grievances. She refuses the passive-follower frame. She acknowledges that the bullying was real and also not exculpatory. She writes the Thanksgiving sentence. She lets the reader see the cat-medicine moment without ever quite naming what it reveals. She does not lawyer. She does not perform a sympathy she has not earned. She gives the reader an account of her son that lets the reader make a fuller moral assessment than the official record alone permits.
This is rarer than it sounds. Most parents in Sue’s position cannot do it. Either they collapse into denial and the book is unreadable, or they collapse into self-flagellation and the book is unreadable in a different way, or they retreat into private grief and write nothing. The narrow band in which a parent of a child who has done something terrible can produce a book that is both honest and bearable to read is very narrow, and Sue is in it. The book is, on those terms, a real accomplishment.
The advocacy thesis is something else. The thesis is the structure Sue built afterward to make the close observation livable. The frame she settled on — brain health, warning signs, suicide-as-the-key — is the version of the answer she could organize a life around. It does not fully fit her son’s case. It does fit a meaningful subset of other cases, and her work has helped real people. Those two facts coexist. The thesis is incomplete. The thesis is also doing real good. Both things are true.
I think it matters to separate them, because most reviews of this book either treat the thesis as the heart of the book — and judge the book on whether the thesis holds — or treat the close observation as the heart of the book and let the thesis ride. Neither is quite right. The close observation is the heart. The thesis is the scaffolding she built around it so she could continue to function. The scaffolding is not the building.
If you read A Mother’s Reckoning for the close observation — for Sue looking at her son, in the chapters where she is actually looking — you get something most contemporary memoir cannot produce. You get a record of a person doing the hardest available cognitive work on the worst available material, with sustained honesty, across years. That is what the book is for, even if Sue would not describe it that way.
The advocacy is what the book has been used for. The two are not the same.
A reader can credit Sue for the looking, decline to fully credit the framework, and emerge with a more accurate sense of what happened at Columbine than any other available source provides. Including Cullen. Including Langman. Including the Jefferson County reports. The interior of Dylan, to the limited extent it can be accessed at all, is most accessible through his mother’s careful description of what she saw and missed and now sees. That is the book’s contribution. It is enough to make the book worth reading, even where the thesis it gets wrapped in is incomplete.
Both
Sue Klebold did everything right by the standards almost every American parent who is not poor operates within. She fed her son. She read to him. She drove him to activities. She knew his friends. She set rules and enforced them. She monitored his grades. She noticed when he became withdrawn and took him to dinner to ask. She honored his privacy when he asked her to. She demanded restitution when he hurt someone else’s property and confronted him on the moral substance of the harm. She gave him a curfew. She gave him a college tour. She gave him a flask check when he came home from prom and trusted him when the flask was nearly full. She gave him love in the form the parenting books had taught her to give it, which is the form almost all of us have been taught to give it.
She also produced a son who walked into a school with a duffel bag of propane tanks intending to kill hundreds of children, and who, when the tanks failed, killed thirteen people with guns instead, and who, before he did either, sat in his bedroom for months writing the suicide notes that nobody found until it was over.
These two things are not in tension. They are the same thing.
This is the part of the review I have been working toward, and it is the part most readers will resist, so I am going to say it carefully.
The parenting Sue Klebold practiced is the parenting most American parents practice. The visible markers of success — the kid is fed, the kid is supervised, the kid is at school, the kid is in activities, the kid has friends, the kid has a future — were all in place.
The system was running as designed.
The system runs that way in millions of households right now. Most of those households produce children who grow up reasonably well, by which I mean they hold jobs and form attachments and do not kill anyone.
This is not nothing. The system is not nothing. Most of the time, it is enough.
Most of the time.
The system has no internal feedback mechanism for the thing it cannot do, which is interior contact with a child whose surface is compliant. The kid is doing the things. The system is working. Inside the kid, something is shaped wrong — not damaged, not abused, not anything anyone could name, just shaped wrong in a way that maps too neatly onto what a particular kind of predator is offering.
Most of those kids never meet that predator. They drift through their twenties in a fog they cannot articulate, marry people who do not quite see them, raise children using the same system they were raised on, and live lives that look fine and feel slightly hollow and end at ordinary ages of ordinary causes. They are most of us.
A smaller number of those kids meet the predator. Most of those still say no. The predator’s offer is strange and dangerous and the kid declines it. Chris Morris declined it. Three times.
A very small number of those kids meet the predator and say yes. The kid is selected because his particular interior shape fits the predator’s particular offer. The selection has nothing to do with whether his parents were good people, or whether they did the things, or whether they loved him. They were. They did. They did. The selection has to do with a shape inside the kid that the parenting did not produce intentionally and did not know to address.
The shape is common. The predator is rare. The catching is rarer still. The catastrophic outcome, when it happens, is so rare that we name the events and remember them by their place names for twenty-five years and counting.
If you are reading this and you are a parent who did the things, you are most likely going to be fine. Your kid is most likely going to be fine. The system mostly works.
That is the comfort I can offer, and it is real.
It is also the entire problem.
Anne Marie Hochhalter died last February of complications from injuries Dylan and Eric inflicted on her in 1999. Her death was officially classified as the fourteenth homicide of Columbine. She had publicly forgiven Sue Klebold during her lifetime.
The bombs did not go off. We still do not know how many children Dylan and Eric tried to kill that day, only how many they succeeded in killing, which is fourteen now, and counting.
Sue Klebold did everything right.