A Mother's Reckoning
I've been reading Sue Klebold's book A Mother's Reckoning: Life in the Aftermath of Tragedy - Sue Klebold is the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the shooters at Columbine - which is really good, but in a way where I would be very leery of recommending it because it's so emotionally intense. Like, "I spent the first half of the book crying" emotionally intense. And I feel like it would be even worse for a parent, because Dylan seems so normal that I think it would be hard for a parent not to imagine their own child into his place. "How would I feel if...?"
The first half is mostly memoir about the hours and days and weeks after Columbine, as Sue Klebold tries to grapple with the fact that her son Dylan is dead and also a murderer and dead, and everyone blames her and her husband for the shooting (they should have known! They should have seen what their son was up to!) and they're being sued, and also a media inferno has descended on the town. And, because her son died killing lots of people, it's like he died twice over: she has to rethink everything she ever thought she knew about him, and everything about herself as well, and also about parenting.
I think it's fairly easy to wonder about bias in a book like this: Sue Klebold is clearly reacting to accusations that Columbine was all her fault and she must have been a bad parent, so it's natural to wonder if this is all a rationalization. I've read two outside sources that largely confirm Klebold's characterization of herself and her son, though (David Cullen's nonfiction book Columbine and Brooks Brown's memoir about his friendship with Dylan), so while there are a couple of specific points where I think Klebold might be biased (she really wants Dylan's depression to have psychotic features - and under the circumstances, who wouldn't want to believe he was losing contact with reality?), on the whole it's a painfully honest book.
And also a terrifying book, because if there's one main point that you should take away, it's that people - parents, in particular, but also other relatives, friends - very rarely know the things they "should" have known. It's not that they're unengaged (the Klebolds were clearly very engaged parents), but that people in general and children especially don't open up about what's wrong with unless you pry it out of them.
(When I was eleven, one of my friends confided to me that she was suicidal, and I wrote pages and pages fretting about this in my diary but never told anyone. She had sworn me to secrecy and even if she hadn't, it just didn't occur to me as an option. And I'm sure that same thinking only applies more intensely to bigger and more painful secrets; the surprising thing is not that children don't tell but that they ever tell at all.
I feel compelled to add that the young lady in question is to the best of my knowledge still alive and kicking.)
Speaking of diaries - Klebold mentions that she wishes that she had read Dylan's. Under the circumstances, I think that's an understandable wish, I'm really ambivalent about it as wider parenting advice, though. Dylan Klebold is an extreme case and perhaps ought not to be generalized from?
But on the other hand, Sue Klebold's comment reminds me eerily of a story in David Cullen's Columbine, about one of Dylan's classmates and eventual victims. When Cassie Bernall was a young teenager, her mother went into her room and read some private letters Cassie had exchanged with a friend, which said things like "You should kill your parents and then yourself so you don't have to go to jail" and basically made it clear that Cassie was miserable and depressed. Mrs. Bernall and her husband forced Cassie to break off the friendship and grounded her from pretty much all unorganized activities and basically took over her life.
And it saved her. She didn't become a social butterfly or even get a prom date, but she was doing well and was happy when she died.
...I still have a kneejerk "WHO READS SOMEONE ELSE'S PRIVATE DIARY" reaction to all this. But just because a reaction is kneejerk doesn't mean it's right. (Or that it's wrong. I go back and forth on this.)
I may post about it at more length later; there's a huge amount of thought-provoking stuff in this book. I need to think it over a bit more before I write.
The first half is mostly memoir about the hours and days and weeks after Columbine, as Sue Klebold tries to grapple with the fact that her son Dylan is dead and also a murderer and dead, and everyone blames her and her husband for the shooting (they should have known! They should have seen what their son was up to!) and they're being sued, and also a media inferno has descended on the town. And, because her son died killing lots of people, it's like he died twice over: she has to rethink everything she ever thought she knew about him, and everything about herself as well, and also about parenting.
I think it's fairly easy to wonder about bias in a book like this: Sue Klebold is clearly reacting to accusations that Columbine was all her fault and she must have been a bad parent, so it's natural to wonder if this is all a rationalization. I've read two outside sources that largely confirm Klebold's characterization of herself and her son, though (David Cullen's nonfiction book Columbine and Brooks Brown's memoir about his friendship with Dylan), so while there are a couple of specific points where I think Klebold might be biased (she really wants Dylan's depression to have psychotic features - and under the circumstances, who wouldn't want to believe he was losing contact with reality?), on the whole it's a painfully honest book.
And also a terrifying book, because if there's one main point that you should take away, it's that people - parents, in particular, but also other relatives, friends - very rarely know the things they "should" have known. It's not that they're unengaged (the Klebolds were clearly very engaged parents), but that people in general and children especially don't open up about what's wrong with unless you pry it out of them.
(When I was eleven, one of my friends confided to me that she was suicidal, and I wrote pages and pages fretting about this in my diary but never told anyone. She had sworn me to secrecy and even if she hadn't, it just didn't occur to me as an option. And I'm sure that same thinking only applies more intensely to bigger and more painful secrets; the surprising thing is not that children don't tell but that they ever tell at all.
I feel compelled to add that the young lady in question is to the best of my knowledge still alive and kicking.)
Speaking of diaries - Klebold mentions that she wishes that she had read Dylan's. Under the circumstances, I think that's an understandable wish, I'm really ambivalent about it as wider parenting advice, though. Dylan Klebold is an extreme case and perhaps ought not to be generalized from?
But on the other hand, Sue Klebold's comment reminds me eerily of a story in David Cullen's Columbine, about one of Dylan's classmates and eventual victims. When Cassie Bernall was a young teenager, her mother went into her room and read some private letters Cassie had exchanged with a friend, which said things like "You should kill your parents and then yourself so you don't have to go to jail" and basically made it clear that Cassie was miserable and depressed. Mrs. Bernall and her husband forced Cassie to break off the friendship and grounded her from pretty much all unorganized activities and basically took over her life.
And it saved her. She didn't become a social butterfly or even get a prom date, but she was doing well and was happy when she died.
...I still have a kneejerk "WHO READS SOMEONE ELSE'S PRIVATE DIARY" reaction to all this. But just because a reaction is kneejerk doesn't mean it's right. (Or that it's wrong. I go back and forth on this.)
I may post about it at more length later; there's a huge amount of thought-provoking stuff in this book. I need to think it over a bit more before I write.