The ultimate nightmare

On an April morning in 1999, two teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, walked into Columbine High School in Colorado and murdered 12 fellow students and a teacher, wounded many others, then turned their guns on themselves. Among the many questions fired at Klebold’s stunned parents in the wake of this appalling event, two were especially hard for them to hear. Did they ever hug their kids? And — this from one of the many bereaved — ‘Were you a family that ever spent much time at the dinner table together?’

When brutal and frightening things happen, people want brutal and frightening explanations: the need for causality becomes paramount. If this family bred a monster, then they must have done something monstrous. For if we can’t reassure ourselves that such a thing won’t — can’t — happen to us, then surely no one is safe. Much to her credit, this is the still-urgent question that Dylan’s mother, Sue Klebold — now a suicide-prevention activist — dares to explore some 16 years on, in her agonisingly self-scrutinising and morally acute memoir.

The uneasy truth is that the Klebolds seem to have been a middle-class family just like so many others. Happy, loving, socially and emotionally aware, they not only did very much eat dinner together, but also, like the rest of us, did their best to limit the ‘intake of television and sugary cereals’ and monitor ‘what movies our boys could see and put them to bed with stories and prayers and hugs’. And of the two children, Dylan was for a long time ‘the classic good kid… easy to raise, a pleasure to be with, a child who had always made us proud’.

But it turns out that this ‘easy’ young man was also deeply troubled — a ‘perfectionist’ whose ‘unrealistic expectations for himself’ seem to have resulted in (never diagnosed) depression, contributing to overwhelming ‘alienation at the end of his life’.