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It may seem strange to begin a review by discussing another book. Yet when I put down Sue Klebold’s devastating memoir, A Mother’s Reckoning, written about her school shooter son Dylan (of Columbine fame), my first thoughts were indeed about another book. Some years ago, I had read Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin (Shriver, 2003), a novel written from the imaginary perspective of a teenage school killer’s mother. In that book, fictional Kevin killed not only some of his schoolmates but also his family members, sparing, however, his mother.
Shriver’s 2003 book was uncompromising and incisive, offering the reader an interpretation of the psychic life of a teenage mass murderer. It was written only four years after teenagers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris had murdered 12 students and one teacher in Colorado, USA, at Columbine High School (and eight years before 20-year-old Adam Lanza would kill 20 first graders and a number of adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School). In between, there have been numerous mass shootings in the United States, often involving adolescent perpetrators. There has been endless speculation and debate about school shooters’ psychic life and motivations, in the context of wider contemporary debates on gun control, isolation, bullying, use of antidepressants and violent computer games. Shriver’s interpretation of this phenomenon was definitely an
interesting one. However, when reading We Need to Talk about Kevin, I remember thinking that what Shriver was arguing wasn’t emotionally convincing to me; however clever in its subtle portrayal of the mind of a teenage murderer (and his mother), what the book argued didn’t ring true. I wasn’t sure, at the time, why that was. Reading A Mother’s Reckoning by Sue Klebold some years later has offered me some answers.
A Mother’s Reckoning can be considered the non-fictional counterpart to We Need to Talk about Kevin. Reading it, I realised that what I had objected to in Kevin had to do with the lac