Amanda Knox has written at length about her experiences as a wrongfully convicted murderer in her previous memoir, a book she freely admits was written to help defray the crushing debt accrued by her family while mounting her defense against multiple prosecutions in Italy. However, gaining her freedom didn’t mean her ordeal was over. Her notoriety meant it was next to impossible to re-enter her previous life. For years, her name and face appeared in tabloids, newspapers, social media and news reports. Documentaries were made about her arrest and subsequent trials. Movies purported to tell her story and crime series episodes created fictionalized accounts of the case.
After four years in prison, Knox returned to America to a different type of incarceration. It was virtually impossible for her to do the kinds of things people do in everyday life. She would be recognized in a grocery store or a bookstore. How does a young woman go on a first date without the awkward discussion about her past, assuming the other person doesn’t already know her story and is attempting to exploit it? If she went to a night club, paparazzi snapped photos to sell to tabloids in which her behavior was seen as disrespectful to the memory of the murder victim (something she refers to as the “single victim fallacy”)? And who would hire her who wouldn’t also be attempting to exploit her name and reputation? How could she be simply Amanda Knox again without all the baggage attached to her name?
Knox frankly and eloquently discusses these ordeals and more in Free: My Search for Meaning. She puts her life under unblinking scrutiny, chronicling her struggles as a “free” woman, owning up to some of the mistakes she made after her liberation and her misadventures. She was an unwilling celebrity, someone who never asked to be notorious, but people believed they knew her, made assumptions about her, tried to befriend her or uttered threats against her.
One of the first people who extended a welcoming hand was a newspaper editor who offered her a minimum wage job writing reviews for the West Seattle Herald under a pseudonym. She could remain anonymous by screening movies in dark theaters, and on those occasions where she interviewed people in public, she presented herself as Emile Monte. (The story of how she created her pen name is reminiscent of Stephen King/Richard Bachman. She chose Emile because it was a character from one of her grandmother’s favorite childhood novels and Monte because of a can of Del Monte peas in her pantry. Many of those articles can still be found online.)
The book revisits some of her experience in prison, including the depths of her despair and the people who handed her a lifeline, including a prison priest with whom she could have philosophical discussions despite her disbelief in his religion. Section headings are drawn from Dante—over the course of the decade after she was found innocent she progressed from Inferno through Purgatory to Paradise and beyond. Now she is happily married with a couple of children and working for projects associated with wrongly accused/incarcerated people She has steadfastly reclaimed her personal identity and re-emerged into public life as an advocate.
The most fascinating section of his book is her account of how she reconnected with the man who doggedly prosecuted her, Giuliano Mignini. She decided that, although the man had never relented in his public claim that—regardless of the decisions handed down by higher courts—he believed her prosecution was justified. Still, she wondered what kind of man he might be in private, so she reached out to him, first by mail. Their exchanges, some of which Knox quotes in the book, are intriguing. No matter how hard she tried, she could never get Mignini to acknowledge her innocence or the damage he caused her, but they did form an interesting bond. They talked about her children and his grandchildren. They even met in person in 2019, a private encounter that Knox had never previously disclosed. Although she could never get precisely what she wanted or needed from him, the relationship they formed was important to her and, it seems, to the aging prosecutor. It’s a powerful testament to Knox’s drive to get past her past and create a new path forward for herself.
Anything that separates people can be bridged through empathy, she writes. Although her circumstances are unique, everyone has lived through their own worst moment. When people approach her to say, “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through,” her response is a single word: Try.
