When Amanda Knox was imprisoned in Capanne, Perugia in 2007 for the murder of the British student Meredith Kercher, Viktor Frankl’s 1946 memoir was one of the books that helped her survive.
Man’s Search for Meaning chronicles the Austrian psychologist’s years in concentration camps, and how he came to find purpose there through the completion of daily tasks, caring for others, and facing his suffering with dignity. “His raw nerve to exist in the face of hopeless struggle […] resonated, and continues to resonate, with me.”
During her four-year incarceration, her acquittal, that acquittal’s overturning and the saga that continued, Knox continued to use the wisdom and spirituality of others as tools for her endurance: CS Lewis, Confucius, Jesus, Seneca, ancient Japanese philosophy, Zen Buddhism, Yoda and the revellers at Burning Man festival, have all helped her to make sense of the loss of her freedom, her public image, and her voice at just 20 years old. To Knox, who desires not forgiveness but acceptance, “there’s one kind of revenge I’ve learned to cherish: the revenge of becoming my best self”.
Unfortunately for 37-year-old Knox, most of the people who read Free: My Search for Meaning will be less interested in her path to becoming her best self than beset by a morbid desire to deeper understand the “real” “Foxy Knoxy”, the odd, true-crime celebrity persona forged by a rabid and sexist tabloid press and shonky legal proceedings, branded a murderer and sexual deviant at worst and insensitive and fame-hungry at best. The name everyone remembers instead of the victim’s.
Even more unfortunately, no matter how many times Knox attempts to reclaim her story in her own words – here those words conjure a portrait of a precocious, resourceful, Pollyanna-ish model of magnanimity in the face of her enemies and doubters – it will be impossible to displace the image of “Foxy Knoxy”, or convince her detractors of her right to keep telling it. That doesn’t mean she’s going to stop trying.
Free is not a memoir, exactly – Knox published her account of the trial, Waiting to Be Heard, in 2013 – but an attempt to reframe her extraordinary adult life as something that happened for a reason, something with outcomes that can be good. We follow Knox from her outdoorsy, happy childhood in Seattle to her lovestruck early weeks as a student in Perugia, and then to jail, singing Dido and The Eagles to pass the time, translating other less-educated inmates’ documents for them and becoming best friends with the prison’s Catholic priest.
When freedom was eventually granted, she discovered that the adulthood that she assumed would be denied – a career, love, motherhood – would all be coloured by the past. “Pain was simpler in prison,” she found, as she worked through her trust issues and the world’s mistrust in her. Exploring this, she began to wrangle with her right to a life independent of the murder while still unable to occupy herself with much else.
Like she did in prison, she made it part of her purpose, becoming an advocate for other exonerees – her “exoneree family” – returning to Italy to make new memories, committing to public speaking about her experiences and even striking up a bizarre relationship with her prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, in a search of closure. Free is strung together with long passages of her speeches, emails, and conversations; it feels like an indignant attempt to have the last word and occasionally takes on the tone of an empowering, millennial self-help manual, which is as jarring as it sounds.
Amanda Knox arrives in court for her murder trial in Perugia in 2009 (Photo: REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi)Free is most illuminating when Knox grapples with the public’s perception of her. How do you cope when much of the world believes you to be “a liar, a psychopath, a dirty, drug- addled slut so jealous of Meredith’s purity that I raped and killed her – guilty until proven innocent”? She has an ability to reflect on “Foxy Knoxy” – a childhood football nickname hijacked by the press – with commendable frankness.
Knox’s intelligence, confidence and at times ill-judged decisions are what so unnerved prosecutors during the murder trials. They continue in her writing. She is uncompromising in calling out the misogyny that made her a household name and granted the murderer, Rudy Guede, relative anonymity. She understands completely why the case so captured the world and why she became catnip for a salacious media. She also displays an odd habit of ignoring counsel of trusted advisers – warning her, for example, not to return to Italy, or not to strike up a romance with another “wrongly accused” man – if it means compromising her sense of self or sacrificing her pursuit of “acceptance” and “meaning”.
She is at once incredibly vulnerable and open in the book – writing about masturbating in her cell, her thoughts of suicide, her miscarriage, her foolish and dangerous relationships borne from being too trusting after her acquittal – and detached and guarded. She will not pour her heart out.
Therapy did not work for Knox. Instead she has relied on absorbing the words – she loves words, books, languages, dictionaries – of others. “God doesn’t give you strength, he gives you the opportunity to be strong,” said that prison priest, Don Saulo, who convinced her that she could weave her own life’s tapestry. “Once you realise this floating life is the perfect mirage of change, it’s breathtaking” said the ninth-century Chinese poet Han Shan. “No one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you,” said Seneca. Knox describes the mending of her own life using the metaphor of the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which broken pottery is repaired with gold and made beautiful again.
Knox has also coined a vernacular of her own. There’s “2D-osis”, “the condition of seeing your fellow humans as cardboard cutouts in the shape of people” – which explains the way so much of the world is unable to see her outside of the murder. There’s the “single victim fallacy” – the idea that there can be only one victim in a situation, when even though she did not lose her life as Kercher did, she lost many other things, too.
There are the “Sisters of Ill Repute”, the other women, including Monica Lewinsky, whom she calls a friend and big sister, “whose broken bodies, broken relationships, most vulnerable moments, and worst experiences” the world consumes “like candy”. The fixation on the women at the centre of scandals, instead of the male perpetrators, “distracts from the actual crimes committed against women by men, and even validates them, giving tacit permission for men to hate women, too. We’ve advanced far beyond the days of Salem, 1692. Now, we’re all experts at witch-burning.”
She isn’t wrong, of course, but all those metaphors and aphorisms grow cutesy and simplistic very quickly. Worst of all is when she wonders whether, if her ordeal had to have a flavour, perhaps it would be truffle.
Knox does do a good job of sensitively articulating the injustice that her life is condemned to be forever tied to the flatmate she knew for five weeks before her brutal murder in their home.
“However much I may wish it otherwise, the fact is that her identity has become so wrapped up in mine that most people can’t think of me without thinking of her, or think of her without thinking of me.” She is trapped, when “everything good in my life was spun as some kind of obscene offense to the memory of Meredith”.
It is a shame, though, that those pithy clichés she uses to make sense of life rear their heads here, too. “I often feel as if Meredith and I are two sides of the same coin. And when that coin was flipped, I got heads and she got tails,” she writes. Later: “As I carry her memory with me, I think of her as part of the gold filigree that holds my shattered pieces together.” It veers very close to crass.
In the biography at the back of Free, the first word Amanda Knox uses to describe herself is “exoneree”. For years, she has rejected the sexism and scrutiny and injustice that led this crime to defined her life, that has made her the main character when she should be a footnote. Yet she has continued to court media attention with books, documentaries, a podcast series, and an upcoming Netflix series. She has made “exoneree” her full-time job, and came of age at the exact moment women began to publicise their pain, make it part of their personal brand, and profit from it.
Reading Free, I was left with the impression that the reason Knox has never submitted to shrinking into anonymity, as so many will her to do, is because her identity is inseparable from her trauma – she has no adult self without it.
Her insistence on telling you the kind of playful, silly little girl she was, the kind of playful, silly adult she is – “a lover of foreign languages and dancing, a Renaissance nerd and theater geek; the real me was devouring an heirloom tomato and licking the plate” – is an attempt to replace the toxic narratives about her and reassert the person she was before, and is after, not just for the public, but for herself. Who is Amanda Knox? Even she doesn’t know.
‘Free: My Search for Meaning’ is published by Headline, £22
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