Amanda Knox’s new book Free details her quest for peace

American Amanda Knox says she is still trying to come to terms with her life in - and out - of prison.

Amanda Knox has written a second book about life as a wife and mother, outside the Italian prison system. Picture: Tiziana FABI / AFP

In Buddhism there is a teaching: one’s antagonists are the best spiritual teachers because they are so good at providing opportunities to practice patience and kindness. It is an idea that Amanda Knox credits for helping her overcome years of torment, living “in the shadow of the worst thing that I never did”.

Knox is of course famous — notorious, really — for accusations made against her by Italian police and prosecutors. In 2007 she was an exchange student in Italy when one of her three roommates, Meredith Kercher, was found raped and murdered in their flat. Police brought Knox in as a potential witness — or so she believed. The 20-year-old from the American city of Seattle was held for five days without a lawyer. In Free: My Search for Meaning she describes being slapped, browbeaten and coerced into implicating the Congolese owner of a local bar where she worked part time.

When her case came to court, the prosecution presented a lurid scenario of sex and violence that sent the tabloids into a swoon. It was alleged that Knox, a Volpe Cattiva, or wicked fox, had manipulated her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and an Ivorian migrant, Rudy Guede, into violating Kercher and holding her still so that Knox could “plunge in the knife”.

Amanda Knox is driven to court at midnight to hear the sentence in her murder trial on December 5, 2009 in Perugia, Italy. Picture: Getty Images

There was little to connect Knox or Sollecito to the crime, and abundant DNA and fingerprint evidence that Guede had been at the scene. In late 2007, the Italian authorities extradited Guede from Germany, to which he’d fled. In July 2008, the three were charged with murder.

Knox’s 2013 memoir, Waiting to be Heard, recounted the gruelling details of her trial and incarceration, written after an Italian appeals court overturned the convictions of Knox and Sollecito in 2011 and she returned to the United States. Her new book chronicles the author’s emotional and philosophical battle to accept the events that befell her and to recognise, with as much grace and as little rancour possible, the contours of her new reality.

For Foxy Knoxy, as she’d been known on her middle-school soccer team, there was no stepping back into her old, anonymous life. She had joined what she calls the Sisterhood of Ill Repute. She was, and remains, a public figure and a continued object of fascination and revilement. People who hate Amanda Knox — and there are plenty — really, really, hate her. Even now internet trolls harass her. Even now she gets death threats.

Free: My Search for Meaning By Amanda Knox

The book is an ably written testimony, even soaring at times, though Knox is a bit too inclined to include expletives and earthy anatomical details for it to be a work of real elegance. Style aside, the author does persuasively convey how appalling her predicament was and how powerless she felt until she began to change herself from the inside. “Everything I held dear, everything I thought belonged to me — my home, my freedom, my future — I thought it had been taken away from me,” she writes. In her prison cell, however, she began to see that she “was in the midst of an extraordinary opportunity for personal growth”.

Knox explains that, since her exoneration, she has drawn succour from Buddhism and Stoicism. She has found comfort in getting to know others who were falsely accused or thrust into sudden public infamy. At her first meeting with other exonerated people, she felt teary and bewildered. “You don’t have to explain a thing, little sister,” someone said kindly. “We know.”

Amanda Knox prepares to leave the set following a television interview in 2014 in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

In the subtitle of her book, My Search for Meaning, she echoes Viktor Frankl, the Nazi-concentration-camp survivor who mapped the psychological shocks of extreme suffering and loss.

Knox tells us that she has also gained perspective from a long friendship with an old Italian priest from her prison days. Don Saulo’s patient, faithful witness did not convert her to religion — she’s not a believer — but he helped her see that she could create a meaningful future.

“I could make my life as beautiful as I wanted,” she writes of the moment of recognition. “I could love my reality into being.”

It was to Don Saulo that Knox turned when she chose to perform what many readers may regard as a brave and radical act: to reconcile with Giuliano Mignini — “that monster,” to her family — the prosecutor who had locked her behind bars. The two began to establish a rapport in 2019. Knox writes of the encounter. “He was deeply moved that I not only didn’t hate him but that I would go to such lengths to connect with him.”