Amanda Knox’s first memoir, Waiting to Be Heard, was published in 2013, just as her retrial for the murder of twenty-one-year-old Meredith Kercher was taking place in Italy. Her second memoir, Free: My search for meaning, a much better book, covers some common ground – her two convictions for murder and ultimate exoneration in 2015 – but it goes on to explore her life as a free woman shadowed by others’ views of her as “Foxy Knoxy”, the drug-fuelled, sex-crazed psychopath.
“We’ve advanced far beyond the days of Salem, 1692”, Knox writes. “Now we’re all experts at witch-burning.” What she learns from reputational trauma is, impressively, not anger, but curiosity. Having confronted a monster version of “Amanda Knox” both in the press and in the courts, she refuses to judge others. The results are mixed. She gives a boyfriend the benefit of the doubt even when family and friends are quick to see that he is an abuser and scrounger. A more positive result is her determination to support other “women of ill repute”, aware that people such as Monica Lewinsky and Lorena Bobbitt (famous for severing the penis of her rapist husband) are very different from their public personas.
Most intriguing is her desire to connect to Giuliano Mignini, the Italian prosecutor instrumental in the case against her. Who is he, apart from her nemesis? What were his motives? Knox initiates a correspondence with Mignini in which he comes across, she says, as “some kindly distant uncle”. The prosecutor modelled himself on Sherlock Holmes and claimed his postulation that a sex game led to Knox slitting her friend’s throat resulted from rational deduction. He argued, for example, that a blanket covering the victim proved a woman was involved, because “no man would ever do that”. Nevertheless, in Knox’s account, their exchanges become intimate and tender, suggesting a bizarre affection. In describing his sorrow over the loss of a favourite dog, he reflects that the dog’s melting blue eyes reminded him of her. When they meet, he appears subdued by the possibility of her innocence, but never apologizes for his blinkered certainty about her guilt.
Even as Knox proclaims her desire for a very private life, she and her film-maker husband draw on intimate details of their lives, such as struggles with infertility and the birth of their child, for documentaries and social media posts. She concludes that “to…