From ‘Foxy Knoxy’ to Amanda Knox: How I regained control over my story

Ahead of the publication of her new memoir, Amanda Knox – who spent four years in an Italian prison for a crime she didn’t commit – reveals how she redefined the meaning of being ‘free’

I wrote my memoir, Waiting to Be Heard, a year after I was released from prison, at the age of 25, while I was still on trial. There were already thousands of news articles, dozens of books, and even a TV movie about what people thought had happened to me in Italy.

A chorus of strangers had been authoring my experience for years, and I thought by adding my lone voice to that chorus, I might finally be able to move on. I was done being a tabloid staple, eager to return to my life as an anonymous college student.

If I’m consistently good at anything, it’s being naive.

Waiting to Be Heard was my attempt to dispel the big lie – created by my prosecutor and furthered by the media– that I was a sexual deviant who had murdered my roommate, Meredith Kercher.

But I’ve realised, as the years have passed and that haunted feeling has remained, that Waiting to Be Heard still wasn’t really my story. It was the story of what Rudy Guede had done to Meredith, and of what the Italian justice system had done to me. It was the story of what happened to me, and it left little room for anything I actually did.

The problem was, back then, I hadn’t done much. Or at least, that’s what it felt like. I had survived prison – that’s no small thing. But in the world of “freedom”, I stumbled a lot trying to reintegrate, knowing “Foxy Knoxy”, the false version of me in the public imagination, was walking into every room before I entered. I still didn’t feel like the protagonist of my own story.

My life was still the product of other people’s mistakes. No matter what I did, the world treated me like a killer or dismissed me as tabloid trash. I was lost. I was stuck in a tragic narrative that afforded me only two possible roles: villain or victim. And I feared that nothing I would ever do could define me more than the worst thing that ever happened to me. I just wanted my old life back, but that life no longer existed. I didn’t feel “free”.

What I’ve only recently realised is that freedom is not a state of being. It’s a practice. And for the last few years, I’ve been making meaning out of my misfortune. I’ve been creating my own freedom. If Waiting to Be Heard answered the question “What?!”, Free answers the question “So what?”

It is a roadmap of my personal evolution as I directly confront the existential problems I’ve faced ever since I was first arrested and charged for a terrible crime I didn’t commit: could I ever be anything more than “the girl accused of murder”? Would I ever be truly “free”?

Trying to answer those questions led me to study stoicism, Zen Buddhism, and research on resilience and post-traumatic growth. And it led me to do something terrifying, risky, and complicated: to extend an olive branch to the man who sent me to prison, Giuliano Mignini. To travel back to Perugia and meet him face to face, to see if the man who had been my greatest adversary could become an ally.

That journey helped me to truly understand how to transform my greatest trauma into a source of strength, how to find agency in this long saga, and finally do something that truly speaks to who I am.

I know that my experiences are extreme, but you don’t have to be stuck in a prison cell to feel trapped in your own life. I hope that my readers will come away feeling less alone and better equipped to handle the inevitable misfortunes and injustices they encounter.

I hope they feel more peaceful and optimistic about the world. I see people feeling more disconnected and ill at ease than ever, and while it’s true that terrible things can happen at any time to any of us, and we must carry our grief and trauma for the rest of our lives, it's also true that the world is full of positive potential.

I’ve learned that if you treat people as bad as you think they are, they will rarely surprise you, but if you treat them as good as you hope they can be, they often rise to the occasion.

I hope readers come away from this book pleasantly surprised with who I am, and with who they can be. I hope it helps them to feel more free.

This essay was adapted for The Independent by Amanda Knox from her book, ‘Free: My Search for Meaning’, released 25 March (Headline, £22)