Amanda Knox appeared on Good Morning America to discuss her new memoir, Free: My Search for Meaning.
Knox’s book, published Tuesday by Grand Central, is an account of the nearly four years she spent in an Italian prison after being convicted in the murder of her study-abroad roommate Meredith Kercher. She was freed from prison in 2011, and four years after that, was definitively exonerated of the crime by Italy’s supreme court.
A critic for Kirkus called Free, Knox’s second memoir, “an engrossing reflection on reclaiming identity and finding peace in the aftermath of global notoriety.”
“I think the message and the big takeaway of my book is that all of these external things are happening to us all the time, not just to me,” Knox said. “I happen to have a very big, strange, and overwhelming experience, but ultimately, we all sometimes feel trapped.…I think that it’s a shift in perspective that took me a long time to develop that really made me realize that whatever people say about me out in the world doesn’t define who I am.”
Asked what she would tell her 20-year-old self now that she is a 37-year-old mother of two, Knox said, “I’ve had to learn to grieve for my 20-year-old self, because in a way, she did not survive her study-abroad experience.…I wish that me at 37 could be there to say, ‘Amanda, it’s not your fault. You’re going to be OK. You are. And everything you’re grieving that’s being stolen from you right now, you’re actually so lucky, because you’re going to get it back.’”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
