Free: My Search for Meaning
This month I’m looking at stories about resilience, making this weeks book Free: My Search for Meaning by Amanda Knox. So lets do this.
Now, I read Amanda Knox’s first book, Waiting to be Heard, earlier this year, and that one is her tale of the tragic events of November 1, 2007 when her roommate Meredith Kercher was murdered and Amanda found herself inexplicably at the center of the trial, accused of everything from Meredith’s murder to witch craft, to being involved in an evil rape/murder trifecta with her co-defendants Raffaele Solecito and Rudy Guede….all of this despite the fact that the only one there was any actual physical evidence of being present was Guede.
Free is the next chapters in Amanda’s life. It back tracks a little bit to touch on her childhood, and some of what she learned about herself in prison, but overall it’s how she processed the profound trauma she experienced in Italy, as well as new trauma that occurs after she’s free.
In prison, she found freedom in reading books. She found freedom in talking to her past self, and promising herself it would all be ok. She even found freedom in exploring her sexuality…not in the way that Pornhub would like us all to believe, but rather she explored masturbation, silently, alone in her bunk. And she’s very open about this, recounting how she told this tale at Burning Man one year as a way to be free of some of that trauma.
And when she was back in the United States, before she found the Innocence Project, or rather, before they found her, how she slowly came back into society. Starting with classes at University of Washington, where her notoriety preceded her, but she still managed to make a friend who had trauma of her own. Trauma bonding can be profoundly healing, when it’s done without judgement.
One of her first relationships post prison was with someone she met at a bar who also claimed to have been falsely imprisoned. And she believed him, off of her own experiences, and found herself on the other side of the country with a dead beat boyfriend who threatened to beat her before she made a fast escape from the apartment. Trauma bonding can lead to further trauma.
Here her trauma and mistrust of police worked in her favor as she called her lawyer, who advised her to get someone to go back with her but don’t call the police. The young man in question was…alarmingly similar to Rudy Guede. This at a time when her own retrial in Perugia was continuing in absentia, if Italy had received word that she was dating a man with a history so similar to Guede’s, it’s hard to imagine the ultimate outcome would have been innocence.
Not just not guilty…but factual innocence. And those are two very different things.
She talks about meeting her now husband, their wedding on 02/29/2020, about 10 days before the Pandemic shut down the world, her heartbreaking miscarriage, the joy of having her daughter, the terror that her daughter may have a 1 in a million illness for which there is no genetic testing, the relief when her daughter continues to grow and bloom in health.
She talks about her return to Italy, as part of the nascent Italy Innocent Project. And how that pilgrimage and the speech she gave there opened up the most extraordinary path in her life. See, since her trial and conviction, and even after, she had made several attempts to contact Meredith’s family. And she sums up in the final chapters how she understands why the Kercher’s are clinging to the fable of her guilt. But after her speech at the Italy Innocent Project, one of the other attempts at contact hit it’s mark and got a response: Dr. Giuliano Mignini, the man who prosecuted her, told such fantastic lies about her in court, and would have gladly seen her rot in an Italian prison for 26 years of her life.
And during the early days of the pandemic, they formed a tentative friendship via email, which ultimately culminated in a face-to-face meeting in Italy, mediated by a mutual friend, Don Saulo, who was the prison priest Amanda became friends with while she was kept at Cappane. And Don Saulo was solely on Amanda’s side during the meeting. And while she never got the apology from Mignini she very much wants, they came to an understanding of mutual humanity.
I lost track of the number of times I cried reading this book. And laughed. She talks about how in high school she wrote a paper on wicca for like a religious studies class and it’s a good thing Mignini didn’t get wind of that. I laughed and thought….lord, they wouldn’t have thrown her in prison. They’d have burned her at the stake!
This book is wonderfully insightful about the humanity we each of us carry, and what true resilience and courage looks like. You do the hard things to see what you can learn from them.
She talks in the end of victimhood, and how people assume there’s one victim in a crime. But she too is a victim, robbed of who she could have been with the false accusations that have shaped her life into who she is today. And she talks about the Japanese art of kintsugi. Which is not as random as it may seems. Kintsugi is when a vase or bowl or other object gets broken, it’s repaired with gold metalwork, to make the object stronger and more beautiful. And she thinks of her time with Meredith and the horror that unfolded following her murder as the gold metalwork that holds her own battered pieces together. It’s a theme that’s subtly represented in the cover art of her book.
This book was excellent. It recounts true resilience in the face of genuine hardship and trauma. She includes a quote from Seneca: I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent—no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.
I think to some degree, on some deep psychological level, everyone knows this to be true. Why else the rush to claim victim status, when you have never actually BEEN a victim? How can you claim resilience, when you’ve never actually been challenged? And how will you know what you’re capable of, if you’ve never truly experienced the foibles of fate?
