Writing a memoir while still in your twenties is usually inadvisable. For Amanda Knox, writing her first — Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir — so young was a necessity. Falsely accused in Italy of the murder of her friend and roommate, British student Meredith Kercher, when she was exonerated she had legal debts to pay. At 37 years old, her second memoir is a far more self-assured and affirming account of learning to keep living through the roiling trauma that is life. True Crime junkies will find little to titillate them here. Knox lays out the cold hard facts succinctly in the pages of the prologue. Kercher was raped and murdered by Rudy Guede, a known criminal who had already slipped through the authorities net. Before any physical evidence was gathered, the police cooked up a bizarre narrative that Knox and her boyfriend of a week conspired to assault Kercher, torturing her into a false confession. When conflicting evidence arises, they double down and Knox is sucked into the trial of the decade. Free an account of extraordinary grace. Despite the trauma of the trials, imprisonment, of a life hounded by the press, Knox finds purpose in writing and in connecting with other exonerees and women whose lives have been derailed by the court of public opinion. There’s a lovely teatime cameo from Monica Lewinsky. The first act of the book recounts her time in Capanne, Perugia’s prison. It is a lyrical and assured addition to the prison memoir genre, with Knox finding her feet as Capanne’s scribe and translator. She is one of the few women incarcerated there who can read and write. She learns to make gnocchi from miserable boiled potato rations, teaches herself Italian from a dictionary, and develops a deep and enduring friendship with the prison chaplain. She battles suicidal ideation, and politely declines romantic overtures from a fellow inmate, choosing instead to learn to masturbate in her bunk at night. It’s when she is finally freed from the technical confines of a cell that things begin to fall apart. Therapy doesn’t work. She still washes her knickers in the sink. Normal life eludes her. She is still trapped in the story of Foxy Knoxy, childhood soccer nickname twisted by the front pages into the wicked temptress. Meredith is everywhere. The trauma of her death cleaved multiple lives in two, and Knox must reckon with the fact that her old self, a trusting girl, died in prison. As she struglles to move through the normal stages of life — graduation, work, dating, marriage, motherhood — she is haunted by the girl who will never experience this and the world that resents her for it. When Knox’s first child is born with a terrifying rare genetic condition, she can’t help but wonder if she is still being punished. But honouring Meredith’s memory requires her to live, and Knox is finally able to grieve and recognise her dead friend as the “part of the gold filigree that holds my shattered pieces together”, an apt reference to the Japanese art of kintsugi. Sometimes Knox’s uncrushed naivete proves dangerous. Upon graduation she falls in with a young man who claims he was also wrongly accused of crimes he did not commit. Endlessly sympathetic and desperately lonely, she gives him money from her own legal fund and embarks on a romance unheeding of her friends and family’s warnings. It is only when he breaks into her home and attacks her that she realises that she has let someone just as dangerous as Guede into her life. But it is this same deep commitment to seeing the best in everyone that allows Knox to make the most shocking and emotionally raw connection. She strikes up a correspondence with her prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, during the pandemic, and embarks on a quest to understand why he remained so determined to deny her liberty. Perhaps Knox will never know true freedom. But her determination to endure, to grow, to find purpose, to extend the hand of grace, is an inspiration to anyone who yearns to live a full life despite the odds.