Those assertions are among the many in “Waiting to Be Heard,” the long-awaited memoir that is Ms. Knox’s most extensive public testimony since she was convicted, and then acquitted, of killing her 21-year-old British roommate, Meredith Kercher.
“Until now I have personally never contributed to any public discussion of the case or of what happened to me,” Ms. Knox, 25, wrote in an author’s note at the end of the book. “Now that I am free, I’ve finally found myself in a position to respond to everyone’s questions. This memoir is about setting the record straight.”
On the morning of Nov. 2, 2007, Ms. Kercher was found seminaked, her throat slit, wrapped in a duvet and left in her bedroom in their villa in the picturesque town of Perugia. Ms. Knox, a college student from Seattle who was spending her junior year abroad, and her boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito, were accused by Italian prosecutors of killing Ms. Kercher in a sexual escapade gone wrong, along with Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast native who was eventually convicted of Ms. Kercher’s sexual assault and murder.
An appeals court acquitted Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito two years after their original conviction, and they were released. But in March, Italy’s highest court overturned that decision, ordering a new trial sometime in the next year.
A copy of Ms. Knox’s book, which is scheduled for release on April 30, was obtained by The New York Times. The memoir prompted a highly competitive auction early last year, with seven publishers bidding on it and Ms. Knox receiving a reported $4 million advance from HarperCollins. Publishers were convinced that the intense publicity the case received, with its lurid details and the courtroom spectacle of two Italian trials, would make the book a big seller.
While saying she was the victim of bias and mistreatment by Italian authorities, Ms. Knox also writes that her own mistakes contributed to her conviction. She admits to being naïve, sometimes inappropriate and odd, too proud to admit when her halting knowledge of Italian failed her. During the investigation, she followed the directions of the Italian police “like a lost, pathetic child,” she recalled.
In 463 pages, Ms. Knox recounts her darkest moments in prison — at one point, she writes, she imagined committing suicide by suffocating herself with a garbage bag — as well as her routines there. She says she practiced Italian, wrote letters to family and friends, and read books by Dostoyevsky and Umberto Eco.
Ms. Knox exhaustively lays out her defense, describing her whereabouts on the night that her roommate was killed. She says that she and Mr. Sollecito were smoking marijuana, reading a Harry Potter book aloud in German and watching the film “Amélie” at his apartment. (“Around our house, marijuana was as common as pasta,” Ms. Knox wrote, recalling that one of her roommates taught her how to roll a joint properly.)
She pointed to the Italian prosecutors who she said willfully ignored and manipulated evidence while they clung to the theory that she and Mr. Sollecito were responsible for Ms. Kercher’s death. A conversation with her mother from prison was distorted to help place her at the scene of the crime and promptly leaked to a British newspaper, she writes.
According to Ms. Knox’s account, the police interrogated her for hours and sporadically slapped her on the back of her head. Eventually they goaded her into signing a statement that implicated her and an innocent man, Patrick Lumumba, her boss at a bar where she worked.
Confused and panicking after being taken to prison, Ms. Knox asked to make a phone call. “The guard looked at me like I’d asked for caviar and prosecco,” she wrote.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/books/in-memoir-amanda-knox-testifies-in-public-court-of-approval.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
