Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.

Kat Johnson: Hi, listeners. This is Audible Editor Kat Johnson, and I'm honored to be speaking today with Amanda Knox, exoneree, journalist, public speaker, activist, bestselling author, and co-host, with her partner Christopher Robinson, of the podcast Labyrinths. Today we're discussing her new memoir, Free: My Search for Meaning, read in audio by the author herself. Amanda is a champion for justice, a beacon of compassion and resilience, and a personal hero. I'm thrilled to welcome her today. Hi, Amanda. Thank you so much for being here.

Amanda Knox: Aw, thanks, Kat. I am very honored for such a nice introduction.

KJ: We're very privileged to have you here. I think one of the reasons that I and so many other people are drawn to your story is that we see so much of ourselves in you, and yet you've endured something that no one should have to go through. I find this idea of you sharing your story of resilience and meaning so impactful. It feels like there's no “why” behind what happened to you, but maybe there's a “why” or a “how” that it transformed you.

Given everything you've been through since 2007, when your roommate Meredith Kercher was found dead in your apartment in Italy, and you and your boyfriend at the time were wrongfully convicted of her murder, revisiting this period and putting yourself out there again takes a lot of courage, to put it mildly. My first question is, why is this idea of sharing your resilience important to you, and how did it become this book?

AK: Lovely question. Thank you for that. Maybe some readers know this, but I wrote a memoir back in, I believe it came out in 2013, called Waiting to Be Heard. And it really was answering the “what” question of it all. Like, “What is happening!?” And what was this experience for me, being on trial for this insane accusation, what was that like? It really was a memoir that was necessary because I felt like there were tons of people out there authoring my experience and saying what it is that I did and what it is that I was thinking, and I really felt like I just needed my one voice to be out there in the chorus of voices who were authoring my experience.

But it really was an answer to that “what” question, and I feel like in stories of wrongful conviction—typically, not just my own, but typically—the curtain tends to close after we've satisfied that “what” question. Like, “Oh, my God, what happened? What is the truth?” Period, the end. She gets out of prison, eats her first hamburger. There is no more story.

And really, what I have found after the process of proving my innocence and going through that crazy journey—where I really had no control, no agency, things were happening to me—on the other side of that curtain is the “Now what?” question, and then even more than that, the “So what?” question. The “What did this all mean? What did this all mean for me? What did this all mean for the world? What can we learn from it? What can I learn from it? How do I regain agency in the piecing of my life back together after it had been completely destroyed and thrown to the winds?”

“There is a universal feeling of being trapped in your own life, of not being the protagonist of your own life, of having to rebuild after you’ve lost so much.”

So, my mistakes, my misadventures, my inadvertent successes since coming out of that experience have been what feels more like my story than anything else. It's not something that happened to me, it's things that I did, that I chose to do, that speak about who I am as a person, but also that reveal the universal truths of what I went through. I know that I went through a very extreme, not unique, but extreme experience. Be that as it may, what I went through is universal. There is a universal feeling of being trapped in your own life, of not being the protagonist of your own life, of having to rebuild after you've lost so much.

So, I have found that, over the years, as I have been rebuilding my life, I have made connections and built bridges with people because of that shared feeling of loss and grief and rebuilding and regaining of agency. I wanted to share all of these insights that are very hard-won with an audience, because really, this book feels like me. It's my story, not the story of just a crazy thing that happened to me. I'm really proud of it. And I'm really grateful that you read it and that I got to read the audiobook for it, because that was an emotional experience. I also did a Yoda impression, so people can look forward to that [laughs].

KJ: [Laughs] Oh, my gosh. Well, we're going to talk about the audio, and just to explain to our listeners, I had been able to read an advance copy, but the audio wasn't ready yet. So, I haven't heard it yet, but I'm so excited. And now your Yoda impression, I'll be looking forward to that.

AK: Yeah. Just wait for that. I hope I'm not hyping it up too much. Let me clarify that it is a bad Yoda impression, but it is there nonetheless. So, enjoy that.

KJ: We will. And it's a good segue into my next question, because I think you are going to be building this bridge with a lot of listeners, and this search for meaning that you talk about is so important. When I saw the subtitle of your book, I was excited because I'm a big fan of Viktor Frankl's classic Man's Search for Meaning. I knew instantly this was a nod. What does that book mean for you, and how did it inspire Free?

AK: Well, I read Man's Search for Meaning when I was in prison, and it was the closest thing I had to a “How to Survive This Experience” manual. So much resonated with me. Of course, his experience was even more extreme than mine, so, first of all, it put my experience into perspective. But then secondly, I loved his application of these psychological ideas. I was seeing the responses of prisoners and guards alike mirroring what he was talking about in his book. But then furthermore, thinking about how do you have purpose in the midst of incredible suffering, when you are limited and boiled down to just your essence, what do you choose to do? That really resonated with me, and it really helped me get through prison.

It also helped me in this aftermath part of it, because I was under this sort of lovely, deluded idea that once I got out of prison and was recognized as innocent, I would get to go back to the life that I should have been living, the life of an anonymous college student. I was very rudely awakened to the fact that that life did not exist anymore. I did not exist like that anymore. It wasn't just the fact that I had paparazzi chasing me down the street. It was also the fact that I was changed, and I had to incorporate this experience within me and within my sense of identity, and understand how that positioned me in the world.

I really struggled with that. I struggled with this sense of isolation and this feeling of not belonging. Finding my way out of that, through many mishaps and mistakes, has been really helpful. And Man's Search for Meaning has always given me a kind of sense of direction that, even if I don't know what my path is, I know that there is a path to get somewhere and I just need to figure it out.

KJ: Your book really opened my eyes to how much your post-release period was so traumatizing for you. I don't want to say more so than prison, but you were at a very low point during that time.

AK: Yeah. I mean, just the ripple effects of one person's harmful decision, and let's go back to Rudy Guede breaking into my home and raping and murdering my roommate. That one decision, which is still beyond me to comprehend, had all of these ripple effects. I don't think he was thinking how it would impact the roommates down the line, but it's been interesting to see how the trauma has rippled and how the grief has morphed and transformed over time as I've had the privilege to continue living, knowing that had things gone slightly differently back in 2007, I would've been raped and murdered too.

KJ: That's a scary thought. You talk about two sides of the same coin in some ways, that there was a coin flip, and Meredith ended up one side and you got the other side, and this sort of single-victim fallacy idea. There were multiple victims.

AK: Yeah, I think not just true crime, but the criminal justice system in general tends to pit people who have legitimate grievances against each other, as if there's this zero-cost fallacy. Like there's only so much victimhood that we can acknowledge in a given story. Somehow any acknowledgement of my victimhood is somehow taking away from Meredith's. I really push back against that idea, because it's really had deep resonance in my life. It's not just the people who send me death threats or send my daughter death threats because they want me to know the suffering of Meredith's mother. They threaten to kill my daughter. There's that aspect of it. And the idea that some people think that anything good happening to me is somehow an offense to Meredith's memory.

“I feel like I have her ghost a little bit on my shoulder, reminding me that it is a privilege to be alive. And that doesn’t go away.”

But there's also this weird survival guilt part of me that is like, “Why did I get to go study abroad and get to go home, and Meredith didn't?” There was very little difference between me and her. We were living in the same house. Our bedrooms were right next to each other. We were almost the same age. We had the same plans, we had the same interests. I just happened to have met a really cute boy five days before the crime occurred, and I slept over at his house that night. Like, it's the sheer fluke-ness of me getting to survive and live my life and go on and continue living and continue growing as a person when she can't. I carry that with me. I feel like I have her ghost a little bit on my shoulder, reminding me that it is a privilege to be alive. And that doesn't go away.

KJ: Yeah, and that's all of our lives to a lesser extent. Things can happen for no reason. I think we look to these extreme examples—you've had to think about this so deeply, so I think hearing your story will resonate for people no matter what their experience is. But it's unfortunate you had to go through what you did to get there. Going back to your time in prison, you revisit this to a greater extent than you did in Waiting to Be Heard. What was it like revisiting that time in your life?

AK: I was really grateful to finally get to write about this, because I remember writing a lot about prison when I was writing Waiting to Be Heard. But because it was getting to be 400 pages long and there's only so much I can ask of an audience to pay attention, and really what needed to be answered in that period of time was, “What is going on with this trial?” I focused on the trial, and I had to let go on the cutting room floor a lot of thoughts and experiences from prison, which was really most of my world when I was over in Italy. Even though I was in the courtroom a couple of times every week for like two years, it still meant that most of my time was spent in a cell immersed in an environment that was very different from anything I had ever experienced before. I was exposed to a richness and depth of humanity that I had no idea existed.

I had this really interesting revelation that even though I was the innocent person in this prison and the vast majority of the people around me were admittedly guilty of the crimes that they had committed, I was actually the lucky one. I had my education, I had my family, I had my health, I had all of my teeth. I knew that the world was a sphere. I knew how to read an analog clock. Like, compared to the women around me, I was incredibly privileged. There were women there who, long before they had ever committed crimes themselves, were victims repeatedly of crimes and of neglect and of poverty and of abuse. I was shocked into a realization of the real world and how it is, and given an opportunity that was not asked for to reimagine all of my prejudices about people in prison.

Which isn't to say that it was all hunky-dory, Kumbaya. Many of these women were incredibly troubled, and justifiably so. And so I wasn't safe, necessarily, but I did learn that I had something to offer this community that was very, very resourceless. As soon as I picked up enough Italian to get by, I started a little prison hustle, and I was writing letters for people and corresponding with people and helping them talk to doctors and read their court documents. It was an interesting, careful-what-you-wish-for kind of thing, because I had gone to Italy with the intention of becoming a translator and becoming a bridge between people who couldn't communicate with each other, and then, weirdly, I found myself in that very position.

I talk about this in the chapter called “Ikigai” in the book, where I realized that what I had, what my resources were, was actually very valuable to the community at large. And the resource that was offered me in response was respect and safety. Because as soon as I became a valuable entity, I no longer was a target.

KJ: Your memoir takes us through these incredibly painful moments, obviously, like prison, and also some lighter ones. I loved learning about your trip to Burning Man and your thrift store trips. You've also done a lot of public speaking and interviews about your life, a lot of them highly emotional. I was curious if the process of narrating the book was different, harder, more or less emotional than those experiences, and if you could share any highlights from the recording in your approach?

AK: I was really fortunate that this time around, first of all, I now have years of public speaking and podcasting behind me. When I narrated Waiting to Be Heard, I was learning as I was going. I think at one point, even, I started slipping into a vaguely British accent back then, because that's what you imagine when you think of a narrator. It's either Morgan Freeman or someone British [laughs].

But this time, I know how to exist in my voice now. It's a practiced skill. And I can revisit the places that hurt me. Whenever I think about public speaking or presenting the story of my case, I know that one of the things that is a big hurdle for me, a big obstacle, is the extremeness of the experience and how that could potentially lead people to feel like it is unrelatable. The last thing I want somebody to say to me after I've given a talk or I've talked about my experiences is, “I just can't imagine what that must have been like for you.” I want people to understand not just what it was, but what it feels like, because I think there is truth that is conveyed through emotional truth that isn't just the intellectual facts of it all.

I have a lot of practice talking about the intellectual facts of it all, because there tends to be this explanatory burden on wrongly convicted people to sort of prove their innocence in the act of communicating about their case. You don't have the benefit of the doubt, necessarily, and people tend to resist relating to the experience of being interrogated and falsely confessing, for example. There's this feeling like you are constantly having to explain yourself. And I have found that the best way to do that is to go where it hurts. I always write where it hurts, and I always talk where it hurts. Because that is where both the factual, intellectual truth exists, as well as the emotional. Only once you combine those two things does it become automatically relatable to the person who is listening to you. So, a lot of what I wrote in this book was driving at those places where it still hurts.

“I always write where it hurts, and I always talk where it hurts. Because that is where both the factual, intellectual truth exists, as well as the emotional.”

So, in reading it, I really immersed myself in the feeling of hurt. I was fortunate to be with a friend as I was doing this. I live on a little island in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm really good friends with the king of our local radio station, Jeff Hoyt, who is an incredible voice actor himself. We went to his studio to do the recording. He was the director. I think that because I trusted him—I had already talked about this experience with him before, he was one of my first readers on the book—I knew that I was in a room that understood this story. He knew when to let me flow—the Taoist form of this is just flow with the feeling, just go with it. And then he knew when to stop me and have me go back and rephrase a thing because I had missed a word. It was a marathon, because it's a long book. It's longer than I typically would go and speak about. But it was very grounded. It was very emotional, because I was in that really safe place amongst friends.

KJ: That's good. It's good writing advice. It's good connecting advice. And I think it's a good segue to my next question, because you give us a window into your writing process when you were preparing for your 2019 trip to Italy, which was the first time you were going back, and you were going to speak, and you tried to write this letter to Italy. In the course of wrestling with this speech, you made this remarkable decision to connect with your prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini. I don't want to get too much into spoiler territory, because there's quite a payoff in the book. It culminates in this highly emotional meeting that left me in tears and also kind of frustrated—

AK: Yeah, I was about to say, it's interesting that you say that it was satisfying, because I feel like, depending on what kind of person you are, it might be an incredibly satisfying ending or an incredibly frustrating ending. Either way, I think you're right. I think maybe it's both, and that's why it's so interesting.

KJ: Yeah, no, I was frustrated, but I was also satisfied with the way you reckoned with it. But can you share any details about where you're at with Mignini now, and do you think that he'll read or listen to your book?

AK: Well, first of all, he texted me already today, so we are still very much in correspondence. He has also already read my book. I went out of my way to translate the entire thing into Italian so that he could read it. I mean, one of the really beautiful things about my relationship with Mignini is that I think I made a really smart decision very, very early on in how to approach it. I realized very early on that this is another human being. This was not a psychopath, this was another human being that I could relate to. I just needed to find a way to relate to him after having been through this process that was incredibly adversarial and where he had all of the power and he was imposing all of his power over me and making me suffer.

The people in my life around me were saying things like—when I was plagued by this “why” question, “Why is this happening to me?”—their response was, “Well, he's just a bad guy, and he's doing a bad thing.” And I was never satisfied with that answer, because it didn't ring true to me. I did not believe that the reason why everything happened to me was because bad people make bad decisions. I thought instead, “Good people make bad decisions thinking they're making good decisions, and why is that?”

You can intellectualize around it forever, or you can just directly communicate with someone and be able to position yourself in a place to actually listen to what they have to say. I think that was the biggest hurdle for me: how do I, as a person who has been extremely hurt, put myself in a position to truly, truly hear and understand the person who hurt me? I think my saving grace was that I am an extremely curious person. I am not satisfied by easy answers. And in fact, I am kind of tormented by easy answers, because I feel like they make me feel unsafe. I talk about this a little bit in the book, how there's this idea of the life we should be living and then there's the life that we really are living. I had this sort of epiphany when I was convicted and sentenced to 26 years that, “No, I'm not waiting to get my life back. This is my life. What am I going to do with it?”

In that same way, I find that my curiosity comes from a deep feeling, a deep need to see the world clearly so that I know how to react to it. I am scared. I am very, very scared of being blindsided and hurt the way that I was before, because I did not see clearly that the police suspected me from the beginning. It was that lack of clarity in my mind that made me vulnerable. And so that sense of curiosity was coming from even a place of trauma, because I was trying to protect myself by exposing myself to the truth.

So, how do you start a conversation, though, with someone who has every reason not to trust you and to want to reject the idea of ever talking to you at all? I think that I knew, obviously, that just going up to him and saying, "You were wrong. I am hurt by you. What do you have to say to yourself?" was not going to result in a conversation. I thought and I thought and I thought about finding common ground. What could I have in common with this man who was this nightmarish figure in my life? We all saw it in the Netflix documentary about the case: the media was out of control. And it wasn't just out of control in their portrayal of me. They also were out of control in their portrayal of Meredith, in their portrayal of my prosecutor. Everyone became a cartoon version of themselves.

So when I reached out to him, I acknowledged this fact, and I said, “Giuliano,” or “Dottor Mignini,” because at this point, we were not on Giuliano terms. Now we're on Giuliano/Amanda terms. But, “Signore Dottor Mignini, I've only known you in the context of a horrific true crime tragedy that had epic scandal proportions. I want to understand and know who you are as a human being, because I do not think that you are evil. And I don't think that you intended to hurt anyone who was innocent, even if you did. So, can we get to know each other outside of this adversarial system?”

To answer your question of how did he respond to my book, it was a little bit similar to how he responded to that first letter, which was he felt unexpectedly seen, in that his experience very, very closely mirrored my own in very interesting ways. I think even if he and I have so much that we disagree on about the facts and the interpretation of those facts, he feels very seen by me. And, in fact, he said things to me before that are, basically, he doesn't think anyone he has ever encountered in his life has ever seen him as clearly as I have seen him.

KJ: Wow.

AK: And for that, he is perpetually in awe and feels a great deal of affection for me because of it, which is a surprising turn [laughs], considering everything.

KJ: It really is.

AK: I'm still sort of processing what that all means for me and the depths to which I can psychologically plumb that fact. While he insists that there are things I don't understand about the Italian justice system or whatever the case may be, I understand him. He also, when reading my book, comes away from it feeling like, “Man, this is a story that is true also to me.”

KJ: That's great. That's a triumph of your curiosity, like you said, and your compassion, I think. Pivoting a little bit, what's your relationship with true crime as a genre these days? I know that's a really big umbrella, but your podcast Labyrinths goes into it. Curious what your thoughts are on how the community and genre are evolving and where things should be headed.

AK: Great question. I'm sort of inadvertently, nonconsensually an expert in true crime now. It was not something I ever really thought about prior to being an icon of true crime scandal. I was a Harry Potter kid. I was not interested at all in these realities. I knew next to nothing about the criminal justice system. But I slowly realized over the course of these many years that, well, whether I like it or not, I got a crash course in criminal justice. In the same way that some people go to Harvard and some people go to the Peace Corps, I went to the school of hard knocks, and these are my credentials. As a result of that, I do have a perspective that I think is valuable when we think about something so delicate as the consumption of other people's worst experiences. Anybody who is in a true crime story, it is the worst experience of their life. Whether they're the victim, whether they're the defendant, all of the people involved, this is a traumatizing experience.

I feel like we are in this interesting landscape where information doesn't just exist for information's sake. It's infotainment. Everything now is infotainment. If information is not presented to us in an entertaining way, we do not receive that information. And now, the question becomes, what is entertaining? And do we compromise the truth, or people, in the process of taking a complex real-life tragedy and turning it into entertainment?

To give an example, because I don't want to just speak in theoretical terms, I actually got an insight into this by the way I was treated by different forms of media. I like to say that I also have a nonconsensual expertise in media because I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly insofar as it relates to me and my worst experience of my life. I think that the typical way that people treat subjects is to either tell their story without their consent, without their knowledge and consent at all, because it's public property. And I'm not going to argue that it's not public property, because tragic stories are in the public interest in the sense that they have to do with how society functions and all of that.

“For some people, my story is about sexism. For other people, my story is about America versus Europe. For others, it’s about sex. And they’re not wrong, but they’re also not completely right.”

However, when I am included potentially as a part of their analysis or storytelling about the case, very typically someone in my position is just sort of put on the spot to be interrogated again about the “what” of it all. “What did you do? What happened next?” You're a plot point in someone else's narrative. And it is very rare, but very special, when someone asks a person in my position, “What do you think about all of this? What does it mean?” Because we typically don't think about “subject” people as being able to have a grander perspective or being able to have a perspective that is relatable or valuable to us broadly who are not being directly impacted. And I very much push back against that idea. I think that my book is proof that that is not true.

I think another thing that my case reveals is that even those who pretend to have objective viewpoints don't, because they are coming and they're imposing their own subjectivity and perspective on the story. For some people, my story is about sexism. For other people, my story is about America versus Europe. For other people, it's about sex. And they're not wrong, but they're also not completely right. And I think that that's all very interesting. I don't have this firm stance, “true crime bad.” I ask questions like, “Has the storyteller considered who has the most at stake in the telling of this story? And are they imagining how the way that they are choosing to tell their story might perpetuate harm?”

I've interviewed people on my podcast Labyrinths who talk to me about how the media's treatment of them after being victims of crime was worse than being crime victims. Like, people who were sodomized and brutally attacked talk about how the media's portrayal of them hurt more than the actual crime itself. I really feel like people should just sit with that reality. We do not do anything about paparazzi showing up at your house and portraying you to be a lunatic when you're not. There are no consequences for that. And I think that if the criminal justice system is interested in harm and protecting people from harm, it's a very interesting fact that numerous victims have told me, and will tell anybody, that how they are treated by the media is potentially worse than the actual crime itself. So, food for thought.

KJ: Wow. Food for thought, yeah.

AK: For all you true crime creators out there and true crime content consumers out there, just food for thought.

KJ: You mentioned the sexism, specifically. You have a chapter in the book called “The Sisterhood of Ill Repute,” which, I love that title.

AK: Thank you [laughs].

KJ: You talk about the misogyny that you faced, and your wonderful meeting with Monica Lewinsky, who was just how I imagined she'd be. Do you think that society and the media are getting any better at treating women fairly and with dignity, having learned our lesson about this again and again?

AK: Yeah, I do. I do. I don't know if I can lay claim to everything, but I do think that people are being more thoughtful, especially revisiting cases from the ’90s and the 2000s and saying, “Oh, whoa, what was going on there?”

There's still room to grow. There are still problems of ageism with women, how older women tend to be made invisible and irrelevant when they're absolutely not. But I do think that there is much more of a platform for women's voices. I think that there is an interest, particularly among younger people, in positioning women in the world who have been badly treated as recognizing their value. There are people who were 6, 7, 8 while I was going through everything in Italy, who heard about me in the ether and had sort of come to conclusions about me. And then once they turned 20, they had this sudden realization of, “Oh my God, that could have been me.”

It's funny, because I had the exact same experience with Monica. Because back in the ’90s, when I was quite young and overhearing what everyone was discussing around the dinner table, I sort of casually absorbed things about what kind of a person Monica was, what kind of a girl was like Monica. And then all of a sudden, I'm 20 years old and accused of an insane sex crime and I'm being sexualized everywhere and turned into a villain through my sexuality. And I go, “Holy shit. This is what Monica went through.”

“I do have a perspective that I think is valuable when we think about something so delicate as the consumption of other people’s worst experiences.”

So, I've been really grateful to discover that people who are younger than me are also relating to my experience, who are actively trying to create a world and a culture that doesn't drink the blood of virgins, I guess? [laughs]

KJ: Is it too much to ask? [laughs]

AK: Is it too much to ask? I don't know.

KJ: Can you share any details about the project that you're working on with Monica Lewinsky about your case?

AK: What I can share is that I'm super stoked about it. It's very different than my book. Because my book is so intimate and personal and internal. This Hulu project is going to very much concern itself not just with my internal processes but also with everyone else involved in the story. I think what is true about it, which is true to me and something that I'm bringing to it as an executive producer, is a concern to make sure that no one is flattened into a caricature of themselves. Because I do not believe that. It was done to me, and it was the last thing that I would want to do to another human being. So, it's very concerned with the humanity of everyone involved. I'm really excited for you to see it, basically.

KJ: I can't wait. So, you've been outspoken about your miscarriage, which for how common it is, is still not discussed enough. I really loved hearing about your journey to having kids, fraught as it was with its own very difficult challenges. I'm just so grateful that you were released in time for motherhood to be part of your story.

AK: Oh, thank you.

KJ: I'm curious how having a family has changed your perspective on everything that happened to you.

AK: Thank you for asking that, because one of the things that I think gets overlooked in wrongful conviction stories is the impact that it has on families. My parents, my siblings, all of them carry trauma from this experience as well. Something that I was shocked into a realization about when I was pregnant was the sudden sense of urgency to figure out my shit [laughs]. I felt this insane sense of urgency to be okay for [my daughter's] sake and to overcome any lingering sense of trauma so I didn't somehow pass it on to her. After a miscarriage, you start questioning everything, and I was worried that any sort of stress or PTSD that I might be feeling might be impacting my pregnancy. My body might be in survival mode, and therefore it might expel a perfectly good, viable fetus, because it's just like, “Now's not the time. You're in survival mode.” I was like, “No, I need to not be surviving anymore. I need to be thriving for her, for her to even exist.”

And then when she comes into existence, the first thing I said to her was, "I'm sorry." Because she had just been pushed through a vagina, which no one should have to go through, and yet we all go through [laughs]. She was screaming and in pain, and I realized in that moment, “Oh my God, I can't take away her pain.” It just became viscerally true in that moment that she will experience pain in this life that I cannot take on for her. It put into perspective everything that my mom, my family, everyone went through. It put into perspective what Meredith's family went through, what Raffaele's family went through. And that helplessness that comes from another human being that you would give anything for—just by virtue of existing in the world, there is a level of suffering that comes attached with it, because you know that they are going to be experiencing pain you can do nothing about.

But I also know there is a difference between pain and suffering. Pain is inevitable. Things happen that hurt. But we can be more hurt and more debilitated by suffering, which is meta pain that is on top of that inevitable pain, the pain of resisting reality, the pain of feeling like you shouldn't be feeling that pain. And I know, deep down, that I can teach my daughter the difference, and I can teach my daughter how to let go, how to accept and then let go of unnecessary pain that we impose on ourselves just because we are complex thinking entities. And in so doing, I can teach her how to get back up and move forward and continue existing in a world that can be painful at times.

So, I feel really, really, actually, silver lining, weirdly blessed and grateful for this experience, because I learned deep down the difference between pain that is unavoidable and is there and you just have to accept, and pain that makes it worse and doesn't have to be there.

KJ: That's beautiful. Thank you. I think, like I said before, your experience is extreme, but also, these things are very universal. There was a part in the book early on when you recall how your former self—this 12-year-old version of Amanda, who's so real you say she still has peanut butter on her breath—used to come visit you in prison. And you also say that a 35-year-old future you would've been really helpful if you had had access to her. So, I'm curious, what would the grown-up version of you say to 22-year-old Amanda now?

AK: Oh, that's a really great question. I can immediately put myself there, actually. That chapter always makes me cry whenever I read it, because it's amazing the kinds of things our minds will do to help us and protect us in unexpected ways. But now, thinking about my 22-year-old self, I mean, I would do what I do with my daughter, which is I would hold her. What I do with my daughter whenever she's struggling is I just go, “Owie. Owie, this hurts. This hurts. This really hurts. I know. And it's not gonna be forever. You are going to survive this, and you are going to be so strong. You don't even know. Just know that you have got you. You have got you. And you are going to make it and be so much bigger than anything that is hurting you. You will endure. And I love you.”

It's that simple, really. God, it would've been so nice to have heard that at the time, because everything was so uncertain and I felt so fragile and so impotent and so irrelevant. Being reassured that I was powerful and relevant and that I had it in myself all along to survive and endure and thrive on the other side like that would've been nice. That would've helped.

KJ: Well, thank you for that. I think you're an amazing mom and an amazing person.

AK: Aw, thanks.

KJ: Thank you so much. Thank you for just being a voice of compassion and justice and resilience. And thank you so much for being here. I really appreciated this conversation.

AK: Thank you so much, Kat. I really appreciate it.

KJ: And listeners, Free: My Search for Meaning, written and read by Amanda Knox, is available now on Audible.