The Intermission: On Finding Hope in Prison

Amanda Knox's story was sensationalized beyond belief, but I'm just now learning the reality of her life behind bars.

If you’re new to this Substack, I started a series called “The Intermission,” which contains profiles/discussions of people (real or fictional) during the important pauses or resets during their professional and personal lives. I post these mini-profiles every now and then, and I write essays the rest of the time. Thanks for being here!

Like any millennial who spent too much time being chronically online in the 2000s, I know the name Amanda Knox very well.

I remember very well the photos of Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, in the immediate aftermath of her roommate Meredith Kercher’s murder. The media depicted these photos as odd behavior and as evidence of her guilt, even though we know people sometimes grieve and react to traumatic events in ways that do not conform to societal norms.

I remember the Italian prosecutor’s bizarre postulation of “sex games gone wrong,” which put Knox squarely in his crosshairs, despite a lack of robust evidence in favor of his hypothesis explaining the events that led to Kercher’s horrific death.

I remember thinking at the time that the media had treated this young woman, Amanda Knox – accused of the most serious of crimes and having to defend herself in a language that was not her native tongue — very badly. (Knox was subject to dozens of hours of tense interrogation in Italian following the murder, resulting in a confession to the crime that she swiftly recanted)

I remember feeling some semblance of joy, years later, upon hearing Knox had found love again after all she had gone through. Somewhat selfishly, it gave me hope that if Amanda Knox — with all the infamy surrounding her name — could find love, so could I.

Amanda Knox’s recent memoir. Image Credit: Grand Central Publishing

I remember learning that she developed a correspondence and eventual friendship with the prosecutor in her case — the man responsible for putting her in prison for a crime she did not commit and making her life a living hell.

I remember thinking she must have been a pretty remarkable person to go through all that and come out the other side with understanding.

Knox was acquitted of Kercher’s murder in 2015 after serving four years in prison, though the legal battles surrounding a slander charge related to her original case drag out to this day.

There’s a new Hulu series dramatizing Knox’s saga entitled The Twisted Tale Of Amanda Knox, which I haven’t seen, but Knox serves as an executive producer on the project.

I have, however, read chapters of her recent book, Free: My Search for Meaning, and listened to several podcasts in the wake of the book’s release, most notably, this interview with Knox on “A Slight Change of Plans with Maya Shankar.”

The interview made me reflect on how I had never thought about how Knox got through her days in prison. What force kept her mine sane and her hope alive during all those dark days, knowing she was innocent yet unable to change her circumstances?

Not all intermissions are voluntary, and an extended prison is the kind of life reset we rarely see depicted in media, apart from over-the-top portrayals like Orange is the New Black.

I’m very interested in writing more mini-profiles on this topic, so if you know of any formerly incarcerated people with incredible stories I should feature in this series, please let me know. For stories directly told by current inmates, I recommend reading the Prison Journalism Project.

While reading Knox’s memoir and listening to the podcast, I learned how Knox built, as she put it, “a life I would have never chosen for myself, but a life worth living.”

Most of us reading this newsletter will never find ourselves in Knox’s shoes, metaphorically speaking, but most of us will find ourselves in a hopeless situation with seemingly no end in sight at some point. I think there are some pretty universal lessons to be found here on handling these difficult transition periods in our lives.

Image Credit: Hulu

Lesson 1 - Accepting the current reality

“I’m not this lost tourist waiting to go home. I’m a prisoner. This is my life now. I’ve just been defined a killer. The only place you belong now is behind bars,” Knox tells Shankar her reaction after receiving a guilty verdict, being sentenced to 26 years in prison and literally collapsing in an Italian courtroom.

“All these things I thought were going to be a part of my life were not a part of my life. What is my life? Who am I?”

Some of the things Knox had to accept

-Not being able to hold the hands of her loved ones

-Not getting a beer with her dad on her 21st birthday

-Having a career

-Spending time with her nephew

-Having a family (at least, at the time — Knox is now a parent and has a spouse).

We all have scripts in our minds for how our lives will go, and letting go of those old scripts can be hard, even when your reality makes those previously imagined futures an impossibility.

It can be even harder when the people around us still hold onto these old scripts. In Knox’s case, her mom thought her acceptance of being in prison was giving up on her quest to prove her innocence. But Knox was simply focusing on the few things within her control in jail, like staying healthy.

Lesson 2 - Learning to inhabit a new identity

“This was my community, whether I liked it or not. I was an integral entity in that community I started to think about my role in it. What is the best thing I can do in that space?”

Instead of begrudging her identify shift from free human being to prisoner, Knox leaned into it, but used her unique skills to be of service. Identity transitions are hard at any stage of life, but being of service to another person can help ease the transition period by providing fulfilmment during an inherently destabilizing time.

In Knox’s case, she helped fellow inmates write letters and acted as a translator for doctors or court documents.

Once again, identify shifts are hard on our relationships, as it can feel like we’re either leaving people behind or being left behind by the ones we love.

Knox told Shankar “our lives were diverging so drastically” (meaning the lives of her family members, who were living their ordinary lives as free people, and her own life, which left her stuck behind bars).

Photo by Tim Hüfner on Unsplash

Lesson 3 - Realizing friends of proximity/circumstance matter

When we think of the qualities that drew us to our friends, we might think of personality type or common interests.

But when you’re in prison, the friends you make are the people you see every day behind bars. For Knox, that was the prison chaplain. Even though Knox was an atheist, the chaplain taught her to play on the keyboard. They bonded over the music.

When I’ve gone through tough intermissions in my life, the people who I found the most comfort from weren’t always the close family and friends, who sympathized but often defaulted to offering well-intentioned advice that made me feel worse.

Instead, the people who brought me the greatest joy were the friends in similar circumstances, such as those dealing with chronic illness, mental health struggles, or grieving a layoff. Even if we wouldn’t ordinarily have been close friends because of personality differences or a lack of shared interests, our circumstances brought us together.

Of her fellow inmates, Knox said: “They were my gurus…when my flesh-and-blood peers were across the ocean”.

Lesson 4 - Discovering physical books can also be a lifeline

When a local Italian politician working to improve U.S-Italy ties took an interest in Knox’s case and asked if she needed any items, she only asked for one thing: libri (books).

After Knox had arrived to the prison, she still wasn’t fluent in Italian by any stretch of the imagination. She taught herself Italian, in part, by poring over a translation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

“I struggled through that book with unbridled joy,” Knox wrote in her memoir.

Knowing Italian would be indispensable in a country where she was a foreigner and had to defend herself against very serious charges. But more than that, the books helped her navigate her new situation.

One particular book, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, gave her a guide for how to survive prison life. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor and psychologist who wrote of finding resilience and hope during his most desperate times in the concentration camps.

After reading Frank’s book, Knox realized how some of her fellow inmates “resisted the pull of moral deformity” so common in prisons and instead found lives of quiet dignity, in accordance with the tenets in Frankl’s book.

This book is a must-read. Image Credit: Beacon Press.

It’s no coincidence that I have read far more books now in my early thirties — the most significant “intermission” in my life thus far — than I ever did when I was tirelessly trucking away from goal to goal.

It’s not just that I have more spare time (though that helps). I’m also grasping for truth in the dark and finding a few kernels of wisdom in the pages of a really great book.

Lesson 5 - The only thing you can control is your own mind

After living in an isolation unit in prison for months, the real world started to feel like “half-forgotten dreams” as Knox recounted in her memoir. She experienced what mental health professionals call “depersonalization” or a loss of the feeling of self — as if watching herself from above and not actually existing in her body.

Knox was also subject to countless strip searches. Being in jail meant surrendering a total lack of control over your physical body.

“What I could control was my mind. My thoughts, my memories…I protected these directly,” said Knox. Whatever falsehoods were spread about her in the courtroom or in the newspapers, Knox knew the truth in her own mind about her innocence.

“Just because you deserve to be angry doesn’t mean it will” help you be your “best self,” Knox told Shankar on the podcast.

When I experienced a sudden onset of chronic illness, I had to surrender my body against my will. How I reacted to my circumstances in my mind — what Buddhists call the “second arrow” — was the only thing within my grasp.

Lesson 6 - Material things don’t nourish your inner world

Knox was only allowed three books at a time. Ten photos of her family members at a time. If she wanted to see more photos of her family and friends, she’d have to submit a request and rotate out the old photos. These objects helped anchor her, but having to live such a “spartan lifestyle” with few worldly possession made Knox realize inner peace comes from within yourself and not within the objects we accumulate.

She learned to overcome a seeming paradox. On one hand, you must detach from material goods, because anything can be taken from you at any moment. On the other hand, you can still find temporary joy in reading a good book or comfort in glancing at a photo of your mother.

It’s a paradox that lives in my bones, as I prepared for weeks on end to evacuate during the LA fires, hardening to the fact that I might lose everything. When I didn’t, I still took comfort in my possessions, but it was tinged with the bittersweet knowledge this was all temporary.

After being stripped away from everything “the one thing I had was myself,” said Knox.

“And I was enough.”