Amanda Knox On: Finding Meaning in Tragedy, Not Needing an Apology, and Refusing to Own What Other People Think
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What question does Amanda Knox ask herself whenever something bad happens?
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. If you're watching, you'll see that the backdrop is a little different today. I'm in what I'm semi facetiously calling 10% Happier East, which is my wife's family's beach house in Montauk on the easternmost tip of Long Island. Anyway, let's get to the actual episode. I don't know about you, and I think this is just unavoidable. We all go through shit in our lives. And the question is, how are you going to deal with it? As my longtime friend and meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, likes to say, don't waste your suffering. But here's the thing, speaking personally, I often waste my suffering. I just kind of revert to rumination or regret or resignation.
So I'm really interested to talk to somebody who's had no small amount of involuntary suffering in her life, by which I mean suffering imposed on her. She is Amanda Knox. I'm sure many of you are familiar with her. I'll let her tell her story. But just in brief, she was accused of a murder she did not commit in a country in which she was not a citizen. And she has emerged with a number of deeply useful advice, pieces of advice and nuggets of wisdom for living a better life, a more resilient life. And she's got a new ish book called Free in which she lays a lot of this out. Amanda Knox, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here
in brief for the I imagine very few people who are unfamiliar with your story. Can you just kind of lay out the basics of it?
Yeah, sure. And I don't blame anyone who isn't a true crime person. I certainly was not a true crime person until I became the center of a true crime scandal. So back in 2007, I was a 20-year-old study abroad student in Perugia, Italy. I was living with three other young women, and one day a burglar broke into our home and raped and murdered one of my roommates. And very quickly, the detectives and the prosecution turned their attention on me. I was arrested within five days. They were pronouncing to the world, case closed. Here's this sex murder orgy that was orchestrated between two young women. And it really took over the public's imagination. It became international headlines worldwide. you know, within days.
And it was a very prolonged trial. I was in prison for four years and on trial for eight years before I was definitively exonerated and cleared of everything. But it took over my life. And I went from being an anonymous, you know, young college student to the most vilified and hated woman on the planet there for a second. I was, yeah, vilified and sexualized and all matter of insane narratives were put out there about me. And I had to grapple with having my identity, not just my freedom stolen from me, but my very identity and my place in the world.
I'm sorry you went through that. That is just awful. It's a it's a little sort of trippy to be talking to you because I covered many of the beats of your story as a journalist. In fact, as I was watching, you've got a newish documentary up on Hulu. There's a little clip of me announcing one of, you know, one of the twists and turns in
your story.
I didn't know that that was coming. Let's just kind of go through the story in a little bit more detail, because in free and in your work elsewhere, including on my friend Sam Harris's waking up app where you have a resilience series, you kind of talk about what you learned along the way that you're still using in your life now as as a mom and as a as an artist and a writer. Right. In prison, and as you mentioned, you spent many years there, I believe you got interested in Viktor Frankl's work. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah. So prior to all of this happening to me, I didn't have a spiritual practice. I didn't have a meditation practice. And the only... sort of advice or guidance that I had was actually from soccer. Like I played soccer as a kid. And so I knew what it meant to push through pain. So like I entered into this experience thinking, OK, this is really bad and really overwhelming and I don't have control over of this.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What question does Amanda Knox ask herself whenever something bad happens?
0:04–7:18
2
How did Viktor Frankl’s ideas help Amanda survive prison and find meaning?
7:18–14:26
3
What mindset shift allowed her to live one day at a time and stay resilient?
14:26–25:09
4
Why does understanding the person who wronged you matter more than forgiving them?
25:09–34:12
5
How did the conversation with her prosecutor become a lesson in grace and humanity?
34:12–42:50
6
What does the Japanese art of kintsugi teach about embracing brokenness?
42:50–52:07
7
How can we stop living as victims and reclaim agency over our pain?
52:07–1:02:13
8
Why is accepting your life exactly as it is the first step to changing it?
1:02:13–1:10:33
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from 10% Happier with Dan Harris
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