The Collected Writings of Amanda Knox

Twenty-year-old University of Washington creative-writing student
Amanda Knox posted a short story called “Baby Brother” on her MySpace
blog last December to a resounding lack of interest from the world at
large. It got a grand total of one comment. A year later, the short
story has achieved global notoriety, having been quoted and/or
mentioned by the Associated Press, MSNBC, the Seattle Times,
the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Irish Examiner,
all the London newspapers and tabloids, newspapers in Italy, etc. Never
in American history has a short story gotten so much attention,
although the attention has nothing to do with literary greatness.

Knox (in Italy for a study-abroad program) and two men are being
held by Italian authorities in connection with the rape and murder of a
21-year-old British foreign-exchange student, Meredith Kercher, who
lived in Knox’s apartment. Kercher was found dead there on the morning
of November 2, half-clothed, covered with signs of struggle, having
bled to death from a gash in her neck.

Unlike Knox’s constantly changing story about whether she was home
the night of the murder—first it was widely reported that Knox
said she wasn’t in the apartment during the murder, then it was widely
reported that Knox admitted to being in the apartment and covering her
ears while Kercher screamed, then it was widely reported that Knox had
reverted to her previous statement that she hadn’t been in the
apartment at all the night of the murder, then (on Monday of this week)
it was widely reported that authorities had discovered a tape of Knox
entering the apartment on the night of the murder on closed-circuit
television—the plot of “Baby Brother” remains fixed, its details
unchanged since the day she wrote it.

Last week, Knox’s MySpace page was set to private, though not before
The Stranger—and other news organizations—had
printed out the contents of Knox’s blog. On November 7, London’s
Daily Mail wrote that the writing on Knox’s blog gave
“worrying insight into the bizarre life which has led the 20-year-old
brunette to an Italian police cell,” and, with specific reference to
“Baby Brother,” that “the discovery of the prose, which will now be
examined by detectives, casts a new light on the woman.” But the
ostensible “insight” provided by this ostensible “new light” went
unarticulated. You were just supposed to infer it, since “Baby Brother”
is built around an older brother (Edgar) confronting his younger
brother (Kyle) for drugging and raping a girl.

The only new light that “Baby Brother” casts on the murder suspect
is that she wasn’t a very good short-story writer. She emphasizes
characters’ furrowed brows and facial creases and is overly fond of the
word “sand” (“His husky voice sounded like it was crawling out of a
bucket of sand”; “His skin reminded him of sand, and how sand was all
stretched and washed out on a cold beach”; a character named Sandra has
“sandy blond hair”). When Edgar is about to confront Kyle, we get this
rather overbaked sentence: “His mouth was drawn tight and creased at
the edges, and for a second Edgar thought he was going to say
something, but he felt the tightness of his brow ease and he swallowed
a large, slippery gulp of the aching, burning rage that pulsated in his
forehead, chest, and throat.” These are unmistakably the contorted
metaphors and maudlin exaggerations concocted by someone who doesn’t
know what she’s talking about, who’s making it up whole cloth.

The story’s biggest weakness from a literary standpoint is that none
of it is believable. Kyle, the story’s rapist, is a cheeseball bad guy
who first tells his brother, “A thing you have to know about chicks is
that they don’t know what they want,” and then punches Edgar in the
face. Anyone who’s ever read a handful of college-level
creative-writing assignments knows that date rape is a cliché of
the genre, as is someone-punching-someone-else-in-the-face. These are
the sorts of conflicts that creative-writing students cook up because
they’re taught that the first thing they need to do is cook up
conflict. After Edgar gets punched by his brother (described as feeling
“like someone was jabbing a razor into the left side of his face,”
which isn’t what getting punched in the face feels like), Edgar is on
the floor bleeding profusely. “He spit into the blossoming smudge
beside his head.” That’s pretty evocative, that “blossoming
smudge.”

Still, the most evocative writing related to the Knox case was a
description in the Seattle P-I on November 11 of the prison
where Knox is currently staying. It’s “nestled between
olive
groves and pines in the hills outside
Perugia.” According to the
P-I, “Behind bars, Knox has support services available to her,
including psychologists, nuns, and the prison chaplain, a Catholic
priest. She is said to be spending most of her time writing.”

frizzelle@thestranger.com