Busy Parent Briefing: Amanda Knox Signs a Book Deal

It has been four months since Amanda Knox was declared innocent by an Italian court. Knox, along with her former boyfriend, Rafaelle Sollecito, was arrested in 2007 and spent four years in prison after Knox’s roommate, Meredith Kercher, was found stabbed to death in their apartment in Perugia, Italy.

Knox has remained pretty tight-lipped since her conviction was overturned last year during an appeal, but it appears she is finally ready to speak out about her ordeal.

The New York Times reports that, after a battle between multiple publishing companies, Harper Collins has purchased the rights to Amanda Knox’s memoir.

How much will Amanda be receiving to tell the world what it was like to be wrongfully convicted of murder and spend four years in an Italian prison? Sources close to the negotiations report that Knox will receive $4 million. That is (not necessarily intentionally) one million dollars for every year of her life Knox spent behind bars for a crime she didn’t commit.

Knox kept diaries during her time in prison and these will be used to shape what is gearing up to be a much-anticipated tale, told from the point of view of the one person we have yet to hear from in this tragedy — Knox herself.

A publisher of Harper, Jonathan Burnham, said in a statement to The Associated Press: “No one has yet heard Amanda Knox’s own account of what happened, and this book will give Knox an opportunity to tell the story in full detail, for the first time. It will be the story of a crime and a trial, but also a moving account of a young woman’s struggle to cope with a nightmarish ordeal that placed her at the center of a media storm, and led to her imprisonment.”

Sollecito, Knox’s former boyfriend, is expected to shop his own side of the story later this month.