Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,

Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,

from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works

by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes

for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice

and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with

two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now,

and in the third episode I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky. You can find a link in

the description or search close readings wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast.

I'm Thomas Jones and I'm talking today to Jessica Olin, who's been writing with the LRB since 2000, and she has a piece in the latest issue on Amanda Knox, who was acquitted in 2015 of the murder of Meredith Kircher in Perugia, nearly eight years earlier. And Jessica's piece is a review of Knox's second book recently published, which

is called Free My Search for Meaning. Hello, Jessica, and thank you for joining me. Thank you.

So last time we spoke on this podcast, which was nearly a year ago now, I think, it was about

Lisa Marie Presley. And although the circumstances are obviously very different, it does strike

me that something that Lisa Marie Presley and Amanda Knox have in common as that they both became world famous at the young age without wanting it for something that they didn't do.

Correct. Yeah.

And before reading free, before reading this book, did you think much about Amanda Knox? What did

you think about her before you'd read the book? Honestly, I was one of those people who,

I'm so embarrassed to admit this, I was one of those people who always secretly thought she did it,

or I'd at least joke that I thought she did it. I don't, I hadn't ever thought about it

seriously. So yes, I'm

guilty as anyone else about that. Well, I think it's not, yeah, but reading her book did

change your view of her, which is. Yeah, I mean, I did read this book. I also read her first

...