Amanda Knox imagined committing suicide in prison, she has said, in a long-awaited memoir that claims she was smoking marijuana and reading Harry Potter when her British roommate was murdered.
The 25-year-old American, who spent four years in an Italian jail for the killing of Meredith Kercher, also insisted it was not true that she performed cartwheels at a police station the day after the murder.
Ms Knox, who was released last month but faces a retrial, said she hoped to "set the record straight" with Waiting To Be Heard, for which she is said to have been paid $4 million (£2.4 million).
"Now that I am free, I've finally found myself in a position to respond to everyone's questions," she wrote in the book, which is scheduled to be released in the US later this month.
In a copy obtained by The New York Times, she gave her most detailed alibi so far for the night in November 2007 when Miss Kircher had her throat cut in her room at their shared house in Perugia.
Ms Knox reiterated that she was with her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito at his flat, claiming that the pair were smoking joints, watching the film Amélie and reading a German translation of Harry Potter. "Around our house, marijuana was as common as pasta," she wrote.
Mr Sollecito, now 29, was eventually convicted of Meredith's murder alongside his girlfriend, based on DNA evidence that their lawyers dismissed as feeble. After being released last month, he moved to Switzerland.
While conceding that she naively followed the directions of Italian police "like a lost, pathetic child," Ms Knox insisted in her book that her actions after becoming a suspect in the murder had been exaggerated.
After being photographed kissing Mr Sollecito, it was widely reported that she had cartwheeled in front of police. Instead, she claimed, she nervously paced a corridor, tired from a lack of sleep.
"First I showed not enough emotion; then I showed too much," she wrote.
"It's as if any good will others had toward me was seeping out like a slow leak from a tire, without my even realising it."
She said that she had regretted writing a diary entry in which she darkly joked that she could "kill for a pizza".
"The words in my journal were taken literally, and they damned me," she said. "It was a situation I would find myself in again and again."
In the 463-page book, she also criticised her treatment at the hands of Italian guards. When she asked to make a phone call they "looked at me like I'd asked for caviar and prosecco," she wrote.
Having been jailed, she wrote, she practiced Italian and read authors such as Dostoyevsky and at one stage "imagined committing suicide by suffocating herself with a garbage bag", the newspaper said.
Ms Knox, who is expected to be tried in absentia next year, said in the book that she had found it difficult to adjust to how quickly the outside world had changed during her time in prison.
"I hadn't picked up a cellphone in years, and never a touch-screen," she wrote. "This device was as good as sci-fi to me."
