If I Knew Then . . . - Softcover

Amy Fisher is no longer the sixteen-year-old girl known around the world as the "Long Island Lolita." Now thirty years old, she is an award-winning columnist for the Long Island Press (she earned a 2004 Media Award for Column/News from the Society of Professional Journalists), an artist/entrepreneur, and a devoted wife and mother.

Co-author Robbie Woliver, Editor-in-Chief of the Long Island Press, has edited Fisher's column since it began in June 2002. An award-winning journalist, he has been a columnist for Newsday, senior editor at the Long Island Voice, and writer for the New York Times, Village Voice, Rolling Stone, CBS Market Watch, Salon, BankRate, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post and more. He is also the founder of the National Music Awards, owner of the legendary music venue Folk City, and author of Wyoming & March; Bringing It All Back Home; Hoot!; and a new novel, Creation.

Is there really anything else we need to know about Amy Fisher, the teen who in 1992 shot her boyfriend's wife? Maybe not... but hearing the whole story from Fisher herself—now a 30-year-old wife and mother and a columnist for the Long Island Press—is still irresistible. The easy-to-follow narrative, written in unadorned, often amateurish prose, unfolds chronologically. As Fisher explains, she was an abused child; her father had a hair-trigger temper and beat his wife and daughter. Refreshingly, though, Fisher doesn't get too wrapped up in victimizing herself. When she was 13, "a bad age to move," the family relocated from one Long Island town to another, more upscale one. Fisher's parents struggled so she could keep up with at least the "B-list" girls, but once she met Joey Buttafuoco at his auto body shop, Fisher abandoned her rich friends to be with him. Then 36 and full of violent swagger, Buttafuoco seemed pretty cool. Before long he was pimping Fisher, but she complied, eager for his "love and affection." When Buttafuoco suggested Fisher kill his wife, Mary Jo, arguing "they don't put kids in jail," Fisher says she believed him. Yet she got so undone trying to threaten Mary Jo, she ended up beating her up with the gun instead (and, she says, it "exploded and fired" in the process). After seven abuse-filled years in prison, Fisher was finally freed on parole (but then had to fight the paparazzi). She laments that it's taken her years to get her life back on track. Bound to make any parent completely paranoid about their daughter's behavior, Fisher's story's is oddly engrossing.
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