Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize Winner of the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Award Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award • Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction • Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, Washington Post, Financial Times, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Foreign Affairs, Public Books, and Sunday Times
In a memoir that is by turns "bitingly, if darkly, funny…and truly profound" (Max Strasser, New York Times), Lea Ypi reflects on "freedom" as she recounts living through the end Communism in the Balkans as a child.
"Beguiling…[A] primer on how to live when old verities turn to dust." —Charles King, Washington Post
Family and nation formed a reliable bedrock of security for precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi. She was a Young Pioneer, helping to lead her country toward the future of perfect freedom promised by the leaders of her country, the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. Then, almost overnight, the Berlin Wall fell and the pillars of her society toppled. The local statue of Stalin, whom she had believed to be a kindly leader who loved children, was beheaded by student protestors.
Uncomfortable truths about her family’s background emerged. Lea learned that when her parents and neighbors had spoken in whispers of friends going to “university” or relatives “dropping out,” they meant something much more sinister. As she learned the truth about her family’s past, her best friend fled the country. Together with neighboring post-Communist states, Albania began a messy transition to join the “free markets” of the Western world: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. Her father, despite his radical left-wing convictions, was forced to fire workers; her mother became a conservative politician on the model of Margaret Thatcher. Lea’s typical teen concerns about relationships and the future were shot through with the existential: the nation was engulfed in civil war.
Ypi’s outstanding literary gifts enable her to weave together this colorful, tumultuous coming-of-age story in a time of social upheaval with thoughtful, fresh, and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, and on deep questions about freedom: What does freedom consist of, and for whom? What conditions foster it? Who among us is truly free?
Lea Ypi is professor in political theory at London School of Economics, and adjunct associate professor in philosophy at the Australian National University, with expertise in Marxism and critical theory. She lives and works in London.
Table of Contents
1 Stalin 1
2 The Other Ypi 13
3 471: A Brief Biography 26
4 Uncle Enver Is Dead 35
5 Coca-Cola Cans 46
6 Comrade Mamuazel 58
7 They Smell of Sun Cream 69
8 Brigatista 83
9 Ahmet Got His Degree 96
10 The End of History 105
11 Grey Socks 121
12 A Letter from Athens 134
13 Everyone Wants to Leave 149
14 Competitive Games 160
15 I Always Carried a Knife 170
16 It's All Part of Civil Society 181
17 The Crocodile 194
18 Structural Reforms 205
19 Don't Cry 215
20 Like the Rest of Europe 225
21 1997 234
22 Philosophers Have Only Interpreted the World; the Point Is to Change It 249
