Free
Coming of Age at the End of History
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- £7.49
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
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?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Today, Lea Ypi is a political-theory professor at the London School of Economics. But as this fascinating memoir shows, at the dawn of the 1990s she was an 11-year-old in socialist Albania—and fully embraced the ideals and promise of communism, even though she and her classmates sometimes passed around empty chewing-gum wrappers just to get a smell of that hard-to-get treat. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Albania began shifting to a Westernized free market…and Ypi discovered to her shock that the rest of her family had secretly been anti-communist intellectual dissidents all along. Ypi starts Free as a straight memoir, but as her country descends into violent civil war, she brings more and more details of Albania’s social and political history into the story. This gripping read gives us a portrait of a tumultuous period that’s still reverberating through today’s world politics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A child's sense of safety, security, and national pride is upended as family histories surface and a political system splinters in this beautiful debut from Guardian contributor Ypi. The author, who grew up behind the Iron Curtain in Albania, recounts her coming-of-age in 1990 as the country (the last with Stalinist-type rulers in Europe) began to shed its Communist identity. She reflects on her puzzlement as a young girl when protesters demanding freedom and democracy took hold of her city that December. "We had plenty of freedom," she writes. "I felt so free... my freedom as a burden." That mindset, nurtured by her teachers at school, directly opposed the beliefs of her family, intellectuals and property owners whose own ideas of liberty led to their punishment in what the Party referred to as "universities," where "different subjects of study corresponded to different official charges." When the government crumbled, her parents felt it safe enough to finally reveal to her "that my country had been an open-air prison for almost half a century." Out of this comes an electric narrative of personal and political reckoning, suffused with sharp cultural critique, that underscores history's contentious relationship with independence and truth. This vivid rendering of life amid cultural collapse is nothing short of a masterpiece.
