Notes On Now

Indignity

There are few people more ‘now’ than Lea Ypi, author of the deservedly worldwide bestseller Free: Coming of Age at the End of History. It’s a brilliant account of her growing up in Albania and experiencing, aged 11, the abrupt replacement of its autarkic communism with market ‘freedom’.

In 1987, I went to Moscow to witness Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost and wrote Soviet Freedom, helped by Nella Bielski. Later, reflecting on its wretched sales, I was told that irony was always a bad idea for a book title. Ypi’s triumphant success manages to burst even this adage.

Now, she has written a different kind of genre-busting account, Indignity: A Life Reimagined. It’s about her grandmother’s history – and mystery.

Frustrated by the elusive nature of personal memories, her grandmother’s myth-making, and the misleading nature of official archives, including the reports of bored spies, Ypi turns to storytelling. Fictional in form but truthful in effect, she embraces something many academic historians refuse to acknowledge: that all good history is also a work of imagination.