Indignity: A Life Reimagined

by Lea Ypi Narrated by Lea Ypi, Rachel Bavidge

Overview

The author of Free returns with an extraordinary inquiry into historical injustice, dignity, truth, and imagination.
When Lea Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Alps in 1941 posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with unsettling questions. Growing up, she was told all records of her grandmother's youth were destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan Ypi: glamorous newlyweds while World War II raged.

What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past, spanning the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, and the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who is the real Leman Ypi? What made her move to Tirana as a young woman and meet a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And, above all, why was she smiling in the winter of 1941?

By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity shows what it is like to make choices against the tide of history-and reveals the fragility of truth, collective and personal. Through secret police reports of communist spies, court depositions, and Ypi's memories of her grandmother, we move between present and past, archive and imagination. With what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations? And what do we really know about the people closest to us?

"[Rachel] Bavidge's tone and delivery capture every emotion during author Lea Ypi's journey from repression to freedom.... Listeners will relish every moment." -AudioFile on Free

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"The lack of agreed-upon history [in the Balkans] makes building anything new impossible. Ypi’s book is an intervention against this oblivion . . . [Her] disorienting questions force us to reevaluate our own assumptions about the present. As she takes us on a tour of her family’s twentieth-century history, it becomes clear that the clean break we like to think we’ve made with the past is illusory." —Lily Lynch, Jacobin

"Thrilling . . . Guiding readers to be curious about their own roots, Ypi’s exquisite research and compassionate
curiosity for the past make for another great read." —Courtney Eathorne, Booklist

"A noted philosopher explores her homeland and the family secrets it conceals . . . [Indignity is] A beguiling, elegant book whose surprise ending, just one of its many real-life twists and turns, befits a mystery." —Kirkus (starred review)

"Heartfelt . . . poignant . . . a moving meditation on the quagmire of probing the gaps in one’s family history." —Publishers Weekly

“A captivating journey of imagination and longing, and a gentle uncovering of a deep buried history that goes to the very heart of identity with brilliant storytelling.” —Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

“Lea Ypi goes deep into Europe’s forgotten past to explore who owns the story of a life and who gets to tell it. A gripping tale of secret police, fractured families, and undying loyalties, this is also a remarkable reflection on how history is made and what happens to the people who get left behind.” —David Runciman, author of The History of Ideas

“Renowned for making autobiography philosophical, the great Lea Ypi now plunges into the life and times of her grandmother, with exquisite and memorable results. The search for answers in a family past leads to infinite questions—and raises especially nagging and profound ones about how a dignified life is possible, especially when history continues to haunt our time.” —Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism Against Itself and Humane

“Indignity is a delicate and powerful reimagining of a life and an act of watchful, questing, loving witness to the turmoil of the fractured Balkans in the mid-twentieth century. In beautifully reimagined scenes interspersed with original State Security Service reports, Ypi brings vividly to life human beings making hard decisions and living with the consequences. And she’s able to interrogate the kinds of truths we want from archives—and from life—some of which we’re unlikely to get. Most of all, it is Ypi’s own fine and compassionate moral sense of human complexities that makes this a superb read.” —Anna Funder, author of Wifedom and Stasiland

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2025-08-15
A noted philosopher explores her homeland and the family secrets it conceals.

Ypi, a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, opens in the archives of the former Communist secret service in her Albanian homeland, seeking documentation about her grandmother, Leman, and hoping, as she writes, to rescue her “from the trolls.” One such troll, of the social media variety, has somehow unearthed a gone-viral photo of Leman and her husband, Asllan, vacationing in the Italian Dolomites in 1941, well into World War II and the Italian occupation of Albania, leading to another troll’s accusation that Leman was a Communist spy after first having been a fascist collaborator. The assault sets Ypi on a search for the truth about her family, outsiders who, though ethnically Albanian and Muslim, had made their home in Salonica, Greece, home to a thriving Jewish community until the Nazi invasion. The family, bookish and aristocratic, enters the tobacco business in Albania with a German partner who, virulently anticommunist, is apoplectic when Leman, a convert to socialism, becomes a chain smoker, doubtless the fault of the Bolsheviks and “the way they inspire the young to disrespect their fathers and mothers.” It’s ironic, then, that Leman should have been suspected by the communist government of Enver Hoxha as a “foreign agent” and an enemy of the state who had “expressed hatred towards the People’s Republic, and the Party in Power.” Ypi’s skillfully written tale includes thoughtful meditations on the notion of dignity as a philosophical construct; in a provocative turn, Ypi compares her condition to the surveillance state of old that had Leman under constant observation: “I am a generic consumer, a cog in a corporate machine, a means to profit. She’s still recognized as human by another human…a subject whose dignity can never be fully destroyed.”

A beguiling, elegant book whose surprise ending, just one of its many real-life twists and turns, befits a mystery.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940194586738
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	11/04/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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