When Lea Ypi stumbles across a stranger’s social media post showing her grandmother honeymooning in the Alps in 1941, she is forced to confront a history she was told had been erased. Growing up in Albania, Ypi believed that the early communist years had destroyed every trace of her grandmother’s youth. Yet the photo exists, and with it comes a flood of questions about memory, secrecy, and survival in a time when even love and loyalty could be twisted into acts of surveillance.

What follows is part family memoir, part political investigation, and part moral reckoning. Ypi sifts through declassified Sigurimi files, court depositions, and fading memories to piece together who her grandmother truly was. The book moves across the fractured history of the Balkans, from Ottoman aristocracy to the rise of communism, weaving official reports with reimagined scenes of private life. It is both intimate and sweeping, showing how ordinary people made impossible choices in times of war, dictatorship, and shifting ideology.

The heart of Indignity lies in its questions: Is memory ever apolitical? Who has the authority to judge the compromises made under unlivable conditions? Ypi refuses to offer neat answers. Instead, she lingers in the uncertainty, exploring the thin line between complicity and resistance, and the persistence of dignity even in the harshest circumstances.

This book is not only a history of one family but also a meditation on truth, justice, and the stories we inherit. Ypi’s compassionate eye and her ability to balance ambiguity with clarity make Indignity both profound and unforgettable.

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My review of Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History remains my most popular contribution to Goodreads. I still stand by it. That book was fun, insightful, and well-written.

I am very disappointed to say that Indignity does not have the charm or sharpness of Ypi's first book. I will admit that I picked up the book with some reservations. I have grown rather weary of this particular genre of memoir/autofiction/auto-theory (these terms may not be interchangeable, but there is no particular rigor to their classification either). The "restoring truth and justice to the life of a forgotten matriarch." The "no archive can restore us" ethos of any such works. I have read far too many, and unfortunately Indignity does little to breathe fresh life into an increasingly stale genre.

But it should have been able to. The story we can glimpse from the material Ypi has pieced together is, prima facie, fascinating. The life of a woman at the intersection of crumbling empires and devastating world wars. The problem, I am sorry to say, is Ypi's writing. This book is at its best when Ypi grapples with her own project, partly because there is more uncertainty there, a lot more ambiguity. But when she enters the territory of the fictional, she stumbles. The story becomes stilted, the language sounds like a bad translation, and the characters (modeled for the most part after real people) have little depth. There is an alchemy to fiction that is clearly missing from Ypi's repertoire as a fine nonfiction writer and it does this book a huge disservice.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an advance copy of Indignity by Lea Ypi.

Part memoir, part political enquiry, this story delves into a reimagining of the past in which truths come to light, only to be questioned and interrogated leading to profound discoveries.

A times a detective story, at others a moral battle, this book will really make you think, ponder and ask yourself all sorts of questions.

Thanks to @fsgbooks and NetGalley for the advance copy.

As luck, or literary fate, would have it, Indignity was my very first NetGalley title. And somehow, this was the perfect book to start with. Lea Ypi’s writing isn’t just intellectually sharp, it’s historically intimate, political, and radical without being dogmatic.

Following on from her memoir Free, Ypi returns to the ghosts of her family’s past, but this time through the lens of her grandmother, Leman Ypi, who appears in a 1941 honeymoon photo smiling radiantly while Europe burns. It’s a photo that shouldn’t exist. A past she’d been told was erased by communism. But as we all know, the internet, unlike regimes, doesn’t forget.

What unfolds is part detective story, part political reckoning. As Ypi combs through declassified Sigurimi archives (the files of Albania’s notorious secret police), she begins to ask not just what her grandmother did, but what it means to survive in a regime that criminalised memory, erased ideology, and coerced even love and loyalty into state surveillance.

The deeper question at the heart of this book is one I think many of us, especially from diasporic, postcolonial, or formerly occupied nations, wrestle with:
Is memory ever apolitical?

And who has the moral authority to judge the compromises made by those who lived through unlivable times?
Ypi doesn't deliver tidy answers. Instead, she stays in the ambiguity of complicity and resistance and of course, dignity and survival.
If you’re drawn to stories that complicate what we think we know about history and justice Indignity is essential reading.

Memoir meets political theory. And the questions will follow you long after the last page.