Taking a photograph of her grandparents as its jumping off point, Indignity by Lea Ypi blends memoir and historical enquiry to explore her grandmother’s life and the period of transition between the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Enver Hoxha’s authoritarian regime in Albania. The resulting book is a nuanced reflection on the relationship between memory, history and imagination, and how personal stories interact with – and resist – official histories, writes Andi Haxhiu.
Indignity: A Life Reimagined. Lea Ypi. Allen Lane. 2025.
When Lea Ypi, a professor at the London School of Economics, published her award-winning memoir, Free, it sparked numerous positive reactions around the world. Free was in virtually every library imaginable, translated into more than thirty languages, and was reviewed and praised extensively in dozens of formal outlets. Fast forward to September 2025, Ypi has written yet another fascinating book – Indignity: A Life Reimagined.
The relationship between fact and fiction
In an email exchange we had in 2022 after I reviewed her first book, adamant about our collective need to study history if we are to make sense of the world, Ypi described her next work as being “about the relationship between fact and fiction.” This remark stayed with me. Perhaps, I thought, it could respond to the venomous rhetoric within certain Albanian circles that discredited Free for minor historical inaccuracies. Contrasting with the international response to Free, the book’s reception in Albania framed Ypi as an apologist for communist dictatorship. Ypi’s academic background also puzzled many Albanian readers who wondered how a prominent academic could fail to produce what they expected: an “objective” and rigorously historical account. However, this was never Ypi’s intention: Free was, explicitly, a highly subjective and personal memoir.
Indignity: A Life Reimagined opens with a photograph of Ypi’s grandparents, Leman (Leskoviku) and Asllan Ypi, taken during their honeymoon in the Italian Alps in 1941. When this black-and-white photograph was posted on the internet by a random user, it went viral across Albania and prompted a wave of accusatory comments towards Leman, who had passed away almost twenty years earlier and was unable to defend herself.
Confronted with this posthumous indignity, Ypi decided to respond to this emotionally charged trolling both as Leman’s granddaughter and as the researcher she is. Her journey thus began in the Authority for Information of Former State Security Documents, a state institution covering the years of Albanian dictatorship. When asked about the reasons behind her visit during her taxi ride to the Sigurimi archive, Ypi (8) admitted to being uncertain why she was doing any of this: to rescue her grandmother Leman from the trolls, to ease her own guilt over the fact that her great-grandfather, Xhafer Ypi, had briefly led fascist Albania, or, perhaps, to write a book that examines a country’s history through the lens of individual people’s lives?
Ottoman collapse and the rise of nation states
From here, Indignity (re)traces the life of Ypi’s grandmother, Leman. Born in Salonica, Leman’s story begins against the backdrop of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Questions of identification were especially pertinent in this context, as overlapping identities and multi-ethnic coexistence gave way to new nationalising states. Leman found herself in a new socio-political context where nationalism became a way of aligning political and cultural units. The collapse of the imperial order displaced communities, increased suspicion towards cosmopolitan pasts, and pressured people to conform to newly minted national categories. This first section of the book can thus be read within the broader nationalist momentum sweeping Europe.
This sets the stage for the second part when Leman, known as “the Albanian” in Greece, moves from the cosmopolitan milieu of Salonica to Tirana, Albania’s capital and the symbolic centre of the newly established nation-state. Considering that Leman had moved to Albania during the interwar period, Ypi often notes the confusing archival references to her grandmother as “the Greek”. This aptly depicts the bitterly ironic dynamic that, although borders promised stronger identity, they often delivered the opposite. Leman was Albanian in Greece, and Greek in Albania – a life lived under the “indignity” of never fully belonging. However, Leman settled in Albania and lived there throughout the turbulent events of the 20th century that culminated with Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist dictatorship. She married Asllan Ypi, had a son, Zafo, and endured nearly fifteen years before Asllan’s release from prison. Asllan (Ypi’s grandfather, whom she never met) was imprisoned due to his alleged contacts with foreigners and, by extension, disloyalty to the Albanian state. This would have immense consequences for Leman and her Zafo (Ypi’s father).
Living and remembering under authoritarianism
The epicentre of the book, however, is neither the story of Ypi’s grandmother nor her family’s relationship to the broader socio-political events of the 20th century. Indignity’s power lies in the deft way it moves between what is factually true yet narratively trivial, and what is narratively powerful but not verifiably true. One of the book’s key contributions is a literary one: its focus on not only what, but how we remember.
The book illuminates the ways in which this interacting ‘what’ and ‘how’ are made complicated for those attempting to preserve a sense of self, agency and moral integrity under the indignity of authoritarian brutality.
The “what” of memory gives us facts, but the “how” of memory governs interpretation, transmission, and moral weight. More than this, the book illuminates the ways in which this interacting “what” and “how” are made complicated for those attempting to preserve a sense of self, agency and moral integrity under the indignity of authoritarian brutality. History is thus never neutral data; it is “how” we remember that sustains communities, legitimises power, or enables resistance.
The role and limits of the archive
The book’s second key contribution is methodological, relating to a revelation that she becomes aware of late on in her research. This incident casts doubt on the question of whether and under what conditions we trust an archive unreservedly. As Ypi puts it, “[f]acts can only be reliable if one trusts the mechanisms through which they are transmitted, if error is no longer possible” (335).
It is precisely through this merging of fact and fiction that Indignity demonstrates how all history, however rigorously pursued, is ultimately a form of narrative.
This particular experience with the archival records led Ypi to become part of a broader scholarly and literary circle that offers a degree of hybridity between conventional history and memoir. Ypi’s methods thus are comparable to Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation” in Black Atlantic studies, or W. G. Sebald’s fragmentary essayistic style that accentuates the unreliable nature of memory. Ypi’s work is also comparable to the Nobel Prize winner, Svetlana Alexievich, whose books challenge systems of power while giving dignity to individual voices.
The use of narrative invention can thus be seen as an ethical attempt to give voice to what is often left unsaid. This methodological choice, among others, exposes that Ypi, the author and academic, is also against a positivistic notion of history that has shaped the Western tradition. In its slippage between archive and imagination, Indignity too attempts to protect the dignity of those whose stories exist only in arbitrary historical records. It is precisely through this merging of fact and fiction that Indignity demonstrates how all history, however rigorously pursued, is ultimately a form of narrative.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Main image: John Copland on Shutterstock.
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