The book "Free, How I Became an Adult at the End of History," by Lea Ypi, published by Casa das Letras in 2024, is an autobiographical work that narrates the author's childhood and adolescence in Albania under the socialist regime. It all begins when Lea, at eleven years old, witnesses students beheading a statue of Stalin in a garden near the Palace of Culture, at that moment when the regime enters into convulsion. The girl, raised to believe that socialism guaranteed freedom, questions what it truly means to be free.
Lea Ypi's grandmother occupies a central space in the narrative. Born in 1918, niece of a pasha, she was the only girl at the French Lyceum of Thessaloniki at age 13, became an advisor to the Albanian Prime Minister at age 20, and married at age 23. The grandfather, a socialist but not a revolutionary, was arrested and sentenced to the gallows, later commuted to life imprisonment. Many of her relatives were executed or committed suicide, with survivors divided among the asylum, exile, and prison.
From 1990 onwards, after the Berlin Wall, Albania officially became a multiparty state. The transition brought economic chaos, chain bankruptcies, the so-called pyramid loans, and crowds fleeing across the Adriatic. Lea's family fragmented: her mother left for Italy, her father had a failed political experience. Lea decided to study Philosophy in Rome, later moving to the London School of Economics.
The work explores the cost of freedom and the unfulfilled promises that accompanied it. Lea considers that socialism meant the denial of what people wanted to be, while liberalism brought the destruction of solidarity and the right to inherit privileges. The author wrote her story to explain, reconcile, and continue the fight against political cynicism and apathy, considering it a debt owed to all those who sacrificed everything they had.
