I’m in Albania with a young girl who thinks she lives in paradise

Free is an autobiography written by Lea Ypi about her childhood growing up in Albania. I bought this book new, although I can’t remember when, because I enjoy autobiographies and memoirs of unusual childhoods and also because I don’t know a huge amount about Albania.

Lea starts her book by describing her early childhood in Communist controlled Albania where she learned to revere the leader Enver Hoxha and to admire Stalin and Marx. Albania, as she understood it, was a paradise for ordinary people and she and her classmates pitied the poor children who lived under capitalist regimes. Her family told her often of relatives in university and laughed away the resemblance of their name to that of hated pre-Communist rulers.

As Lea became older the Communist regime was overcome and she realised the truth about the world outside her country and the world within. Her relatives had not been in university but in prison and her family were connected to important figures from the past which would have blighted her life opportunities as she became older. Albania was not a paradise and the freedom that she had embraced was not freedom at all.

Albania experienced Civil War in the 1990s and financial systems collapsed. Thousands fled the country, including her mother and brother, and those who remained struggled to pick up the pieces of their lives in what was now a very different world.

This is a fascinating account of the childhood and coming of age of one individual and how she became aware that all she was most proud of in her country was actually a form of oppression and that her family had been lying to her all her life. The author examines freedom and what it means to have free choice in this book – she is now an academic lecturing on philosophy and politics. I found the writing very accessible and full of details about the author’s life that I would never have imagined, including the status afforded to people who owned an empty Coca-Cola can.

This book will be shelved with my other biographies and memoirs of unusual childhoods as I may want to read it again one day. I thought that it was an excellent insight into a country and a life but also an exploration of ideas about what constitutes freedom and whether any of us can truthfully claim to be free.