We Don't Know Ourselves

I loved this fast-paced, witty, moving account of Ireland’s recent history.

O’Toole is the kind of narrator you want to spend more time with. I admired the style of this fascinating memoir: O’Toole tracks the history of Ireland over the course of his lifetime, weaving together the personal with the political, economic, and cultural.

I’ve conducted research in Ireland since 2016. It’s a remarkable place, changing rapidly, full of contradictions and grappling with the darkness of its recent past. I loved O’Toole’s book because he made sense of these contradictions in lively and nuanced ways.

This book is the best… show more.

My current research tries to understand the remarkable changes in attitudes towards sexual and gender nonconformity in Ireland over the past century, especially in the past few decades when it has transformed from a regressive and repressive Catholic nation to one in the vanguard of European liberalism.

O’Toole’s journalism and writing about the relationship between Ireland and Britain (especially the follies of Brexit) have been a sure guide, and this book encapsulates his analysis of an emerging Ireland with personal and family stories illustrating its hairpin shifts and contradictions.

It is a tricky strategy for writing history because it risks… show more.

Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves has the rowdy elegance of an insider who lovingly, hilariously, can detail the contradictions, plights, hypocrisies, sanctities, and denials of a family he knows intimately.

He tells the truth, any reader can feel, about Irish ways of double-think regarding all sorts of political, cultural, and personal shadows. 

His Ireland made me know again, anew, my New Jersey.

The book brilliantly uses episodes from O’Toole’s own life to bring to life the way Ireland has changed from being a conservative, Catholic country, to a more modern, liberal, and open-minded society.

The many beautifully written short chapters could each be read as stand-alone essays but together they tell a much larger story which possibly has lessons for other countries that have gotten stuck in the past.