Preparing for trips to Ireland and Norway with books that deepen conversations with locals. "We Don't Know Ourselves" is reframing what I thought I knew about Ireland.
Before I travel somewhere, I read about it. Not guidebooks, but real books — history, memoir, fiction rooted in the place. It started as a way to care about where I was going before I arrived, and it's become one of the more reliable tricks I have for getting more out of every trip.
This summer I'm doing a stretch in Ireland and a week in Norway. Norway I've been chipping away at. Ireland I know more about already — I've read Trinity, I've read Angela's Ashes — so I went looking for what else was worth picking up before I land.
One thing I remember about Angela's Ashes: years ago I was talking to some friends of mine who live in Wicklow, and I was excited to bring it up. I'd just finished it and I wanted to discuss it with actual Irish people. One of the guys, a bit older, didn't exactly light up. He wasn't angry, more like pained. The reaction was almost like — that book exposes something shameful. Not that the book was wrong, but that it was true. Frank McCourt wrote it as a memoir, and the poverty and bleakness he described was real, and for some people that's uncomfortable to see reflected back to the world.
I've never forgotten that reaction. It's the kind of thing you only get when you actually ask.
The book I'm halfway through now is called We Don't Know Ourselves, subtitled "A Personal History of Modern Ireland," by Fintan O'Toole. He was born in 1958, so the book follows his life while also tracing Ireland's transformation across the same decades. The structure works because you have a real person to follow — there are characters, there's a life unfolding — but running parallel to all of it is a philosophical account of how Ireland became what it is.
"The way that it draws out kind of a philosophical view of why Ireland is the way it is, or how it was and how it became is really interesting."
Ireland became independent in 1916, so by the time O'Toole is ten years old, it's the 50th anniversary. The Troubles in Northern Ireland are starting up again in the '60s and '70s. The country is joining what would become the EU. A lot is shifting, and the book holds all of that while staying personal enough to stay engaging.
The thing that's genuinely surprised me, reading this as an American with Irish heritage, is how completely I'd underestimated how small and rural and stagnant Ireland was in the 1950s and '60s. I had this warm, nostalgic picture of the place. What the book is making clear is that Ireland was hemorrhaging people for most of the 20th century.
The potato famine — somewhere in the late 1800s — sent huge waves of Irish immigrants to the US. The tenements in New York, the xenophobia directed at Irish arrivals, all of that is part of the story. But Ireland kept losing people long after the famine, because there wasn't much to stay for. Limited education, limited career options, no real path to building a better life. Young people just left.
Ireland's trajectory was to get smaller and smaller, just a shrinking island village, because it couldn't stop the flow of people out.
That's the version of Ireland the book starts from. Modern Ireland — the prosperous, cosmopolitan country that gets such good press now — had to be built on top of that. Understanding where it came from makes the transformation more interesting, and it makes me a lot more curious about the conversations I'm going to have when I get there.
The reason I do this isn't to show off research. It's that reading before a trip changes the quality of conversations you can have with people who actually live there. Even with a tour guide, even with strangers — if you've spent some time thinking about the place, you can ask better questions, push conversations a little deeper, and invite people to tell you things they wouldn't bother explaining to someone who came in cold.
When you visit friends in another country and you've done the work, they notice. The conversation starts somewhere different. That's worth a few weeks of reading.
