Using the letters published by popular Sunday Press agony aunt Angela Macnamara between 1963 and 1980, this fascinating book offers a unique insight into intimate relationships within family life in Ireland. It charts how dating and married couples negotiated a new understanding of their intimate and sexual lives, and shows how women rejected relationships where sex was a duty within marriage as opposed to an expression of love. The analysis of the column s letters reveal how this transition provoked anxiety amongst Angela Macnamara s conservative readership as they struggled to reconcile seeing their bodies less as conduits of sin and more as instruments of pleasure. The problem page became a vehicle through which people explored these two different understandings. Asking Angela Macnamara explores these developments within intimate life as part of a greater process of informalisation within Irish society. Children demanded that their parents defend and explain their use of corporal punishment in the home. questioned the Catholic Church s position on moral issues such as contraception and homosexuality. Gay men questioned why their sexuality was both criminalised by the State and treated as a disorder by the psychiatric profession. Angela Macnamara emerges from these debates as both a traditionalist in defending Catholic social teaching and a modernist in encouraging an open discussion of sexuality.