My family includes a farmer and a fiber artist in rural Kentucky, who rarely miss a Sunday service at their local Baptist church; a retired Jewish banker on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; a theater director in Florida; a contractor in Louisville; a lawyer in Boston; and a gay Republican.
Talking about politics at our family gatherings can be like smoking a cigarette at a gas station—there’s a good chance it will make the whole place explode. What’s always impressed me about our big, mixed-up family is not just that we survive Christmas dinner, but also that the family includes several couples who disagree politically with the people they live with every day: their own spouses. They haven’t voted for the same candidate, much less for the same party, in years.
For a long time, those differences were mostly an annoyance that flared around elections, but over the past few years they’ve become far more stressful for those couples to navigate. Especially now, when the country is so divided and angry, when we have pulled so far into our own corners that it feels like the seams holding us together are finally about to snap. Yet all those couples are still together. I wondered how they did it.
That question turned into a novel in part about a Democrat and his husband, a Republican who’s running for office. The book is not about politics or campaigns; it’s about marriage and ambition and what happens when who we are in the world doesn’t match how we see ourselves. But in order to write it, I needed to do some research. I could have watched hundreds of hours of Fox News and MSNBC and talked with dozens of strangers in the grocery store. Instead, I decided to talk with the people in my family—about guns, abortion, immigration, and climate change—whose politics I found baffling.
These are the conversations most of us spend the holidays desperately trying to avoid. I wasn’t particularly excited about having them either. But I figured it would at least be efficient, and I hoped that maybe I’d learn something.
I’ve been a reporter at The New York Times for 15 years, so I have spent many hours of my life asking personal questions about sensitive issues. When I’m working on a story, my job is to figure out what the facts are and what they mean, and then I present the information so readers can decide for themselves. I’ve stopped countless people on the street or in parking lots over the years to ask about politicians or schools, how much they pay in rent, and what they think about ice-skating when it’s 78 degrees in February.
The people I interview don’t generally ask me what I think about climate change, or whom I’m voting for, and if they did, I wouldn’t be able to tell them. My role as a reporter is to dig up information, not to convince anybody. (I can’t say what I think about those issues here, either; Times guidelines require that reporters keep their political views to…
Read More: How to Not Fight With Your Family About Politics
