My family includes a farmer and textile artist from rural Kentucky, who rarely miss a Sunday service at their local Baptist church; a retired Jewish banker from Manhattan’s Upper West Side; 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: Chances are it will cause the whole place to explode. What has always impressed me about our large, mixed family is not only the fact that we survive Christmas dinner, but also the fact that the family includes several couples who are politically at odds with the people they are with. live on a daily basis: their own spouses. They haven’t voted for the same candidate, let alone the same party, in years.
For a long time, these differences were mainly a nuisance that flared up around elections, but in recent years they have become much more stressful for these couples. Especially now, when the country is so divided and angry, and we have become so inward-looking, it feels like the ties that bind us are finally about to be severed. However, all these couples are still together. I wondered how they did it.
This Question became a novel in part about a Democrat and her husband, a Republican 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 to write it, I had to do some research. I could have watched hundreds of hours of Fox News and MSNBC and talked with dozens of strangers at the grocery store. Instead, I decided to talk with family members—about guns, abortion, immigration, and climate change—whose politics I found confusing.
These are the conversations most of us desperately try to avoid during the holidays. I wasn’t particularly excited about having them either. But I thought it would at least be effective, and I hoped that maybe I would learn something.
I was a journalist at The New York Times for 15 years, I have spent many hours of my life asking personal questions on sensitive subjects. When I’m working on a story, my job is to figure out what the facts are and what they mean, then I present the information so readers can decide for themselves. Over the years, I’ve stopped countless people on the street or in parking lots to ask them questions about politicians or schools, how much they pay in rent, and what they think about what’s going on. go ice skating when it’s 78 degrees in February.
The people I interview generally don’t ask me what I think about climate change, or who I vote for, and if they did, I wouldn’t be able to tell them. My role as a journalist is to find information, not to convince anyone. (I can’t say what I think about these issues here either; Times guidelines require journalists to keep their political opinions to themselves.) I’ve had hundreds of such conversations over the years, and I can’t think of a single interview that has turned combative, even when I’m personally disagree with every word.
So I decided to approach my family like a journalist. I wasn’t looking to have a back and forth; I was looking for information. I wanted to know what they thought and why.
I started with my brother. He lives in Tampa, and sometimes we talk on the phone while he walks around the neighborhood with his dog, a Schnauzer rescue who had a rough childhood and sometimes wears a weighted vest when she gets anxious.
We always got along, but it had been a few years since we really talked about politics. The last time was at my parents’ dining room table, where my mother was desperately trying to change the subject while my brother and I screamed about our Chinese takeout. I don’t remember why we were arguing, but I remember how that anger felt, like an animal was trying to claw its claws out of my chest. I wanted to reach across the table and shake him. I could remain perfectly calm when discussing their opinions with strangers; Not everyone will agree with me, and that’s fine. But how could my own brother believe these things?
When I called my brother to explain to him that I was working on a book and wanted to talk to him about politics, I told him that I wasn’t interested in debates: it was research and I just needed to understand.
“Okay,” he said. I imagined him walking under a palm tree with his little gray dog. “To pull.”
I started with some basics. If you were talking to a 5 year old, I asked them, how would you explain what it means to be progressive? How would you explain being conservative to that same child?
I didn’t agree with his answers, but that didn’t matter. Some of my characters would. I asked him to continue.
Tell me about immigration, I said. What do you think is fair for the children who were brought here illegally when they were young?
What do you think of affirmative action?
What should we do about climate change?
What about abortion?
As he explained his point of view, I felt like I began to know my characters better. I could see their faces more clearly in my mind. And it was a good excuse to talk with my brother. We both have kids and jobs and marriages to sort out, and we don’t stay in touch as much as I would like. But suddenly we were calling each other more often and I liked it. Cautiously, I took another step. I would talk to my in-laws.
On paper, my father-in-law and I couldn’t be more different. I’m a gay, Jewish New Yorker, and he’s a truck-driving farmer who lives in rural Kentucky. But we both love reading and joking, and in the 15 years since I met my wife, her father and I have become close. There were always topics, but we had difficulty discussing them. I remember a conversation years ago where we spent nearly an hour late one night taking turns making “just one last point” about gun accessibility across the country. country. He was intrigued by my point of view and it took all my willpower not to yell at him in his own house. My wife only lasted a few minutes before getting up from the table and leaving the room.
His policy, however, is not predictable. For example, he doesn’t own a gun. Instead, he likes to say he keeps giant aerosol cans of wasp spray around the house in case of an intruder. And because there are wasps in the barn.
A few months after writing my novel, my wife and I took our children to Kentucky for a spring visit. As we sat in rocking chairs around the wood stove, I talked to my father-in-law about electric cars and renewable energy. I used the same approach as with my brother. I listened. It was research. We didn’t care who was right. And the conversation was… perfectly pleasant! Truly, it was a great success. It gave me more material for my book, and no one said anything they might have regretted.
So I tried two other family members. One evening, sitting around a bonfire in a backyard in Louisville, I chatted with one of my sisters and her husband about how they voted. (Later I would call this husband to ask him about golf and what he would do if he found out his wife had cheated on him with a woman.)
On another visit to Kentucky, I stood with my mother-in-law in her kitchen, as a group of white and brown sheep wandered through the pasture out back. I asked her what it was like to be married to someone who voted differently than she did.
She sighed, shook her head and said she didn’t understand. “But he’s such a nice person,” she said.
When I talk to people about my family or my novel, one thing I often hear is: if my spouse voted differently from me, I would divorce him.
Maybe you would. But maybe you wouldn’t. Not all of these couples started out so far apart. But slowly, over time, their views changed, like a shadow tilting in the afternoon sun, until there was almost no overlap left. But they continue to share the everyday things of their real lives: children, mortgages, work. They take care of each other. And if these things work, if you’re good to each other, would you really blow it?
No one in my family was so convinced by our conversations that they changed their political affiliation. But the more discussions we had, the easier they became. And for everyone involved, it’s become harder to dismiss people on the other side, whose views are often caricatures. My book is finished, but the way my family and I learned to talk to each other remains. We try to remember that, even when we look down on others’ leaders, we are all people doing our best.