My family includes a farmer and a textile artist in rural Kentucky who rarely miss a Sunday service at their local Baptist church; a retired Jewish banker on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; a theater director in Florida; a builder 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’ll make the whole place explode. What has always impressed me about our large, blended family is not only that we survive Christmas dinner, but also that the family is made up of several couples who politically disagree with the people they live with every day: 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 primarily an annoyance that flared up around elections, but in recent years it has become much more stressful for these couples to navigate. Especially now, when the country is so divided and angry, when we have retreated so far into our own corners that it feels like the seams that hold us together are finally breaking. However, all of these couples are still together. I wondered how they did it.

That question became a novel about a Democrat and his 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 align with how we see ourselves. But in order to write it, I had to do some research. I could have watched hundreds of hours of Fox News and MSNBC and talked to dozens of strangers at the grocery store. Instead, I decided to talk to the people in my family about guns, abortion, immigration, and climate change—whose politics I found confusing.

Faith Hill: What if you just skipped the holidays?

These are the conversations most of us desperately want to avoid during the holidays. I wasn’t particularly excited about having them either. But I assumed it would at least be efficient and hoped that maybe I would learn something.

I was a reporter at The New York Times For 15 years, I have spent many hours of my life asking personal questions about sensitive topics. 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 rent they pay, and what they think about ice skating when it’s 70 degrees Fahrenheit in February.

The people I interview generally don’t ask me what I think about climate change or who I’m voting for, and if they did, I wouldn’t be able to tell them. My role as a reporter is to gather information, not to convince anyone. (I can’t say what I think about these topics here either; Just (Guidelines require that reporters keep their political views to themselves.) I’ve conducted hundreds of these conversations over the years, and I can’t think of a single interview that was combative, even if I personally disagreed with every word.

So I decided to approach my family like a reporter. I didn’t want to have any back and forth; I was looking for information. I wanted to know what they were thinking 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-like rescue dog who has had a difficult puppyhood and sometimes wears a weighted vest when he’s scared.

We’ve always gotten along, but it’s been a few years since we’ve ever really talked about politics. The last time had been at my parents’ dinner table, where my mother was desperately trying to change the subject while my brother and I were yelling about our Chinese takeout. I don’t remember what we were arguing about, but I remember the anger feeling like an animal trying to break free from my chest. I wanted to reach across the table and shake it. I could remain completely calm when talking to strangers about their views; Not everyone will agree with me, and that’s okay. But how could my own brother believe such a thing?

When I called my brother to explain that I was working on a book and wanted to talk to him about politics, I told him that I wasn’t interested in a debate: it was research and I just needed to understand it.

“Okay,” he said. I imagined him walking under a palm tree with his little gray dog. “Shoot.”

I started with some basics. If you were talking to a 5-year-old, I would ask them: How would you explain what it means to be progressive? How would you explain to this child that he or she is conservative?

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 children who were brought here illegally at a young age?

What do you think about affirmative action?

What should be done about climate change?

What about abortion?

As he explained his views, I could feel myself getting to know my characters better. I could see their faces more clearly in my mind’s eye. And it was a good excuse to talk to my brother. We both have kids, jobs and marriages to take care of and we don’t keep in touch as often as I would have liked. But suddenly we were calling more often and I was enjoying it. I cautiously 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 pickup-driving farmer living in rural Kentucky. But we both love to read and joke, and in the 15 years since I met my wife, her father and I have grown closer. There were always topics, but we found it difficult to discuss them. I remember a conversation years ago when we spent nearly an hour late into the night taking turns discussing “just one last point” about gun accessibility across the country. My perspective confused him, 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.

However, his politics are unpredictable. For example, he doesn’t own a gun. Instead, he likes to say that he keeps giant spray cans of wasp spray around the house in case of a break-in. And because there are wasps in the stable.

A few months after I wrote my novel, my wife and I took our children to Kentucky for a spring visit. As we sat in rocking chairs by the wood stove, I talked to my father-in-law about electric cars and renewable energy. I took the same approach as I did with my brother. I listened. It was research. We didn’t worry about who was right. And the conversation was… absolutely pleasant! It was really a great success. It gave me more material for my book, and no one said anything they would regret.

So I tried two other family members. One evening in Louisville, I was sitting around the backyard campfire talking to one of my sisters and her husband about how they vote. (Later I would call this man and ask him about golf and what he would do if he found out his wife had cheated on him with a woman.)

Olga Khazan: Why families argue during the holidays

On another visit to Kentucky, I stood with my mother-in-law in her kitchen while a group of white and brown sheep ran around in the pasture outside. I asked her how it felt to be married to someone who chose differently than her.

She sighed, shook her head and said she didn’t understand. “But he’s such a kind person,” she said.

When I tell people about my family or my novel, I often hear: If my spouse voted differently than me, I would get a divorce.

Maybe you would do that. But maybe you wouldn’t. Not all of these couples were that far apart to begin with. But slowly, over time, their views changed, like a shadow receding in the afternoon sun, until there was almost no overlap. But they continue to share the mundane things of their actual lives – kids, mortgages, jobs. They care about each other. And if that works, if you’re good to each other, would you really blow everything up?

None of my family members were so convinced by our discussions that they changed their party affiliation. But the more of these discussions we had, the easier they became. And it became increasingly difficult for everyone involved to reject the people on the other side, whose views we often see in caricatures. My book is finished, but the way my family and I learned to talk to each other remains. We try to remember that we are all just people doing our best, even if we despise each other’s leaders.