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 themselves.) I’ve had hundreds of these conversations over the years, and I can’t think of a single interview that got combative, even when I personally disagreed with every word.
So I decided to approach my family like a reporter. 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-ish rescue who had a difficult puppyhood and sometimes wears a weighted vest when she gets anxious.
We’ve always gotten along, but it had been a few years since we talked about politics in any real way. The last time had been at my parents’ dining-room table, where my mother tried desperately to change the subject while my brother and I shouted over our Chinese takeout. I don’t remember what we were arguing about, but I remember what that anger felt like, as though an animal was trying to claw its way out of my chest. I wanted to reach across the table and shake him. I could stay perfectly calm talking with strangers about their views; not everyone is going to agree with me, and that’s fine. But how could my own brother believe these things?
When I called my brother to explain that I was working on a book and wanted to talk with him about politics, I told him I wasn’t interested in a debate: This was research, and I just needed to understand.
“Okay,” he said. I pictured him walking under a palm tree with his little gray dog. “Shoot.”
I began with some basics. If you were talking to a 5-year-old, I asked him, how would you explain what it means to be progressive? How would you explain being conservative to that same kid?
I didn’t agree with his answers, but that didn’t matter. Some of my characters would. I asked him to keep going.
Tell me about immigration, I said. What do you think is fair for kids who were brought here illegally when they were young?
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. And it was a good excuse to talk with my brother. We both have kids and jobs and marriages to attend to, and we don’t keep in touch as much as I wish we did. But suddenly we were calling more often, and I was enjoying it. Cautiously, I took another step. I would talk to my in-laws.
On paper, my father-in-law and I could not be more different. I’m a gay, Jewish New Yorker, and he’s a pickup-driving farmer who lives in rural Kentucky. But we both love to read and we like to kid around, and over the 15 years since I met my wife, her father and I have become close. There have always been topics, however, we’ve had a hard time discussing. I remember one conversation years ago, when we spent nearly an hour late at night taking turns making “just one last point” about the accessibility of guns around the country. He was mystified by my perspective, and it took every drop of my willpower not to shout at him in his own house. My wife lasted only a few minutes before she got up from the table and left the room.
His politics aren’t predictable, though. He does not, for example, own a gun. Instead, he likes to say that 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 into writing my novel, my wife and I took our kids to Kentucky for a spring visit. As we sat in rocking chairs around the woodstove, I talked to my father-in-law about electric cars and renewable energy. I used the same approach I did with my brother. I listened. It was research. We didn’t worry about who was right. And the conversation was … perfectly pleasant! Really, it was a great success. It gave me more material for my book, and no one said anything they came to regret.
So I tried two more members of the family. Sitting around a backyard bonfire in Louisville one evening, I talked with one of my sisters and her husband about how they vote. (Later, I would call this husband to ask about golf and what he would do if he found out his wife cheated on him with a woman.)
On another visit to Kentucky, I stood with my mother-in-law in her kitchen, as a cluster of white and brown sheep milled around in the pasture out back. I asked her how it felt to be married to someone who voted differently than she did.
She sighed, shook her head, and said she didn’t understand it. “But he’s such a kind person,” she said.
When I tell people about my family, or about my novel, one thing I hear a lot is: If my spouse voted differently than I did, I’d get a divorce.
Maybe you would. But maybe you wouldn’t. Not all of these couples started out so far apart. But slowly, over time, their views shifted, like a shadow tilting in the afternoon sun, until there was almost no overlap remaining. But they continue to share the day-to-day stuff of their actual lives—kids, mortgages, jobs. They take care of each other. And if those things work, if you’re good to each other, would you really blow it all up?
None of my family members was so persuaded by our conversations that they switched their party affiliation. But the more of these discussions we had, the easier they became. And for everyone involved, it got harder to dismiss the people on the other side, whose views we often see in caricature. My book is finished, but the way my family and I learned to talk with each other has stuck. We try to remember that, even when we despise each other’s leaders, we are all just people doing our best.
The normal rules of public disgrace may no longer apply to Donald Trump. But at least some expectation of good behavior remains, it seems, for a politician in Trump’s orbit.
After a multiyear investigation, the House Ethics Committee reported today that former Representative Matt Gaetz paid “tens of thousands of dollars” to various women, including one 17-year-old girl, “for sex and/or drugs” on at least 20 occasions. Many such allegations had been reported before but specific details are always more shocking to the senses, and the report was heavy on those.
“The Committee received testimony that Victim A and Representative Gaetz had sex twice during the party, including at least once in the presence of other party attendees,” the panel said. “Victim A recalled receiving $400 in cash from Representative Gaetz that evening, which she understood to be payment for sex. At the time, she had just completed her junior year of high school.”
In its conclusion, the committee said it had found evidence that Gaetz violated several House rules “prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.”
I reached out to Gaetz’s former congressional aides for his comment on the report, and they pointed to his long denial on X, now pinned to the top of his profile, which is full of all-caps disclaimers. “I was charged with nothing: FULLY EXONERATED,” he wrote. “It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have earlier in life. I live a different life now.”
That life is already different from the one he’d carefully planned. A week after the November election, the 42-year-old Florida Republican was named as President-Elect Trump’s choice to lead the Justice Department. Gaetz quickly gave up his seat in Congress—to forestall, it was widely assumed, publication of the ethics committee’s report. But the maneuver seemed to have failed when, a month ago, he pulled out of the running for attorney general and announced the launch of a show on the relatively marginal One America News Network. As one former Republican lawmaker from Florida who’d collaborated with Gaetz in the House (and who asked for anonymity to speak candidly) described his former colleague’s future: “It’s oblivion.”
A man who reportedly dreams of being Florida governor is now facing the blunt reality of his own political irrelevance. “He is farther from the governor’s mansion now than ever,” Peter Schorsch, a Florida publisher and former political consultant who previously worked with Gaetz,told me. “GOP voters are not going to go with the P. Diddy of Florida politics.”
“Matt Gaetz is winning,” I wrote in my profile of the congressman back in April. “He has emerged as the heir of Trumpism. And he’s poised to run for governor in a state of nearly 23 million people.”
Until very recently, Gaetz was winning. He had, in the past few years, become a MAGA folk hero for his commitment to posture and provocation—as well as a trusted confidant of Trump. He was able to exact revenge over his arch-nemesis, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. More than anything, though, Gaetz seemed relieved: He’d been released from a set of ruinous claims after the Justice Department, which had been investigating sex-crimes allegations against him, dropped its probe in 2023, reportedly because of witness-credibility problems.
Already personally rich, Gaetz has only ever wanted one thing: relevance. And his path forward seemed obvious to anyone who’d ever known him. At the end of 2025, he would run for governor of his home state—and, given his relationship with Trump, he seemed likely to win the GOP primary. Serving two years at the helm of Trump’s Justice Department could help Gaetz in that quest; even if his nomination were to be blocked, he could campaign as a victim of the “deep state” and the GOP establishment.
Yet all of Gaetz’s planning fell apart. After initially voting not to release the report, the ethics panel took a second, secret vote earlier this month in which all five Democrats on the panel, plus two of its Republicans, chose to make their findings public. This morning, Gaetz filed a restraining order against the House panel to halt the official release, accusing the committee of an “unconstitutional” attempt “to exercise jurisdiction over a private citizen.” That last-ditch effort failed.
After standing down from consideration as attorney general, Gaetz was being wooed by Newsmax, a TV network owned by the Trump ally Christopher Ruddy, where Gaetz has previously guest-hosted. But with the unreleased ethics report still hanging over his head, Gaetz instead accepted a role anchoring a show on OANN, a significantly smaller and less influential network. “If it gets much worse, he’s gonna be on public access,” Schorsch said. Some observers I spoke with expect Gaetz to relocate to San Diego, where OANN is based, which is nearly 3,000 miles from the Trump White House—far enough that it might as well be Mars.
Some in MAGA world have come to Gaetz’s defense: Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, said today on his War Room podcast that the ethics report is “a big nothingburger” and encouraged Gaetz to “go full Harper Valley PTA” by returning to Congress on January 3 to take the oath of office—which Gaetz could technically do, given that he was reelected to his seat in November. Bannon called OANN a “great little channel,” but said Gaetz could do better than being a talk-show host: “You’ve got enough crazy people like Tucker Carlson and myself yelling in microphones,” he said. “We need a man in the arena.”
Gaetz has already mused about a plan for revenge that would force other House members to disclose their sexual-harassment settlements. “He’s lashing out because he knows it’s over,” the former Republican lawmaker from Florida told me.
Trump has not seemed eager to jump to Gaetz’s defense. After Gaetz withdrew from the AG race, the president-elect posted on Truth Social the kind of message you might read in your high-school yearbook from a loose acquaintance: “Matt has a wonderful future, and I look forward to watching all of the great things he will do!”
In two years’ time, Gaetz might still run for Florida governor. But his chances of success have dwindled, allegation by toxic allegation. “Who knows” whether Gaetz will try to run, the former Republican legislator texted me. “This isn’t being MAGA or America first. This is being a disgrace.” Gaetz’s implosion has probably made it easier for Trump and his allies to begin consolidating their support behind a candidate in a crowded field. “I know the bar has been lowered for what is acceptable behavior out of our politicians, but Florida voters know a creep when they see one,” Schorsch said.
Gaetz’s superpower has always been his ability to find the spotlight and stay stubbornly in it. Yet he will have a hard time accepting his ouster from the white-hot center of MAGA world during a new Trump administration and adjusting to a new perch far outside the perimeter. At OANN, Gaetz could engineer a way to make himself relevant once again—transforming himself into a media personality with influence and reach. But for now at least, Gaetz’s winning streak is over.
Out of an estimated 1,350 active volcanoes worldwide, about 45 have continuing eruptions, and about 80 erupt each year, spewing steam, ash, toxic gases, and lava. In 2024, erupting volcanoes included the Villarrica volcano in Chile, Mount Lewotobi Laki Laki in Indonesia, the Sundhnúksgígar crater chain in Iceland, Popocatepetl volcano in Mexico, Mount Etna in Sicily, Shiveluch volcano in Russia, and more. Collected below are scenes from the wide variety of volcanic activity on Earth over the past year.
To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.
For centuries, eggnog has been a part of America’s Christmas festivities. George Washington was rumored to have his own recipe, and the concoction was the catalyst of a riot at West Point in the wee hours of Christmas morning 1826. Today, the grocery chain Kroger sells nearly 3 million gallons of the drink each year.
But for a drink with so much tradition, eggnog has long divided Christmas tables. When BuzzFeed ran an article in 2016 titled “Eggnog Is Delicious and If You Disagree You’re Wrong,” it was paired with a missive the same day calling the drink “Absolute Garbage.” In 2017, when the Today show polled its audience about whether they liked eggnog, people were almost evenly split between those who thought it was disgusting and those who found it delicious. And these days, TikTok is laden with videos of people complaining about eggnog’s smell and taste—and with others mixing it into cereal and soda.
Growing up, I was never an eggnog lover. The premade, nonalcoholic version my parents would buy from the store wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t good, either. I felt obligated to gulp it down in the name of Christmas, but surely there had to be a better option. These days, eggnog has become my favorite Christmas treat. Everything changed when I discovered that a better eggnog is hiding in plain sight. It is called coquito. The creation, which is sometimes referred to as Puerto Rican eggnog, swaps the drink’s traditional base of cream and eggs for coconut milk and condensed milk. Puerto Ricans traditionally make the cocktail during the Christmas season, and then give some away to friends and neighbors. That’s how classic eggnog died for me: A few years back, a Puerto Rican family moved across the street from my parents and gave us a bottle of coquito. The drink looked and smelled like eggnog, but once it hit my tongue, I realized it was lighter, more flavorful, and just less weird. And yet, in mainland America, coquito remains a novelty. What if the problem with eggnog is just that many of us are drinking the wrong kind?
The fundamental deficiency with eggnog is, well, eggs. The drink’s raw eggs turn it into an easy vector for salmonella. That can make for a not-so-merry Christmas, leading to vomiting, diarrhea, and fever. If you’re old or immunocompromised, tainted eggnog can even be deadly. In the early 1980s, five seniors died after drinking homemade eggnog at a New Jersey nursing home.
I was determined not to land myself on the toilet this December when I decided to try a number of different eggnog recipes in the hopes of better understanding the most hated Christmas beverage. The exact ingredients vary, but at its core, eggnog is eggs, cream, milk, sugar, and, often, liquor (usually rum or whiskey) that are whisked together. The result, says Dan Pashman, the host of The Sporkful podcast, is more like “drinkable alcoholic cake” than a traditional cocktail. (An eggnog aficionado, he makes the Joy of Cooking recipe every year, which calls for 12 egg yolks, a pound of confectioners’ sugar, and two quarts of cream.)
But making homemade eggnog that’s safe is easier said than done. Most store-bought versions use pasteurized eggs, but I couldn’t find those at my local Trader Joe’s. Aging alcoholic eggnog in the fridge has also been proven to kill off the bacteria, but my brain would not allow me to accept that letting anything sit around for weeks could make it safer to consume. I found tempering the eggs to be the most tenable solution, but the process of heating the cream, slowly whisking it into a bowl of eggs, and then letting it cool before serving was one big, messy chore.
Eggs don’t just make the drink risky; they are also why so many people find eggnog unappealing. The texture of traditional versions is gloopy, closer to melted ice cream than anything else. Chefs have attempted to remedy this by whipping the egg whites to add some airiness, but even then, the result is plenty thick. Then there’s the flavor of eggnog. James Briscione, a chef and co-author of The Flavor Matrix, told me that most of the flavor from classic eggnog comes from the rum, because cream and eggs “are both relatively flavor-neutral.” Although people with a discerning palate might savor the caramel notes imparted on the rum from barrel aging, all I tasted was booze and dairy. Store-bought eggnog solves this flavor deficit through an extraordinary amount of sugar and spices, perhaps why more than one online commentator has compared it to cough medicine.
Either way, there is a better way to sip a creamy alcoholic drink that actually tastes like something without having to resort to saccharine premade nog. Instead of searching for the subtle coconutty notes in eggnog, coquito puts the aroma front and center. And the drink’s main ingredients, coconut milk and rum, go perfectly together. “The fruity esters and tropical notes that are coming from a coconut fit really well with those Maillard flavors—the toasting and roasting—that you see particularly in rum,” Briscione said.
Coquito has none of eggnog’s problems. The drink doesn’t need eggs to be luxurious; it achieves that texture through the inclusion of sweet, sticky condensed milk. (Some recipes also call for evaporated milk and cream of coconut, which results in a drink that’s even more luscious.) And it’s remarkably easy to make. When I made the drink earlier this month, I cut my finger opening a can of condensed milk and then dropped a spoon into the blender in a fit of pain-induced negligence. But the recipe still took only five minutes to complete. One classic-eggnog recipe I made, which involved separating out the yolks and egg whites, took three times as long, even without the same mishaps.
It might seem odd to adopt a Caribbean cocktail for the holidays if you don’t already live in the tropics. Coconut and rum seem more apt for sunbathing by the pool (hello, piña coladas!), than gathering around a Christmas fire. But don’t let that scare you. The coconut is subtle and balanced with a festive dash of cinnamon. If you crave a cocktail apt for sweater weather, coquito still fits the bill.
Christmas is a holiday of tradition: The decorations, the food, and the familiar rituals tend to stay the same. Even the movie selections don’t change much year to year, despite the fact that so many of us already know the dangers of a Red Ryder BB gun, and that “every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.” But the holiday isn’t actually as static as it seems. More than a century ago, goose was served at Christmas dinner. Now turkey is a staple. The candles that used to illuminate Christmas trees have thankfully been replaced by electric lights. And hardly anyone makes figgy pudding anymore, despite whatever “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” says. The core spirits of these centuries-long traditions still exist; they’ve just been updated for modern times. It’s time for eggnog to get an upgrade too.
Maybe it’s the time of year, but I’ve been thinking lately about Nora, the whirling, frantic heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, overspending on Christmas presents, quietly operating her household in ways that go unseen, twisting herself into knots of gaiety and performance that can only unravel. Relationships can endure an awful lot, the play asserts, but not false intimacy—not the pretense of something that should be sacred. A Doll’s House also underscores how easy it is to get trapped playing a part, particularly one that’s lavishly rewarded.
Romy (played by Nicole Kidman), the unexploded bombshell around whom the new film Babygirl is built, is one of Nora’s heirs. So is Helen (Keira Knightley), the grinning politician’s wife and dutiful mother of twins in the Netflix series Black Doves, who happens to be a spy operating under deep, deep cover. Both Babygirl and Black Doves are set at Christmastime, which allows me to argue that the former is the most honest kind of Christmas movie—not a cheerful fable about a rotund home invader, but a ferocious portrait of a woman balancing right on the edge. And like Black Doves and A Doll’s House, the movie homes in on someone who is simultaneously dying to blow up her “perfect” life and clawing to protect it at all costs.
Since Halina Reijn’s movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival this summer, with Kidman claiming the Volpi Cup award for Best Actress, Babygirl has been provoking debate about its exploration of desire, deception, and power. Romy is the immaculately assembled and impossibly tense CEO of an automation company, whose pioneering work with robotics and artificial intelligence feels almost too on the nose. Romy is optimized, down to the subtle Botox shots that limit her expression and the high-femme power suits in dusky pink that register her as a compassionate girlboss. But is she human? As she attends her office holiday party, then her husband’s theatrical premiere (Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler), then her family’s Christmas dinner at their picture-perfect house outside New York City, Romy switches fluidly between different identities. None feels authentic, at least until a messy affair with the unsettling, slightly feral Samuel (Harris Dickinson) encourages her to try out a kind of role-play that’s wholly new.
Much has been made of Babygirl’s sex scenes, in which Samuel, who’s both disconcertingly fearless and bizarrely intuitive, senses that Romy wants someone to dominate her—not for humiliation and abjection, but as an expression of care. In the movie’s early moments, Romy straddles her husband, simulating orgasm, before rushing to her laptop to indulge in what really turns her on; she packs lunches for her two daughters wearing a rose-patterned apron, slipping in handwritten notes that will surely mortify them; she sits in her corner office, welcoming a new class of interns, Samuel among them. Each of these roles involves catering to others, but what Samuel understands is how much she longs to cede control, to abandon decision making, to be sternly told what to do. Reijn, who also wrote Babygirl, lightly suggests that Romy’s free-range childhood in a cult helps explain her eroticization of authority, but Romy’s craving for risk feels like more than that: It’s the only way she can critique her idealized existence. “There has to be danger,” she explains late in the movie, trying to understand what she really wants. “Things have to be at stake.” The push-pull between safety and survival is the movie’s most fascinating element. As Nora says to an old friend in A Doll’s House, faced with the possible airing of her secrets, “A wonderful thing is about to happen! … But also terrible, Kristine, and it just can’t happen, not for all the world.”
Through this lens, Kidman’s performance as Romy lingers long after the final act; it’s a disturbing mix of reticence and abandon, taut composure and elemental surrender. The movie is part and parcel of Kidman’s series of works in which she embodies artifice before imploding it as we watch. As an actor, she, too, seems drawn to risk, and to the freedom and fulfilment that can come with acquiescing to another person’s creative vision. Before she was a director, Reijn was a classically trained actor, playing an “unkempt and suicidal” Hedda Gabler (as one profile put it), among other roles, before developing debilitating stage fright in her late 30s. What both she and Kidman seem to want to say with Romy is that no loneliness is more profound than realizing that you don’t know yourself at all—and that the comforts and milestones you once yearned for have become anchors that threaten to pull you under.
Helen (not her real name), Knightley’s undercover operative on Black Doves, operates within much the same space as Romy and Nora: Her family is one enormous lie that she will fight to the death to maintain. The Netflix series, written by Joe Barton (the creator of the underrated crime thriller Giri/Haji), is a darkly funny, thrillingly brutal, ludicrously self-aware yarn about underground crime networks, diplomatic crises, and espionage. Like Babygirl, though, it’s also about human connection, and the untrammelled joy of being with the people who make you feel most yourself. Helen is a member of a private spy syndicate called the Black Doves, operated by an elegant woman known only as Mrs. Reed (Sarah Lancashire). Unlike spies who serve their country, the Black Doves work for cash, selling secrets to the highest bidder. When Helen was recruited, it was because Reed sensed she was a thrill seeker with a flair for violence and a cool head in a crisis. For 10 years, “Helen” has been married to a Conservative member of Parliament who’s now the secretary of defense, bearing his children and stealing his files. In the first episode, we learn that (a) she’s been having an affair, seeking some release from the constraints of her fake day-to-day existence, and (b) her lover has been murdered, setting off a trail of bloody retribution and the near-constant threat of exposure. (The effort of maintaining her triple life, at one point, almost gets her killed when her daughter FaceTimes her while Helen is hiding from assassins.)
Barton appears to enjoy juxtaposing the banality of Helen’s life as a wife and mother—flawlessly hosting her husband’s holiday work party, sticking jewels on a crown for a Nativity costume—with the extravagant action of her secret life. Helen has been styled (intentionally, it seems) to look just like Kate, Princess of Wales: hair in long, loose waves; dressed in an endless array of expensive sweaters; and smiling, smiling, smiling. In one scene, Reed describes Helen as “a coiled spring,” and the latter’s performance of holiday jollity is so committed that you can only faintly sense her cracking at the edges. When Helen finds herself in danger, Reed summons her former work partner, Sam (Ben Whishaw), and his pairing with Helen is, for me at least, what makes the show so fun. “Hello, darling,” Sam tells her, immediately after blowing the head off one of her assailants with a shotgun. Helen, covered in more blood than Carrie at prom, crumples in joy and gratitude. “I can’t believe you’re here,” she sighs.
Black Doves is best appreciated if you don’t think too hard about the logical holes in the plot and simply enjoy the spectacle. But there’s also much more to Helen than one might expect from the genre: more sympathy for how suffocated she is by her sham marriage, her own perfect display of domesticity, her unexpectedly tender impulses as a mother, which ruin her ability to just do her job. The show’s most ruthless bosses are all women—Lancashire’s Reed, Kathryn Hunter as the wormily sinister director of a league of assassins, Tracey Ullman in a cameo I won’t spoil—which suggests that they’re all adept with secrets. For Helen, though, her fake life has become so dominant that it’s superseded her identity as a person in her own right. “I wake up sometimes and I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, Sam, because I have no idea who I am,” she says in one scene. “And neither does anyone else.”
In the end, Black Doves suggests that Helen, like Romy, might be better off at home, but that her fearlessness and risk-taking have shown her something about what she actually wants. Late in the series, confronted in a shop by an interloper who has tried to infiltrate her family, Helen throttles her with a pearl necklace—that loaded symbol of class and status—then lets her go, shrieking, “I’m still Helen Webb, and Helen Webb doesn’t stab girls to death in jewelry stores on Christmas Eve.” I laughed at the line, and at Knightley’s regal meltdown. But it also seems to signal that all of Helen’s adventures have led her to a better understanding of herself, and to acceptance. That shift is enabled by Sam, who really does see her, and—better—sees someone worth knowing. It’s the kind of validation that can make everything else about her life and her Christmas—the strategizing, the emotional regulation, the smiling—just that much easier to bear.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
