A: Over the past few years I’ve observed with increasing concern how passionately people on all sides have committed themselves to their political beliefs, in the same way the young Communists of the 1930s—when Stalin’s extremely effective propaganda coincided with a disastrous period in the history of capitalism—became personally invested in communism. Many were disillusioned as events unfolded, but the Cambridge spies, who were all brilliantly intelligent, highly educated men, continued to justify and even double down on their ideological commitments throughout the murderous purges and the forced collectivizations, the Ukraine famine and the Nazi-Soviet pact. Why? Because communism offered you a sense of belonging to a quasi-religious movement that delivered a systemic explanation for the world around you, together with a vision for a future utopia, both of which fulfill core human emotional needs. As in a religious sect, you’re willing to sacrifice everything else to your convictions, because these convictions have become essential to a personal narrative of heroic selfhood standing in moral opposition to unbelievers, and—crucially—in community with co-religionists. Through that lens, the Cambridge spies—and hundreds of other ideologically motivated operatives—were able to view their betrayals and sabotage as noble, courageous acts in the service of humanity, despite the deadly consequences to friends, colleagues, and the millions of people living behind the Iron Curtain. You have only to glance at Twitter today to see how these ego defense mechanisms continue to manifest—in orthodoxy and denunciation, in anger and intolerance for criticism, in rationalization of contradictory facts—as the personal and the political merge inside the fragile self.

Q: What is most striking about your main characters, twin sisters Iris and Ruth, is their deep devotion to each other, even if they don’t see eye to eye. Family devotion is a reoccurring theme in your novels, and Our Woman in Moscow is centered on the deepest bonds of sisterhood. Why did you write Iris and Ruth as twins? Why do these themes of family bonds run through your novels?

A: Again and again in my novels, I find myself returning to the fundamental human tension between public and private obligations, because it seems to me that our lives depend on how we resolve this dilemma. Life’s greatest joys and miseries arise from our connections to other human beings, and the connections between siblings are so often the most complicated mix of all—the closer the family connection, after all, the deeper the hurt of betrayal. I created Ruth and Iris as twin sisters to raise these stakes to their highest, because Our Woman in Moscow is essentially a book about human relationships and human loyalty, and what happens when we’re forced to choose between fidelity to our chosen beliefs and fidelity to the people we love.