Sara Freeman on How Marriages Implode

“The Posting” is a new story by Sara Freeman. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Freeman and Katherine Hu, an assistant editor for the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Katherine Hu: In your short story, “The Posting,” a family spends a year in West Berlin while the father is away on a reporting assignment. The narrative is set against the backdrop of German reunification, but focuses on the quotidian experiences of a family. Tell us about this contrast.

Sara Freeman: The story, rather than being a direct expression of a historical moment, is about the impressionistic way history might register in the individual or familial psyche. The child narrator is in flux; the family is in flux; the place is in flux. The interaction between these three elements is the territory of this story.

Within the story, Frankie, the narrator, has taken on the role of family journalist: While the father reports on major world events, the child reports on the family’s innermost workings. This meant, as the writer, staying true to the child’s perspective and seeing the world at her eye line. Frankie’s reporting is sensory, emotional, built on her keen observation of the day-to-day. But since the narration is retrospective, this day-to-day takes on, with over two decades of remove, something like historical significance.

Hu: One afternoon at a public pool, the mother befriends a young couple named Frank and Sabine. A sudden and surprising intimacy develops between Sabine and the mother. What motivates Sabine’s side of this friendship?

Freeman: I hope that this story provides the opportunity for multiple readings of all the relationships within it. There is certainly one reading in which Sabine is interested in taking advantage of this family’s naiveté. Perhaps she is using them for their relative wealth and benefiting from their momentary vulnerability. There’s a second reading in which the mother’s quiet charisma attracts the attention of a younger woman and a real friendship occurs. Finally, there’s an even more banal possibility: Sabine is a student who is outgoing and bored one summer day. She meets a Canadian woman at a public pool and seeks an opportunity of momentary distraction. In this reading, the sense of threat is simply a projection on the part of the narrator and her brother. These children, far from home, separated from their father, are primed to see danger in the most innocent of situations.

Hu: “The Posting” is narrated by the daughter, looking back on the story as an adult. There are moments where her innocence still peeks through to color her memories. Did you ever consider telling it from a younger point in her life?

Freeman: The story came to me this way, as a retrospective narration, with a 35-year-old woman recalling her impressions and feelings as an 11-year-old girl moving abroad for the first time. There is certainly a reason—psychological or circumstantial in nature—for this woman to revisit this important phase in her life at this precise moment, and yet, this explanation stays off the page. This internal necessity creates a sense of narrative tension beyond the immediate events of the story.

I was also thinking of writers I admire greatly, such as Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, who in their stories create a kind of durational consciousness, a layered sense of self shaped in the gaps between event and retelling. Without this added dimension of analysis, of adult interpretation, the writing of this story would have been far less interesting to me, and ultimately less interesting to the reader.

Hu: Your story has a lovely sense of atmosphere, a verisimilitude that accrues through detail. How much of the events were drawn from your own life?

Freeman: On the one hand, this is very autobiographical: My father, like Frankie’s, was a foreign correspondent in the 1990s in Berlin, and my family moved there for his posting. On the other hand, the characters themselves, the family dynamics, and what transpires with the young German couple, are decidedly fictional. And yet, many of Frankie’s feelings were mine. Just like Frankie, those couple of years I spent in Berlin were foundational to my sense of self. My impressions of that time have remained, decades later, extremely vivid, and it was a pleasure to pour some of them into this story. I don’t know if I would have become a writer without this early move, without this terrifying sense both of my smallness in the face of an exponentially enlarged world and the electrifying experience of separateness and subjectivity that this confrontation granted me.

Hu: The mother begins to act out, and her behavior changes as a result of her friendship with Sabine—not paying the train fare on a dare, drinking multiple beers. Are these changes a reemergence of who she truly is or a deviation from it?

Freeman: That’s an interesting question, and one that suggests that there is a “true” self to deviate from or return to. Throughout “The Posting,” Frankie contends with her mother’s unknowability. She observes her mother’s every gesture, every change in mood, and yet in some ways her mother, by the end, remains a mystery. I do think that there’s a kind of myopia born out of familial intimacy. Just as seeing oneself clearly is a life’s labor, so, too, is discerning one’s parents, one’s siblings.

What we do know is that Frankie’s mother met her father when she was 19. In marrying him, she foreclosed many other experiences such as completing her studies, or having a social and romantic life that one might expect of a woman in her 20s. And so her time in Berlin, and encounter with Sabine in particular, become the occasion for her to explore these submerged parts of herself—whether unearthed from before or yet to be experienced.

Hu: Philip, the son, grows to resent his mother for her attachment to the couple, and successfully tries to end the friendship. But later, when his mother divorces his father, Philip blames everyone in the family but her. Why?

Freeman: Philip’s resentment is part of a general adolescent acting out in the wake of his family’s rupture. He blames those who are closest at hand—his father and sister. Implied in the story is a proximity, maybe even an overidentification, between mother and son, which persists even when the family is physically broken up and she is out of the picture.

He is, in some ways, the most conservative of all the characters. He wants his family as they were before the move: the old life, old school, old neighbors. He feels the beginning of the end more acutely than anyone else, and acts out this presentiment through small but meaningful acts of rebellion throughout the story. In Berlin, in his father’s absence, he takes on the role of “father” by watching out for their expenses and warding off the “bad influence” of Sabine and Frank. When his mother leaves, perhaps he feels a need to lash out at his remaining family to maintain his fantasy of how their family once was.

Hu: The narrator describes the year in Berlin as an interwar period for their family. Do you imagine that their marriage was doomed from the start?

Freeman: This points back to whether we believe in a fixed self, in the inevitability built into each character’s tragic flaw. In this reading of the self, I suppose one could argue that contained in every marriage is the possibility of its implosion, the DNA of its demise. And yet, Frankie also admits to sensing a complicity between her parents, one that she and her brother are fundamentally excluded from. There are closed doors in this story that no amount of retrospection can open. I, for one, can certainly picture a version of this story in which the family stays together; yet I’m not sure this would represent a happier ending.

Hu: What new projects are you working on at the moment?

Freeman: I’m currently circling a few projects: a couple of short stories, and a very early draft of a novel. I say circling because I’m at the stage in all of these projects when I haven’t quite committed to them, haven’t quite found my way into them. I tend to spend a lot of time on the dock before diving into the water.