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.
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
