The Postmistress
by Sarah Blake
June 2011 Book Pick

Iris James is the postmistress who takes her job seriously. Every move she makes is by the book. She would never take advantage of the townspeople or her beloved post office, until one day when she does just that.

Frankie Bard is a radio broadcaster who is heard throughout the United States; the voice that people listen to for updates on the war. She persuades her boss to allow her to go overseas to broadcast live so that people can hear the true voices of war.

Emma Fitch is a newlywed, just married to the town doctor. She is alone in the world except for her new husband. When tragedy strikes, Dr. Fitch decides to head overseas to help those in need.

These three women are tested time and again. They need to determine if their news is meant to be shared or better off kept to themselves. This is a story about determination, about facing hardships when you feel alone. Can one live a "normal" life while there is a war going on?

Discussion Questions

1. As a newlywed, would you have fought for your husband to stay home when he didn't have to go overseas during the war? What do think about Emma?
2. Iris did something unspeakable. Would you have done the same? Why or why not?
3. If you had the opportunity to speak to people who are going through horrible tragedies to get their voices heard, would you? What do you think of Frankie Bard?

Book Club Discussion: Interview with Sarah Blake, author of The Postmistress

I love that Frankie Bard was the narrator! I didn't pick up on that at first. Why did you decide to use her voice for this story?

The further I got into the drafts of this novel, the more I realized that Frankie's situation--someone who is both inside a war and outside of it (living it and telling about it)--was the most generative, most interesting position from which to frame the novel. Many people ask why the novel is called The Postmistress, when first of all Iris considers herself a postmaster, and second of all it seems that Frankie is the main character, not Iris; and I think I realized that if Frankie is telling the story, then of course Iris is at the center of it. Because without Iris's withholding of the news, Frankie's moral conundrum would never have arisen. In part, Iris's gesture is the catalyst for Frankie's breakdown, for the way in which the war really came home to roost.

Book Club Discussion: Interview with Sarah Blake, author of The Postmistress

"What happens to a story around its edges? Will had asked. What happens after the part you gave us?" I have always wondered about this but didn't realize I did until reading this line. How do you feel after your story is written? Do you ever wonder what happens next to the characters?

Well, in terms of my own story--honestly, these characters lived with me for eight years and so when they finally came to the end, they were really gone, I didn't and don't wonder about them anymore. But Will's question is my own, and it never goes away. I just watched Davis Guggenheim's "Waiting for Superman" this weekend and the fact that there are four children out there--real children and their real parents--who didn't win the school lottery and so who are back in the classrooms they tried to get out of, is haunting me. I'm trying to figure out what to do, about it!

Book Club Discussion: Interview with Sarah Blake, author of The Postmistress

In this technological world, do you feel as if we always receive everything that we are intended to receive? Emails can be sent and lost in cyberspace as easily as a letter can be. Emails can be deleted by unintended recipients just as a postmistress can tuck away a letter that wasn't meant for her. What makes The Postmistress so different?

You are absolutely right--cyber technology can often wreak more havoc than plain old machinery! Perhaps the difference has to do with the amount of time that can go by before a mistake like that is caught--enough time for a story to grow up in the silence, and for an alternative path to get set down.

Book Club Discussion: Interview with Sarah Blake, author of The Postmistress

In the Story Behind the Story you mention that you wonder if your mail carrier knows things/secrets about others. Would you want to be put in that position? What would you have done in Iris' or Frankie's place?

I imagine that it would be irresistible to work in a post office and not pay attention to various secrets that strayed in your path. This seems one of the most human characteristics, the idle way in which we keep track of and take notice of other people's stories, how much we love to get details that add to our understanding of people whom we may know only in the most cursory sense. I think it's part of the human love of story, of narrative, of having bits that weave patterns.

Book Club Discussion: Interview with Sarah Blake, author of The Postmistress

Harry Vale was an interesting man. What was his importance to this story?

As I researched the novel, I thought a lot about World War I veterans and how they must have greeted the news as the world gathered its forces to begin another war--within twenty years of the end of the last one--and Harry's character arose out of my thinking about this. The idea that he was paying attention long before others were--or wanted to--generated his decision to climb to the top of the tower, to the bemusement of the town. Like Frankie, and like Iris, Harry's character offers another glimpse at the question of how we pay attention, how we prepare.

Book Club Discussion: Interview with Sarah Blake, author of The Postmistress

Can you tell us what you are working on next?

I'm working on a novel that moves back and forth between 1959 and 2009 and follows two generations of the same old money family. The novel takes place in the family's big old summer house in Maine, so the characters move in and out of the same rooms, walk the same paths, drink from the same cups, but their stories don't overlap. The 1959 section centers around a fateful weekend in August of that year, whose secrets reverberate but are never told aloud. I'm interested in the ways in which families echo and foreshadow each other--how we can walk upon the same terrain as our parents and never know how we follow them.

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