I didn’t know I had burning questions about the US Postal Service (USPS) until I started reading Stephen Starring Grant’s Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home.
The book opens in March 2020 with Grant at Charlotte, North Carolina, airport: “I noticed the business lounge nearly empty. The whole place was library quiet. It was a weird, haunted-house feeling, like I was in the establishing shot of a science fiction film…. You didn’t need to be an epidemiologist or government contingency planner to know that we were all going someplace new, probably bad.”
Grant had spent years in New York and other big cities, working as a consultant and brand strategist. When he lost his job at a boutique marketing agency, the timing could not have been worse. He was 50, newly diagnosed with prostate cancer, and his family’s main breadwinner. In short, he’s in “F**k City”.
Like many in the first wave of Covid-19 layoffs, he was desperate for work and health insurance. He ended up back in his hometown of Blacksburg, Virginia, taking an unlikely job as a rural mail carrier in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Grant tells his story in a hilarious, exuberant, patriotic and sobering memoir about the daily grind of postal work, service, belonging, and what it means to reconnect with a community during a time of national crisis.
After a two-week intro to the job, he has to swear an Oath of Office and become a sworn agent of the US government. “We all opened up our white handbooks. There it was. Not a pledge, but an oath. As legally binding, morally charged, and spiritually consequential as a wedding vow. Except that instead of being between me, my wife, and whatever higher power I recognised, this was between me, the Constitution, and the American people.”
The job was tougher than he imagined. Before a carrier even leaves the post office each morning, there’s the dreaded task of “casing” the mail — sorting letters, magazines, and parcels into precise delivery order. Grant compares it to building a library, loading it into a truck, and then dispersing it house by house along a 95km route. Get it wrong, and you add hours to an already punishing day.
Then came the physical strain. Carriers work through freezing winters as low as minus 8°C, sweltering summers and heavy rain, hauling packages up to 30kg. Shoulder injuries are common, especially torn rotator cuffs. Dogs are a constant hazard, with thousands of attacks reported each year, and wasps or bees often nest in mailboxes. And always in the background is the risk of violence, however rare.
Grant comes to see himself as part of a lineage stretching back to Benjamin Franklin, appointed the first postmaster-general in 1775.
“In the test scenario for our final,” he writes, “there was no aptitude score for driving on the right-hand side in a left-hand drive car or delivering in 100 degree [fahrenheit, 38°C] heat, no questions on how to recognise when a mailbox is concealing a black widow spider, no evaluations on how to recover a mail truck from an ice-filled ditch, how to deal with armed citizenry, dog attacks, or literally psychotic customers.”
Humour runs through the book. Grant calls Frost Cherry Gatorade “the unofficial flavour of the USPS” and treats Slim Jims warmed on a dashboard as Appalachian haute cuisine. His route brought him everything from respirators and heirloom tomato seeds to Lord of the Rings merchandise. One man announces that he used his stimulus check to buy “the sword that smote Sauron”. Another leaves coffee in the mailbox as a thank you on freezing mornings. A widow shows him the model train set she built after her husband’s death. A neighbour passes along her weekly Economist issues, until Grant quips that at the end of time the only thing left will be unread copies of the magazine.
As Covid-19 wore on, Grant realised his role carried more weight. He wasn’t just delivering dog food and Amazon parcels; for many, especially the elderly, the mailman was their only human contact. He writes that what he delivered was not only letters but, “Continuity. Safety. Normalcy. Companionship. Civilisation. You know, the stuff that a government is supposed to do for its people.”
Postal behemoth
Mailman is also about institutions. Grant comes to see himself as part of a lineage stretching back to Benjamin Franklin, appointed the first postmaster-general in 1775. Today’s US Postal Service, the world’s largest, moves billions of items each year. Unlike most federal agencies, it takes no taxpayer money, surviving on stamps, postage and services alone.
He’s angered by how, before the 2020 election, the USPS became a political target. An organisation once celebrated for its reliability was mocked as bloated and inefficient, just as Americans relied on it for medicine, cheques, ballots and even lube. He casts Louis DeJoy, the Trump-appointed postmaster-general, as the chief villain. DeJoy’s cost-cutting moves, from slashing overtime to removing sorting machines, slowed delivery and eroded public trust in the institution.
Yet he stresses that the carriers themselves are not the problem, their camaraderie reminding him of line cooks: exhausted, sometimes cynical, but united by a shared mission. For many, the work feels like a calling. Grant reconnects with the land and people of Appalachia. “I was the guy with the goods,” he writes, “but I carried more than the mail. I carried my family’s future, my own fear of illness, and a desire to belong to something greater than myself.”
While faith in public institutions is low, Mailman is a timely, thoroughly engrossing story about the dignity of public service. Grant insists that being a mailman, like being a firefighter or marine, is a “Halloween job” — a role instantly recognisable and trusted by the people.
As he puts it, “We carry it for you. That is the letter carrier’s work. Since this nation’s birth, we have carried the mail for you — your endowment, yours just for having the good luck to be born American or having the heart to become one. We carry it. And then we head home to our families and brace ourselves. We pray for strength and then get up and do it all again. To the last mile. Every letter, every parcel, every day.”
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