Stephen Starring Grant. Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2025. $29.99. 304 pp.
In 2020, Stephen Starring Grant lost his job in marketing. This happened to many during COVID, but the timing was especially bad for Grant, because he had a wife and children—and cancer. Grant needed healthcare benefits. Lacking other options, he became a rural carrier associate for the United States Postal Service. He worked where he lived—Blacksburg, VA, an Appalachian college town that is home to Virginia Tech. Mailman is about the year Grant spent as a postal carrier, a year he believes “saved my life, taught me who I was, and educated me deeply about a country I had lost touch with.”
Mailman includes the kind of tales you would expect in a book like this. There is an intense dog encounter, there is bad weather, there are salty old hands working the routes, a few awkward customer encounters, and a lot of carrying things. Grant describes the vehicles mailmen drive, the process of sorting the mail (which carriers do), and how to pack the truck well. Chapters may contain new-to-you information, like the difference between rural and urban carriers—rural carriers provide their own vehicle and do not have to wear the same uniform. Grant also reminds readers of something we should know but maybe don’t—that the United States Postal Service generally does not receive taxpayer money but supports itself via the sale of stamps and other goods and services.
Grant himself grew up in Blacksburg, an island of scientific and technology research in western Virginia. He had some Appalachian grandparents on his father’s side—but his Appalachian father was also a professor at Virginia Tech. Grant dwells between these two worlds. He always carries a pocketknife, he knows about guns, but he’s never been deer hunting. He lives in a modern house and enjoys reading The Economist and helps people use behavioral economics for marketing, but he can fall back on “yes, ma’am” quickly and easily. In some of the chapters, Grant addresses Appalachian culture and identity directly—the know-how, the resilience, the likelihood to be packing heat—but this book has no deep anthropological angle and does not try to tie everything back to cultural heritage. But Grant learns more about where he is from with every delivery run. He has a much better understanding of his community once he learns the names on the routes, gets to know other mail carriers, and needs his GPS far less often.
This book is the product of timing in multiple ways. Grant’s experience as a rural carrier would not have occurred except for COVID and was probably more interesting because of it. It was certainly more grueling during a time when Amazon decided to play hardball with UPS and shift their deliveries to USPS. Furthermore, in terms of topics and themes, the book has it all: a white-collar guy forced into a blue-collar job; a regular civilian becoming a public servant and representing the government at a time when people are skeptical of the government; and the emotional quest to feel at home in one’s own hometown. It is also a book about spiritual disorientation and how one man got himself reoriented while delivering rural mail.
Timing, furthermore, is very relevant to Mailman because the USPS has been under attack both in the present Trump administration and the previous one. Grant defends the USPS in various places in this book, explaining its history and significance, and why it should remain a trusted institution. The USPS is a non-profit that pays for itself. The U.S. government only pays for mail when it relies on the USPS as a customer. Despite occasional mistakes, the USPS is quite efficient. Started by Ben Franklin, it is enshrined in our Constitution. Grant argues that the USPS is also inspiring. After all, it is a bunch of ordinary people working together to do something that is logistically extraordinary, with very basic equipment, for the good of their neighbors. The entire system is solidified by trust.
Grant took his role as public servant very seriously during his time as a mailman. He describes the deep feeling of patriotism he had when he took the oath to serve as “an adult version of patriotism. An adult version of love, where you love something for its best parts.” Being a representative of the U.S. government was perhaps especially significant when people were isolated at home because of COVID and sometimes very angry at the government. He was sometimes a rare outside human contact for people. As he emphasizes, “During the pandemic, the Postal Service held the country together.” Grant’s time with the USPS gave him a laboratory for experiencing and evaluating public trust within society. At times, he waxes philosophic about America and the lessons he learned: “Reminding us that we are a people, that our job is to love and protect each other, that our government at its best is us, and that when we are alone, we are still together, joined by ideas, history, correspondence, chicken feed, and refrigerators. Out of many, one.”
Grant’s story sits naturally at the intersection of many public interest topics that continue to be relevant. How could anyone write about 2020 mail delivery without some commentary on public trust? How could anyone not write about being a public servant after years of working for for-profit corporations and pursuing the advancement of the self? In a reminder of his connection to local events, his father was shot and wounded by the Virginia Tech shooter. Grant shares his opinions about all these in places, but he is not too preachy. Occasionally he seems to be a little too intent on hitting relevant issues, but this commentary never overtakes the narrative. There are plenty of passages describing questionable deliveries and some profanity-filled explanations about his situation. Mailman walks the line of making its “relevancy” its appeal.
One thing that saves Mailman from being too topical is Grant’s family history. He grew up in Blacksburg and his parents still live there. His reflections on his inheritance and family relationships are often moving. It turns out that 2020 was one of his mother’s last good years before her mental decline. Another thing that makes Mailman less topical (and more interesting) is Grant’s personal growth. Mailman is, in some ways, a classic tale of midlife crisis—career dissatisfaction, cancer, concern about not being where one should be. In his description of himself, Grant alternates between pride in his emerging abilities as a mailman and his recognition of his inferiority compared with many other carriers. He sometimes thinks of himself as unlike other mailmen, with his economics background and corporate backstory. And then a customer sees him as “just” a mailman. He is smart enough to create some of his own job hacks, but he is still capable of being completely overwhelmed.
2020 was a very hard year for Grant, but it made him a better person. One theme in Mailman is Grant’s anger and depression, his attempts to recognize them, and his historic inability to tame them. But while carrying the mail, something shifted. With patient help from his wife, he gained control over his anger: “It wasn’t a complete transformation. It wasn’t perfection. But I changed. People who knew me noticed.” His time delivering the mail also delivered something of a spiritual awakening. Grant had more than one oceanic experience while out on his route. He found himself beginning to sometimes pray and beginning to grasp the presence of the transcendent.
Like packages we receive in the mail, not all chapters are the same. At times, the book soars. Grant has a real facility with prose. He makes liberal use of profanity, but in ways that reflect his circumstances and show some of his personality. His descriptions of his encounters and even of loading his vehicle are very good. Mailman contains many threads, but not all are tied off. Grant’s cancer is what began this journey, but we hear next to nothing about it. His wife and daughters sometimes appear, but we learn relatively little about them. These absences seem surprising in a memoir. On the other hand, so much of Mailman is written from a perspective that seems to fit the experience of being a man alone on the road with his thoughts, delivering the mail for hours and trying not to get hypothermia again.
Overall, Mailman is an entertaining read. Grant is good at selecting anecdotes and delivering information. You will learn the preferred mailbox and Gatorade flavor of postal workers. Occasionally, Grant seems to be straining to hit a hot button issue. Also, Mailman does not deliver as many wildlife encounters as you would expect from the subtitle about the author’s “wild ride delivering the mail in Appalachia.” Still, it very much delivers on one man’s journey in delivering the mail in Appalachia and in finding himself and home. The home he finds is not just Blacksburg, Virginia, but the life he has. He realizes that his year delivering the mail was not a detour or a misstep. He reflects, “I’ve learned to recognize that my home is in this timeline, this moment, in this slice of space.” That is a lesson many of us would benefit from learning or at least reading about.
