The Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

by Stephen Starring Grant Narrated by Stephen Starring Grant

Overview

An exuberant, hilarious, and profound memoir by a mailman in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, who found that working for the post office saved his life, taught him who he was, gave him purpose, and educated him deeply about a country he loves but had lost touch with.

Steve Grant was laid off in March of 2020. He was fifty and had cancer, so he needed health insurance, fast. Which is how he found himself a rural letter carrier in Appalachia, back in his old hometown.

Suddenly, he was the guy with the goods, delivering dog food and respirators and lube and heirloom tomato seeds and Lord of the Rings replica swords. He transported chicken feed to grandmothers living alone in the mountains and forded a creek with a refrigerator on his back. But while he carried the mail, he also carried a whole lot more than just the mail, including a family legacy of rage and the anxiety of having lost his identity along with his corporate job.

And yet, slowly, surrounded by a ragtag but devoted band of letter carriers, working this different kind of job, Grant found himself becoming a different kind of person. He became a lifeline for lonely people, providing fleeting moments of human contact and the assurance that our government still cares. He embraced the thrill of tackling new challenges, the pride of contributing to something greater than himself, the joy of camaraderie, and the purpose found in working hard for his family and doing a small, good thing for his community. He even kindled a newfound faith.

A brash and loving portrait of an all-American institution, Mailman offers a deeply felt portrait of both rural America and the dedicated (and eccentric) letter carriers who keep our lives running smoothly day to day. One hell of a raconteur, Steve Grant has written an irreverent, heartfelt, and often hilarious tribute to the simple heroism of daily service, the dignity and struggle of blue-collar work, the challenge and pleasure of coming home again after twenty-five years away, and the delight of going the extra mile for your neighbors, every day.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

A highly personal, utterly charming tribute to this American treasure.“
—David Von Drehle, The Washington Post

“A love letter to the Blue Ridge Mountains, a participant observer’s ethnography of a rural post office, an indictment of government austerity, and a witness statement attesting to the remarkable and at times ruthless efficiency of one of our oldest federal bureaucracies. Not least, Mailman is a lament for the decline of service as an American ideal.... [Grant] proves to be a compelling and empathetic guide, observing his country and its citizens, not just himself, with open and unjaded eyes.”
—Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic

“Mailman pulses with humor and the beauty of simple, everyday courage. In the heart of a small mountain town, Steve Grant’s route as a rural mail carrier becomes a journey of personal redemption, of finding purpose and dignity.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, New York Times bestselling author of Everything is Illuminated

“An entertaining and illuminating read.... Grant is a great storyteller and a wonderful writer — lyrical, descriptive and honest. He’s fervent in his belief that the U.S. Postal Service is necessary, impartial and downright patriotic.”
—Laurie Hertzel, The Washington Post

“Warm and oddly patriotic... this unpolished but perceptive book kept me turning the pages.... [Grant] has a rough authority. A working-class hero is something to be.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“People like to make fun of the Postal Service for being late with deliveries. Well, this book could not be more timely. I needed this reminder that Americans can commit to the greater good, that public servants can be heroes, and that our crazy-quilt culture is a strength, not a weakness. Thank you, Mr. Mailman.”
—AJ Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Constitutionally

“If you’ve ever fantasized about ditching your corporate job for a quieter life in the country, Mailman could be the memoir for you.... Grant’s honesty and humor... have me hooked.”
—Garden & Gun

"Mailman takes readers on a wild ride... as Grant pulls back the curtain on the U.S. Postal Service, revealing its foibles and idiosyncrasies alongside its stalwart heart."
—Southern Review of Books

"A coming-of-age (at middle age) story... Mailman more than delivers."
— Booklist (starred review)

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2025-05-27
A marketing whiz, waylaid by the pandemic, becomes a rural mailman in this winning memoir.

“I am behind schedule and this route is almost sixty miles long,” writes Grant early in his memoir. That route snakes out from Blacksburg, Virginia, one of the most technologically sophisticated cities in the nation; by its end, on unmaintained roads past sad trailer parks and weathered farmhouses, it’s a different world. Indeed, one of his first customers takes delivery of a sword paid for with his second pandemic check, a replica of “the blade that smote Sauron.” Another stop on his route leaves coffee in the mailbox for him in the freezing Appalachian winter, while Grant slugs down Gatorade in the boiling summer and advises cutting it in half with water, “because it’s actually too salty right out of the bottle.” That’s not the only bit of wisdom Grant dispenses: “If you think your letter carrier isn’t keeping a list of who’s naughty and nice, you are not living in reality.” Grant also observes the reality that few delivery people last long in the job: where the average on-the-job annual injury rate is 2.8 for every 100 employees, it’s 7 for postal workers, thanks to dogs, bees, weather, and off-kilter people. But, Grant adds, there are pleasures to the job, too, from seeing beautiful countryside to doing a public service: “When I carried the mail I was never just me, but something much larger.” Along the way, Grant muses about rural poverty, fractious politics, violence, drug abuse, and other issues, but he peppers his prose with funny aperçus: “It’s always the small dogs that start shit….When the universe arrives at its heat death, there will be nothing left but unread issues of theEconomist….Our delivery vehicles were like democracy, the worst of all possible vehicles, except for the alternatives.”

A charming book that’s guaranteed to make you think differently about the USPS.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940194373420
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	07/08/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One: Fuck City Chapter One FUCK CITY
I WAS LAID OFF FROM MY consulting gig. That’s how my pandemic began.

It was early March in 2020. I was in the Charlotte, North Carolina, airport, rushing to make my flight up to New York City, where the agency I worked for was headquartered out of SoHo. Plan Z was a boutique marketing consultancy—one part startup, one part ad agency, and the rest a sort of experimental decentralized phantom equity holding company. If you think that’s tough to get your head wrapped around, the market agreed.

I was head of strategy and I was flying up because we were kicking off a big project with a new client, a somewhat secretive law firm that specialized in getting rich people their money back when the counterparty (corporations, foreign governments, other rich people) was hiding overseas. The client wanted a marketing plan to become the go-to firm for helping the ultrarich, only the ultrarich.

It was possible to make it from Blacksburg, a tiny college town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Virginia, to New York for a same-day meeting, but doing so was an obscure Olympic sport similar to the pentathlon. The consultant’s version involved a pickup truck, sprinting, flying, and a cab ride. If you caught the earliest plane out of Roanoke to Charlotte and made the connection to New York’s LaGuardia Airport, you could wake up in the cold, foggy, blue-black of predawn Appalachia and find yourself sitting in a glass conference room with a view of anonymous office buildings in midtown Manhattan by late morning.

This morning, my pentathlon was canceled midrace. In Charlotte, I got a call that the meeting was off, postponed indefinitely. The work was on hold because the law firm was “buttoning up.” The client had a number of ex-military folks working for them, and “buttoning up” is army slang for dropping down into an armored vehicle, like a tank, and closing the hatches behind you. They were going into a defensive posture because of what the gate agent called “this virus thing.” “Everybody is turning around and flying home, hon.”

Waiting for my flight back in a couple of hours’ time, 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.

That was when I got the whim whams. A deep, animal sensation—full body, with my frontal lobes racing to catch up. It was a feeling I would come to recognize intimately over the year to come. The ground moving under my feet, the train switching tracks from one timeline to another, the world moving from normal to flat-out fucking weird. You didn’t need to be an epidemiologist or government contingency planner to know that we were all going someplace new, probably bad.

It is easy to forget sometimes how afraid everyone was in that moment. Nobody had any faith that our government or the world’s governments would be able to coordinate a response. So Big Business did the only sensible thing—it turtled. Across the business world, leadership teams cut spending and stockpiled cash while their firms developed a response. This had all the predictable second-order effects. Any business on thin margins, not just my experimental ad agency but neighborhood restaurants, art house movie theaters, bookstores—they all choked to death.

I was still waiting for my flight home when the call from my boss came. “Steve,” he said, “we’re both adults, so I don’t need to belabor this.” He was a gentleman and a pro about it, like he always was. I’d had the pleasure of working with him for years, and now that was over.

At four that morning, I had been employed. Now I was not.

The central concourse of the Charlotte airport is acoustically hot, typically 90 decibels of ADHD torture chamber. When I sat down in one of the airport’s signature white rocking chairs that line the big glass wall overlooking the tarmac, it was so quiet I could have been on the front porch of a remote mountain cabin.

I knew I needed to tell my wife, Alicia, that I’d been laid off but I didn’t see the point of sharing this over the phone. I wanted to savor this in-between time, when I was the only one in my family who knew I’d been let go again. I walked over to the Burger King counter, bought a Whopper and onion rings, and ate the food slowly while I rocked in a wooden chair next to the people-mover belt. For years I would eat a Big Mac after a successful job interview to seal in the good luck. Or as a ritual sacrifice to ward off evil after a layoff. Stuck with a Whopper, it felt like some cosmic signal that my luck had truly run out.

My work in the two decades before the pandemic had a bunch of names—Brand Strategist, Marketing Consultant, Consumer Psychologist, the sort of psychologist that, instead of helping you feel better about yourself, helps corporations feel better about how to sell you things. In late capitalism, we call this “creating demand.” It was not a skill set that was widely recognized and not particularly practical outside of a very narrow context.

I wasn’t a cardiologist or a plumber with a concrete, certified set of skills. I did not hold an honorific like doctor or professor. No rank like captain or major. I was the grease in the global capitalist machine. Because the worst-kept secret in corporate America is that the black arts of marketing work. I had been a strategist for some of the biggest corporations in the world, helping the glass-tower crowd understand how “regular people” make the wheels on the bus go round and round, which is good-paying work as long as corporate America is buying. But marketing is notorious for being the canary in the coal mine of corporate spending. Just a few years earlier, my behavioral economics lab at Prudential was shut down during a corporate reorg. It had taken months to get a new job, and that was with a party-time economy. Sitting in that rocking chair in the neutron-bomb-empty airport, I could see how much worse this situation was. Getting a new marketing job was going to be a near impossibility for the foreseeable future. It was certainly never going to happen before my health insurance ran out in a couple of weeks.

Which was a problem. Because I had cancer.

I had only known about the cancer for a couple of months. My father had survived prostate cancer, and his brother, my uncle Rich, had survived it as well. So I hadn’t been too worried, honestly. At least that was the story I was telling myself. My urologist told me the malignancy was contained inside the prostate. The tissues uncovered in the biopsy were submillimetric, too small for the MRI to detect. My Gleason value, a scoring system for classifying the aggression and danger of the cancer, was low. My cancer was as benign as cancer gets. But what had seemed manageable—treatable—now loomed as an existential issue. I was about to become one of the undoctored in America while I knowingly carried a disease that could kill me. The world was going someplace weird. And I was sitting in a white rocking chair in an abandoned airport, eating a Whopper with a biological time bomb strapped to my nuts.

I was a husband and a father of two teenage girls, and everybody in our big modernist house up on Brush Mountain in Blacksburg was counting on me to keep them in the upper middle class because I lived in a house full of artists, deep feelers, and dreamers who I couldn’t bear realizing how precarious our situation had become. Up there on Brush Mountain, our glass-walled house with the art on the walls and the piano in the library was a bubble where people painted, played music, studied, and wrote. Where people felt their feelings. A gentle place where people kept journals, knit sweaters, and ate home-cooked meals.

But I knew where I was right now, and it was not that gentle place.

My old man had a name for it. Fuck City.

Fuck City is that in-between place, between where I was supposed to go and where I actually was. In between jobs. In between knowing what was going on and having no idea at all. Having wandered into a career and gotten used to a version of myself—not my “authentic self,” whoever the fuck that is, but a version of myself I could live with—and now wondering, if I didn’t have this job, who was I? (My intrusive thoughts were very quick to supply an answer: “You’re an unemployed loser, that’s who.”) Of suddenly knowing with cast-iron certainty that the world was about to go batshit crazy, that the order of the things that came before was just a set of norms, a consensual illusion, a bunch of made-up shit. That the “real world” is as arbitrary as a playground game because that’s all late capitalism ever was, just a game, a game that I’d played pretty well until I was told to take my toys and go home. Yeah, yeah, the VUCA world—volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. It’s one thing to use that term in a PowerPoint presentation about consumer attitudes, but something else to be feeling it down in your guts.

The whole world was now Fuck City.

What the fuck was I going to do?

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