Memoir of a Mailman

The Atlantic

a day ago

'Delivering the mail is a 'Halloween job,' ' Stephen Starring Grant observes in Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home. 'An occupation with a uniform, immediately recognizable, even by children.' What to call Grant's book is harder to say. It is an unusual amalgam: a pandemic memoir, 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—for the cultural twilight of the Halloween job: those occupations, such as police officer, firefighter, Marine, and, yes, postal worker, whose worth is not measured first and foremost in dollars but in public esteem. Or should be, anyway.
At the same time, Grant's project is immediately recognizable as 'Hollywood material.' A corporate suit loses his job during COVID and spends a year as a rural blue-collar worker reconnecting with his inner country boy and coming to appreciate the dignity of physical labor—silently nursing, one suspects, the dream of a book contract (and maybe a studio option) all along. A stunt, in other words, that a cynic might see as more in the spirit of self-service than public service.
This tension isn't lost on Grant, a proud son of Appalachia who's suddenly laid off from a marketing agency and gets a job as a rural carrier associate for the Blacksburg, Virginia, post office. He second-guesses his qualifications—and his motivations—but doesn't let either concern stop him.
'What I'm feeling is a spiritual disorientation,' he confesses, having been jolted into downward mobility. 'Lost in the sense that I don't know what I'm doing, lost in confronting the reality of being back in my hometown at fifty years of age, delivering the mail.' He berates himself for his failure to develop a versatile skill set or 'build any job security,' despite compiling an impressive résumé (including starting a behavioral-economics lab at a Fortune 50 company). As he arrives at the decision to take the post-office job, he's facing real hardship: He has cancer, which he mentions almost in passing to explain the urgency of getting health insurance. But he's also a seeker, unapologetically so, and trying to prove something to himself—that, despite his white-collar CV, he is an authentic Appalachian who can still draw on a reserve of mountain grit.
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Grant doesn't hide the self-indulgence latent in what his wife calls 'one of your quests.' Yet he also proves to be a compelling and empathetic guide, observing his country and its citizens, not just himself, with open and unjaded eyes. If his jaunty prose sometimes feels forced, his curiosity doesn't: He needs to focus on the details of his new manual labor, and milieu, or else fall hopelessly behind his co-workers (which he does anyway).
Immersing himself in unfamiliar work in a familiar place throws him off-balance in a way that feels bracing. Driving his late grandmother-in-law's 1999 Toyota RAV4 (rural carriers, he learns, often have to rely on their personal vehicles) through breathtaking Appalachian landscapes exhilarates, and occasionally terrifies, him. The car loses traction on an uphill dirt road that abruptly becomes 'a rutted-out washboard.' Heedlessly reaching a hand into an abandoned mailbox turned hornets' nest induces 'a full-body, screaming freakout, standing in the middle of a dirt road.' He savors surprising, sweet moments, too: an old widower who shows him the sprawling model-train setup in his garage that he began assembling 'once Jennie passed'; a man in a trailer who reacts with boyish delight when the Lord of the Rings replica sword he ordered with his pandemic check arrives. 'This is Anduril, Flame of the West!' the man explains. Grant chimes right in with 'Reforged from the shards of Narsil by the elves of Rivendell.'
With his co-workers, his approach is 'show up, don't sandbag anybody, be humble, play through to the buzzer.' But he's also keenly aware of being a soft former white-collar worker on a team of hardened veterans—and during a period, the pandemic, when the Postal Service is 'on a wartime footing,' its intricate processes strained by new magnitudes of mail. Kat, a terse USPS lifer, helps him get through the worst days: 'I think as long as she saw a carrier trying, she was supportive.' Serena, a woman who handles surging Amazon deliveries with Sisyphean dedication, instructs him in a new task, chucking parcels into metal cages organized by route: 'Start scanning, start throwing, and get the fuck out of my way.' Glynnis, a 70-something whose back is killing her, 'swore like a marine with busted knuckles'—loudly and creatively, sometimes with racist verve. She drives him crazy with her incessant complaining, not that the fan noise and the heat don't make him cranky too.
By contrast, Wade, an Alaskan, is the Michael Jordan of backwoods mail delivery, which features a degree of 'freedom in terms of when and how you wanted to work' absent from bigger urban routes fully plugged into the Postal Service's centralized system. Wade's 'process fluency' awes Grant—his preternatural ability to keep track of every variety of mail ('the hot case, the raw flats, the parcels, the raw mail,' plus the trays of machine-sorted first-class and standard mail, arriving every morning) and then fit it all, Tetris-like, into his vehicle's cargo area, arranged for delivery; his mastery of a labyrinthine route; his agility in eating sandwiches with one hand while delivering the mail with the other. Wade could do a route 'rated at 9 hours' in five. Grant barely manages half of it in 11 hours, with help.
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Mailman includes its share of epiphanic wisdom. But unlike many works of nonfiction that focus on this region and its people, it avoids treating those who find themselves in its pages with the sort of condescension or reflexive romanticizing—or worse, a blend of both—that often seeps into writing about Appalachia. Grant doesn't pretend that the Blue Ridge is all wholesome water-bath canning, porch sitting, and verdant greenery. He doesn't deal in crude stereotypes of poor rural people, but neither does he avert his eyes from details that might be construed as backwoods caricature. He gets a glimpse into the trailer where the man who buys the expensive sword lives, watching as he has to 'slide crabwise' along the wall, hands raised high, to get past a huge flatscreen TV that dominates the space. Imagining how many times a day he does that, Grant doesn't judge; he just notes 'the kind of trade-offs people are willing to make for picture quality.' His portrayals throughout tend toward the gently sentimental, no noble savagery in view.
Grant's forthright evocation of community, a word so frequently used that its meaning has grown fuzzy, would be easy to attribute to his own roots in the rural-Blacksburg area, where the story unfolds. The truth, though, is more complicated. Sociologists have sometimes categorized Appalachia as an 'internal colony': an impoverished and economically exploited area within a country that is often viewed by elites as if it were an underdeveloped region outside that country. The firmly upper-middle-class Grant—raised in the mountains because he was born to a Virginia Tech professor, rather than into a long line of coal miners or lumberjacks—doesn't really try to hide that he sometimes feels more like a colonizer than an 'authentic' Appalachian.
In one moment of obvious angst early on, after his wife accuses him of having an inordinate soft spot for Virginia's country people, Grant proclaims, 'I'm from Appalachia. I'm Appalachian!' She tells him pointedly, 'You are not!' Identitarian anxiety crops up more subtly too: Grant wistfully recalls his desire to join his high-school classmates on their annual November deer-hunting trips, his father's refusal to take him, and his envy of the homemade venison jerky the other boys would bring to school. When he says, 'I wanted a giant Ziploc bag of venison jerky,' he seems to be saying, 'I wanted to be a real Appalachian.'
m ailman is most distinctive when it ventures into territory that feels timely in a way that goes beyond COVID-era tributes to 'essential workers.' Grant finds himself preoccupied with the nature of public service, its scale and scope, and with coordination among systems and humans, of which the Postal Service turns out to be quite an astonishing example. He focuses in on the scene, not just the enormous 'superscanner, like a seven-foot-tall mechanical praying mantis,' that logs incoming parcels, but also the low-tech mail-sorting methods. He also gets to appreciate up close the skillful interplay between brain and body involved in becoming 'unconsciously competent at complex tasks'; where once he knew only the academic phrase process fluency, now he can see the intricacy involved, and the dignity imparted by mastery.
When Grant declares, 'My robot brain was in charge' at one point, reflecting on the execution of letter gathering while driving, he's speaking with pleasure and pride about achieving a flow state in the fulfillment of a worthwhile task; he's not complaining about drudgery or soul-sucking labor. Ever the marketer, Grant celebrates the Postal Service's uniqueness (indulging in a bit of statistical overreach). 'FedEx? UPS? They simply cannot do what the USPS does. All they carry are parcels,' he scoffs. 'We carry everything for everybody, with 99.993 percent accuracy.'
Mailman is also a shameful revelation of the inexcusable working conditions that letter carriers are subjected to: The injury rate for postal workers is higher than for coal miners. You can almost feel Grant's blood pressure rising as he describes the decades-out-of-date, unsafe, and AC-less delivery trucks—'death traps,' he calls them. (The advent of new electric vehicles, thanks to a 2022 infusion of federal funds, doesn't make it into his book, perhaps because their expected delivery last year has been running behind schedule.) Grant's indictment—and his celebration—predates DOGE, whose arrival only makes both more relevant: a counter to the slander of public servants routinely dispensed by Elon Musk, a man who accrues more money in an hour than the average USPS employee will make in a lifetime.
When Grant says he finally learned that 'what was essential was just doing your job,' he doesn't mean that the USPS work is easy but that it is hard, and that being a mail carrier, showing up day in and day out, matters. 'That's the difference between a regular and a sub,' he observes, remarking on the distinction between being a fill-in and someone's daily letter carrier. 'The sub just delivers the mail. The regular is delivering something else. Continuity. Safety. Normalcy. Companionship. Civilization. You know, the stuff the government is supposed to do for its people.' In Grant's telling, postal workers bring order and predictability to a country that can feel like it's unraveling, especially during crises that starkly illustrate how reliant we are on the federal bureaucracy.
If Hollywood were to option this story, the hero would get offered the job of his dreams and turn it down, realizing in his heart that he is meant to be a mailman after all. But Grant has indicated from the start that his USPS stint is a placeholder. He applies for and ends up accepting a cushy position at a media agency, turns in his Halloween-job uniform, and takes a dig at himself for becoming 'just another white-collar ghost with a job that nobody understands.'
You may roll your eyes when this interloper describes the solace that his brief sojourn in blue-collar life has brought: that after decades of 'feeling like I wasn't doing any good in the world, being part of something—even something as mundane as the Postal Service—made me feel whole.' Glynnis certainly takes a different view as she counts down to retirement. When Grant, hoping to quiet her carping, says, 'I'm in the same jam as you are,' she calls him on it: 'No you ain't, because I'm here to get my motherfucking pension, and you're too goddamned stupid to stay at home and collect unemployment.' Grant acknowledges that 'she had a point.'
His final revelation is that Americans misunderstand the difference between white- and blue-collar work. 'Both forms of labor want all of your time and both exact a toll. One form is no more or less noble than the other,' he writes. 'The real distinction is between work and service, and I think it's one of the great dividing lines in American life.' The question this leaves for readers isn't why Grant decided to stop being a mailman. The question is how we ended up with a country where choosing a life of service all too often feels financially untenable and socially undervalued.