Review: "Mailman" by Stephen Starring Grant

Mailman by Stephen Starring Grant
Published July 2025 via Simon & Schuster
★★★

In 2020, the world turned upside-down, and Grant was laid off. This was a problem, because Grant was the breadwinner at home; it was a second problem, because most health insurance in the US is tied to employment, and Grant had health concerns that meant that health insurance was a need-to-have, not a nice-to-have. And because it was 2020, his regular avenues of work had dried up...and the place he could get hired, right away, with health insurance also right away, was the postal service.

I have a thing about books about Jobs I Never Knew I Didn't Want. Don't want to do the job, but read about it? Yes please. Grant found that there were things he loved about the job and things that were interminable; I expect I would enjoy a lot of the same things and, well, be frustrated by a lot of the same things. (I don't drive, so the mail service would be a doubly unlikely job for me...but I do think I'd really, really enjoy the sort of non-rural route that involves a lot of walking. Well, I'd enjoy it once all the mail was sorted and I was out delivering it.)

A lot of your enjoyment of this book will probably depend on how well you connect with the voice and the worldview. This one wasn't really for me—too much enthusiasm about guns and hoo-rah attitude towards the US. There's quite a lot of "look at this great thing that the US does!" that is nice and all but is outdated even before the book is published because there's been a regime change between the writing of the book and the publication of the book, and, well. Not to get political in a book review, but whether the mail service is in the Constitution or not probably doesn't mean much to the current government. (And when Grant tells us earnestly that in 1776 it was hard to be represented by the government, I have to think that he means that it's gotten better for white men? There are plenty of citizens whose right to vote the government actively works to suppress, and Grant is very optimistic at times at how well his overtly racist colleagues got on with his POC colleagues.) Also rather wish he'd edited himself when he took pains to clarify that his once-upon-a-time-yoga-instructor-therapist's PhD was not one he respected (surely it would have been easier to just not mention the PhD?).

So...some hits and some misses. Again, I really enjoyed the part of the book that was, you know, about delivering the mail. (Side note: Cancer gets top billing in the book description, but it is a footnote in the book. There are good reasons for its footnote status, so that part's fine, but it probably shouldn't have made it into the book description either. Grant probably wasn't the one who wrote the copy, but just something to note!) I've never thought about rural vs. city routes before, or thought much about the work that goes into delivering the mail between the point when it arrives at the post office and the point when postal workers drive out in their loaded-up trucks (or, as it happens, personal cars—did not know that was a requirement for some of the roles). Grant ended up on a less rural route than he (or I) necessarily expected, thanks to the growing sprawl of suburbia, and while I was a bit sorry that there wasn't a bit more rural to it, that's obviously not something within his control for the book. Nice to read about something that is so far outside my wheelhouse, anyway.

Perhaps this isn't quite one for my hypothetical Jobs I Never Knew I Didn't Want list...but at least one for an (equally hypothetical) list of Jobs That Probably Aren't for Me but Isn't It Fun to Dream.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.