838: Letters! Actual Letters!

2024/8/18

This American Life

Grace, a mail carrier, shares insights into how people treat their mail and the personal connections she forms with her customers.

Grace knows her customers well and often sees their faces.
She shares anecdotes about various customers on her route.
People build paths for her to cut across their yards, showing their appreciation.

When the best—and perhaps only—way to say something is to write it down.

Prologue: Ira goes out with a letter carrier, ‘Grace,’ as she delivers mail on her route. He learns about the people who bring us our mail and also how people treat their mail. (11 minutes)
Act One: Writing a letter decades after an event that shaped her life was the only way that Nicole Piasecki could make some sense of it. (18 minutes)
Act Two: Yorkshire, 1866. A farmer overcomes his timidity and writes a very important letter to a local beauty. (3 minutes)
Act Three: When senior editor David Kestenbaum was still a rookie reporter, he wrote an email to a legend. Then he waited...and waited...for a reply. (6 minutes)
Act Four: A woman writes an unusual letter on behalf of her husband. (1 minute)
Act Five: Producer Zoe Chace compares the letters a person gets and the letters they wish they got. (12 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org)

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