Mary Roach Loves Writing About Weird Science

Summary

The Book Review Podcast

Episode: Mary Roach Loves Writing About Weird Science
Host: Gilbert Cruz (NYT Book Review Editor)
Guest: Mary Roach (author of Stiff, Spook, Bonk, Gulp, and the new book Replaceable: Adventures in Human Anatomy)
Release Date: September 19, 2025

---

Episode Overview

This lively episode features Mary Roach, renowned science journalist, discussing her signature approach to “weird science” writing and her new book, Replaceable: Adventures in Human Anatomy. Host Gilbert Cruz leads Roach through discussions of her research process, chapter selection, the role of humor in science writing, and stories from the strange frontiers of human anatomy and medical history. Roach’s curiosity, wit, and perspective on taboo science topics shine, offering insight into how she crafts her unique, reader-friendly explorations of the human body.

---

Main Topics and Discussion Points

Why Return to the Human Body?

[01:29]–[02:18]

• Roach’s last book focused on animal-human boundary issues (“When Nature Breaks the Law”), but Replaceable signals a return to the endlessly fascinating subject of the human body.
  • “It’s this weird foreign planet and I didn’t study it in high school or college. … I seem to just be drawn to the human body and all its miraculousness and weirdness.” — Mary Roach [01:52]

Origins of Replaceable: Serendipitous Inspiration

[02:18]–[05:28]

• Roach often starts books with a few “nuggets”—odd morsels of information that lodge in her mind.
• The seed for Replaceable was planted by a reader email about elective amputation.
  • The reader was an amputee who sought amputation for a nonfunctioning but “healthy” limb. Surgeons were resistant, revealing a “bias for wholeness.”
  • “She would see people with prosthetic limbs who were hiking and running around and doing things that she couldn’t do. But it was very hard for her to find a surgeon willing to cut off her limb. … We have a bias for wholeness.” — Mary Roach [04:24]

Roach’s Research Process: “Flailing Around”

[05:35]–[09:22]

• She describes the interim between books as a period of “flailing around.” She cold-calls researchers, sorts through failed ideas, and maintains folders of “stuff” for potential use.
  • “It’s maddening because it’s not a formula… it’s just serendipity. And all you can do is leave yourself open as much as you can.” — Mary Roach [07:32]
  • Despite claims of lacking job skills, Roach is driven by addiction to the discovery process and storytelling.

Early Body Replacement: Noses, Plastic Surgery, and Groucho Marx

[09:22]–[11:40]

• Roach dives into early examples of body part replacement, tracing the dawn of plastic surgery to ancient nasal reconstruction.
  • Mutilation of the nose was historically used as punishment; reconstructive techniques date to 1500 BCE.
  • “My favorite being a guy named Frank Tedemor in 1896… the nose was attached to the glasses… a mustache to cover the edge… It was essentially a medical Groucho Marx glasses.” — Mary Roach [11:11]

Memory Struggles as a Science Writer

[11:40]–[12:50]

• Roach admits to using flashcards before interviews, as her memory does not retain book facts easily between projects.
  • “I’m constantly in fear that I’m going to blurt something out that’s correct in the book, but I couldn’t remember it…” — Mary Roach [12:24]

The Necessity of Fieldwork and Real-World Reporting

[12:51]–[14:04]

• Roach thrives on in-person research; being present is “essential” to her writing style.
  • “It’s only good if I went there and I spent time and I inflicted myself on somebody for at least an afternoon and preferably two days…” — Mary Roach [13:13]
• Notes that modern science is sometimes hard to visualize (less “bodies on slabs, more protein receptors”) but insists on finding scenes with people and physical presence.

Making Science Fun: Characters, Chapters, and Humor

[14:04]–[15:54]

• Each chapter is crafted around characters, scenes, and quirky stories, a structure Roach uses to keep herself (and readers) entertained.
  • Recalls a memorable misunderstanding at a “dildo research department” (actually a factory) while writing Bonk.
  • “These lovely young Latina women… I’m like, what do you tell your parents? And she goes, I work in plastics.” — Mary Roach [15:19]

Fieldwork Gone Awry: Traveling for the Story

[16:29]–[18:47]

• Details travel for Replaceable, including a fruitless but memorable journey to Tbilisi, Georgia to investigate a bizarre case of a surgeon using a finger to reconstruct a penis.
  • “I sent emails in Georgian, in Russian, and in English. No reply, no reply. No one would call me back. … We just showed up like idiots. He’s on vacation. … [The office manager said] you’re a couple of idiots…” — Mary Roach [17:24]

Modulating Humor: Editors Step In

[20:46]–[22:49]

• Roach admits that she’s not always the best judge of when humor goes too far; credits her editor.
  • “I get it back, and there’s a diagonal line through the whole passage, and it just says, no, no, bad girl. No. So that came out.” — Mary Roach [22:29]

Passionate, Niche Scientists: The Joy of Discovery

[23:00]–[24:52]

• Roach revels in meeting scientists who specialize in tiny niches—chewing, saliva production, etc.
  • “He was so excited about this reflex and chewing. And I live for people like that.” — Mary Roach [24:03]

On Curiosity and Becoming a Science Writer

[24:52]–[27:44]

• Roach describes herself as not particularly curious or socially engaged as a teenager or college student.
• Her path to science journalism came by accident, via writing for San Francisco newspapers, then the magazine Hippocrates, and later Discover.

Embracing the Gross-out: Taboo, Humor, and Internet Fame

[27:44]–[31:32]

• Roach’s first major hit, Stiff, grew from odd online columns for Salon.com about cadavers. She realized that “taboo or gross” stories received the most attention.
  • “These cadaver ones seem to be popular. So these things that are taboo or gross, there is a kind of built in curiosity, I think…” — Mary Roach [29:54]
• She senses her readers share her taste for the offbeat: “When I picture my readers, I just picture a room full of Mary Roach… like the scene in Being John Malkovich…” [31:04]

On Being “Icked Out”

[31:39]–[32:49]

• Though Roach claims she’s rarely disgusted by her own research, she describes a time in a medical examiner’s office that overwhelmed even her tolerance for gore: “I gagged…and walked quickly out of the room and I couldn’t go back.” — Mary Roach [32:37]

Impact on Spiritual and Physical Perspective

[32:49]–[34:43]

• Encountering death in her research has made Roach view the body as a “hull”—physical presence being separate from personhood—though she's not spiritual herself.
  • “It is so much a hull. You have this sense of something is checked out, something was there and it is gone. … The follow up thought is, where did it go?” — Mary Roach [33:17]

Embodiment and Awareness: The Gulp Effect

[34:43]–[35:28]

• Writing Gulp briefly made her hyperaware of digestion; she’d watch diners chewing, thinking it looked “disgusting.” She notes that writing each book temporarily causes a similar focus.

What Makes a Mary Roach Book?

[35:28]–[36:56]

• Key ingredients:
  • Travel to surprising locations
  • Real people doing unusual things
  • Bits of history (“a couple historical chapters”)
  • Humor, usually at her own expense
  • Scenes that are “sometimes surreal”

The Chapter That Got Away: Uterus Transplants

[36:56]–[38:46]

• Roach wanted to include a chapter on temporary uterus transplants, but couldn't get access. She notes increased privacy restrictions make these stories harder to report.

---

Memorable Quotes

• “I think we have a bias for wholeness.” — Mary Roach [04:24]
• “If it’s not interesting and fun for me, it’s probably not going to be interesting or fun for the reader.” — Mary Roach [14:38]
• On meeting scientists with intense focus: “That is what I live for. The person who’s not only has devoted their whole life to it, but is so interested in it.” — Mary Roach [23:28]
• “I don’t have any job skills, Gilbert. I don’t know.” — Mary Roach [09:16]
• On her ideal reader: “When I picture my readers, I just picture a room full of Mary Roach… like the scene in Being John Malkovich.” — Mary Roach [31:04]
• “If I’m gonna make fun of anyone, it’s me. I’m the clueless, bumbling outsider.” — Mary Roach [36:23]
• On research challenges: “It’s gotten a little harder to be Mary Roach.” — Mary Roach [38:42]

---

Notable Segments (with Timestamps)

• [01:52] — Why Roach always comes back to the human body
• [04:02] — The bias for “wholeness” in medicine, and why some patients seek elective amputation
• [07:32] — The chaos and happenstance of Roach’s idea-hunting process
• [09:43] — Ancient nose jobs: Early plastic surgery and prosthetic innovation
• [13:10] — Why firsthand fieldwork is central to her approach
• [15:19] — Inside the “dildo research department” (and how humor arises from scenes)
• [17:24] — Travelling to Georgia for the “penile finger transplant” chase
• [22:29] — The role of editors in managing joke boundaries
• [24:03] — The quirks of scientists and the joy of niche expertise
• [29:54] — Why gross or taboo subjects attract readers (and how Stiff was born)
• [31:04] — What Roach imagines her fans are like (“Being John Malkovich”)
• [33:17] — How seeing dead bodies influences her spiritual thinking
• [38:42] — The new difficulties for immersive science journalism

---

Tone and Style

The conversation is approachable, irreverent, and laced with Roach’s dry humor and playfulness. Both host and guest share a fascination with oddities of the scientific world, and Roach is candid about her insecurities, research tactics, and the sheer unpredictability of writing each new book. For listeners, the episode demystifies how great—and slightly wacky—science writing is made, making it a must for fans of science, storytelling, and the just-plain-strange.

---

For further insight:
Read Replaceable: Adventures in Human Anatomy or explore more of Roach’s accessible, comic-inflected science writing.

Transcript

[Clinique Narrator]

Taking care of your skin is a personal, daily ritual. No matter what regimen works best for you. It's important to remember that great skin care doesn't have to be complicated. With Clinique's classic three step routine, fresh, radiant skin is as easy as 1, 2, 3. Clinique's iconic trio of products used to cleanse, exfoliate and moisturize is specifically created to address your skin's needs and provides a refreshingly simple solution for maintaining beautiful, resilient skin twice a day, every day. Great Skin starts here. Visit clinique.com to learn more.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review podcast. We gave you a fall fiction preview. We gave you a fall nonfiction preview. We talked about almost 30 books over the past two weeks and hopefully you've made time for both of those episodes and have started saving the books you want to read. This week we have on a wonderful writer. Joining me is the author of Stiff, she's the author of Spook, she's the author of Bonk, and she is the author of Gulp. She is Mary Roach, the science journalist behind eight popular science books, including her latest, Replaceable Adventures in Human Anatomy. Mary, welcome to the Book Review podcast.

[Mary Roach]

Thank you very much.

[Gilbert Cruz]

So, Mary, your last book was When Nature Breaks the Law. It was about animals. It was about essentially what happens when animals and humans come into contact. They cross that line. With your new book, you're back on territory that you know very well, which is the human body, the endlessly fascinating human body. What made you come back?

[Mary Roach]

It's just that it's endlessly fascinating. It's this weird foreign planet and I didn't study it in high school or college. And so I'm like that explorer who keeps finding new continents and having a blast. So in a way it's, it's a logical topic for me. I seem to just be drawn to the human body and all its miraculousness and weirdness.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Tell us about the continents you're exploring. This go round here, it's a pretty big tent, this new book. You write about prosthetic legs, you write about organ transplants, you write about cataract surgery, you write about the history of the iron lung, which is not something I would have predicted reading about this year, but I did and I enjoyed it. How did you settle on this sort of broad, as I say, big tent? And then how do you decide what goes in and what goes out?

[Mary Roach]

I tend to do that. I have a very broad umbrella of a topic but that enables me to cherry pick the things that I am most fascinated by. But the thing that first drew me to the topic was it was a email from a reader who had a book idea for me that didn't quite work. It was professional football referees. I don't watch. I don't watch football. They may be. Maybe I'm an idiot and maybe secretly pro football referees are really surprisingly cool and interesting in ways that we don't appreciate.

[Gilbert Cruz]

But has this person read any of your books? Books? Because that just seems slightly out of your. Out of your zone.

[Mary Roach]

She's read them all. And this one, she came with me for one of the chapters and I sent her a book and she's read it. And two days ago I got an email from Judy and she said she sent this clip of there's some guy whose job is to bathe the footballs in mud before they're used. So essentially a mud bath for footballs. And she goes, in case you're still.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Going to do that, that football referee book, very relaxing. I would love to be a football slathered in mud before a game.

[Mary Roach]

Yeah, I'd even be happy to meet the guy who does it. It just sounds really appealing to me right now at this point in my life. It sounds soothing, but.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yes, exactly.

[Mary Roach]

Yeah, the mud bath as well. Anyway, so in the back and forth on email, she mentioned that she's an amputee. I do this all the time. If somebody shares something about their life or their career, I tend to ask questions. I'm a curious and nosy person. So I was asking her, like, what's going on in the world of amputation and limbs and things. And she said she was an elective amputee. In other words, somebody who wanted their leg, their foot, the lower part of their leg cut off because it. It didn't work well. She'd had spina bifida. She had spinal corrective surgery. Her foot ended up being twisted. And there were a number of operations and it never really got to the point where it worked the way a normal foot should work. And she would see people with prosthetic limbs who were hiking and running around and doing things that she couldn't do. But it was very hard for her to find a surgeon willing to cut off her limb. And she said, they'd say to me, but your foot is healthy. It has a blood supply. Yeah, but I can't walk on it very well and I don't want it. Essentially, people, their hip wears out and they get a hip replacement. Why Is this different? And it is different. I think we have a bias for wholeness. You know, when a foot is a. First of all, you can see it, you're not going to put it back on. And there's various reasons why a surgeon might be hesitant to do that procedure. But she did finally find someone to cut off her foot.

[Gilbert Cruz]

So you engaged in this conversation with her.

[Mary Roach]

So that was okay. And you said, yeah, elective amputation.

[Gilbert Cruz]

There's more here.

[Mary Roach]

This is what I do. I have like two little kind of nuggets. I never start with a topic.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Have you ever started the other way or. It's just always been part of your process?

[Mary Roach]

The closest I got, I think was with Bonk, which is a book about the study of sexual physiology. Not gender, not behavior. But how do these bits and pieces work? What is going on with arousal and orgasm as a bodily process? Again, I didn't think I want to write a book about Masters and Johnson and Kinsey and these very brave people who decided to study sexual physiology. It was a reference to the colposcopic films of Masters and Johnson. I colposcopy, that's the cervix. So I thought, my God, they filmed a woman inside her body as she's sexually reacting. And I was like, that's my next book, Sex Research. I don't think it has ever happened that I've thought maybe, gulp. Like the alimentary canal. I had a sense that that tube between the nose and the ass was. It's like there's different rules in there. And it's a very weird space.

[Gilbert Cruz]

It is a very weird space.

[Mary Roach]

You know the subtitle Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. I wanted it to feel like you're a tourist going down the canal. A travel log almost. So that was the closest I've come to having a concept before I have any of the bits and pieces.

[Gilbert Cruz]

You've said in the past that when you're in between books, it is this flailing around process until you alight on your next idea. I'm just curious a little bit more the specifics. What does that look like? What is the flailing around? Are you just picking up random medical journals? What are you doing?

[Mary Roach]

I sometimes call researchers I've worked with in the past and pick their brain. If I've got a germ of a possible idea. I do a lot of brain picking. I talk to people on planes. I'm just picking up a lot of rocks and looking underneath and just. Is that a book? Is that a book? And there are often Almost always false starts where I think, yeah, I've got it. And I spend up to a couple of months in one case looking into a topic and then discarding it for various reasons, maybe logistics or access. It's maddening because it's not a formula of if you work hard enough, you will find it. It's just serendipity. And it's all you can do is leave yourself open as much as you can. Sometimes I go back in for every book. There are folders of rejected chapters. And I also have a folder that's just called Stuff, which is. Doesn't fit in any book, but kind of interesting. And I have a short memory, so I forget. I always forget what's in the Stuff folder now it's like that fat. And I'll go back in there and I'll go, is there another way to look at this? It's the hardest part for me. It really is. I don't know what the next book is. I am flailing so bad right now, Gilbert. I've gone through, I'd say, three false starts.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Do you have to write a next book? Can you take a break? What is the impetus to keep. I gotta find the next one.

[Mary Roach]

I don't know how to do anything else. I don't know how to do anything else. I really. I would. If I did know how to do something else. I think I would love to do that. But here's the other thing I love when I do find a topic and I'm kind of on fire about. I'm going to go here and I'm going to see. I'm going to see if that'll work out. I'm going to get in touch with this person. I could do that. I could do that. And it's very exciting and it's fun and it's addictive. It's the thing I love to do most. So I don't really want to do anything else. And also, there's not much else I can do. Let's be honest. I don't have a lot of. I don't have any job skills, Gilbert. I don't know.

[Gilbert Cruz]

You've proven that you could do this. You've proven that you could do this and do it well. And that's it for this book. In particular, I am curious what some of the earliest examples of body replacement surgery that you were able to find were. I don't want to ask you to tell me everything that's in the book. That's why the book is there, to read it. But Curious about some of the early stuff.

[Mary Roach]

Yeah. Well, the book opens with the nose because that's kind of where it all began. The reason for that is that nasal mutilation was globally and historically comes up over and over. If you want to punish a lot of people in a way that's very visible to the population. So it's a deterrent. You hack off the nose. It's a horrifying thing. It's somebody's face, it's their personality, it's. And it's on display. So nasal mutilation happened a lot. So early on, people figured out. Incredibly early on, people figured out a way to. To surgically rebuild noses by taking like a flap of either the cheek or the forehead. The adjacent flesh loosen that skin, but keep it attached to its original location, flop it over onto the nose and let it grow in there while it's still attached to its original blood supply. And so you put it on the nose, the body grows capillaries into the tissue that you've parked there. And you can you sculpt this new nose? So that was like the dawn of plastic surgery, and we're talking 1500 BCE that were. That some of these things were going on. Which was astounding to me that somebody figured that out. There were also, throughout history, prosthetic noses too. There were metal noses, eventually celluloid noses and different techniques. My favorite being a guy named Frank Tedemor in 1896, published a paper about. He had this celluloid lightweight, which was great nose. And you would hang it off a pair of glasses. So they had the glasses and the nose was attached to the glasses. And this is my favorite bit. There was a little. This would only obviously work for men back then, a mustache to cover the edge, the border between the prosthetic nose and the upper lip. So you'd have. It was essentially a medical Groucho Marx glasses.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Do you remember these facts forever? I know you just said you have a bad memory or is the cache cleared after you do a book press tour where you have to just move on and then all of a sudden memorize a bunch of new facts about the human body and everything that you learned from the last book is gone.

[Mary Roach]

I can't even remember them long enough to see what this is. These are flashcards. This is me attempting to shove back into my head all of the things over the course of what, three and a half years or whatever I spent on this book. And time has gone by. It was a year between when I turned it in and when it finally is coming out. And I don't. Like I said, I don't have a good memory. So I'm having to kind of cram them back into my head. And that's the hardest. It's not the hardest, but it's hard for me. I'm constantly in fear that I'm going to blurt something out that's correct in the book. But I couldn't remember it. When I'm. And people will say, what century is that? I'm like a couple hundred. That was a while ago. I kind of took the book. Look it up.

[Gilbert Cruz]

As someone who also has a terrible memory, I sympathize. Mary, those flashcards. Do not lose them.

[Mary Roach]

No, I won't.

[Gilbert Cruz]

A big part of this book, and I feel like many of your books involves. It involves you traveling somewhere as part of your reporting process. I have to imagine that's fun. I have to imagine it's part of the appeal of the type of reporting that you do. I'm curious how important you feel that fieldwork is for the type of science journalism that you do.

[Mary Roach]

Oh, it's essential for me. I love writing, but only if I have a pile of good material to work with. And it's only good if I went there and I spent time and I inflicted myself on somebody for at least an afternoon and preferably two days, because I want to have a scene and people and conversation and things happening and things for me to describe. But that's actually. It's limiting for me because so much of science now is protein receptors and genomes and things that you really can't see. So if you go to a lab, somebody's explaining something to you. But in terms of the visuals, there are no bodies on slabs anymore. It's very different. But I have to have that. I gotta have it. I rely on the crutch of reality, of the things that I've seen and heard and experience. That's just how I can do what I do.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I think part of the reason your books are so accessible and entertaining is because you are. It's not just a bunch of facts on a page. You really are trying to think about creating a chapter. And these are very chapter oriented in which you are presenting a cast of characters and you're relaying information and scientific fact through those characters. This is obviously all something you've done for a while and it's very deliberate. I imagine it's because you're trying to entertain yourself, but you're also thinking about the reader who's going to receive this Stuff.

[Mary Roach]

Yeah, exactly.

[Gilbert Cruz]

And how they receive information.

[Mary Roach]

My sense has always been if it's not interesting and fun for me, it's probably not going to be interesting or fun for the reader. I'm doing it, let's be honest, because I love to travel and I just love the. The ability to step into these worlds that otherwise I would have no access to. Like, what just came to mind? I don't know. Why was a scene in Bonk where I heard about this. It was a company that makes dildos and they claimed that they had a research department. I was like, I'm so there. But it turns out the research department really barely existed. But just this scene with people, like walking along with armloads of these giant, you know, phalluses. And a lot of the people working the assembly line in the factory, they were women, local women from the valley. And I was like, these lovely young Latina women. I'm like, what do you tell your parents? And she goes, I work in plastics. I don't know. I don't know why that came to mind, but just the surprise of it. I thought, okay, there's a research department. You know, I'm picturing an actual department with somebody doing. I don't know what the research would.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Be, but they have a clipboard.

[Mary Roach]

They've got to have a. They're going to have a lab coat and there's going to be clipboards. Yes. And perhaps a testing machine where they're making sure that it moves the right way and it doesn't deteriorate. Do you ever see those ads for jeans where they had this robot that was like scraping the butt along the floor over and over? I was imagining maybe they'd be like a dildo testing machine. And anyway, it wasn't like that. But it didn't disappoint. I live for that kind of thing.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I cannot imagine anything was the equivalent to this book. Or at least not as hilarious, to be honest. But where, where were you able to travel for this one?

[Mary Roach]

Well, you'd be wrong there. Okay, no, this one, I. Let's see, how do I say this? Somebody mentioned to me it was a woman who worked in a stem cell lab. I don't know how our conversation got to this, but she told me there she saw a paper in a journal about a surgeon in Tbilisi. It turned out she didn't remember where he was. I found him, but she said he used a man's middle finger to rebuild a penis. He'd had cancer. And I, of course, was picturing the finger as is with the nail intact, attached down there. And I'm like, without knowing anymore, I'm like, I'm going to meet that surgeon, at least, if not that man. And so I sent, with the help of Google Translate, I sent emails in Georgian, in Russian, and in English. No reply, no reply. No one would call me back. So I like to travel, and my friend Stephanie likes to travel. And I'm like, you know, the Caucasus are supposed to be lovely in autumn. And also there's a surgeon who built a penis with a finger. So I didn't actually see the surgery. He's done it maybe five times, according to the office manager. He wasn't there. I just showed up like an idiot. He's on vacation. And I said, but we've come all the way from America. She was very nice. She said, you're a couple of idiots. But she said, look, his computer is in his office. There are photographs. Let's go in. And so she sat down at his desk and we looked at some images of that surgery, which in the end, the finger was just the interior. It was supplying rigidity. I have no idea why this surgeon chose to use the man's finger rather than some of the available implants that can be used in reconstruction or even erectile dysfunction surgery. There are implants that will do that. But for some reason, and again, I tried to follow up with him and he never did get in touch. I don't know if he'll even see the chapter or the book.

[Gilbert Cruz]

You should send him a free copy.

[Mary Roach]

I should send. I typically do, but I was a little miffed that he never got back to me.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Fair enough. You went far. Was it nice?

[Mary Roach]

It was beautiful. That was beautiful. Up in the mountains. Yeah. This is what I do. I spend a couple days on the research, and then I spend the rest of the week traveling around.

[Gilbert Cruz]

We'll be right back.

[Clinique Narrator]

Taking care of your skin is a personal, daily ritual. No matter what regimen works best for you. It's important to remember that great skincare doesn't have to be complicated. With Clinique's classic three step routine, fresh, radiant skin is as easy as 1, 2, 3. Clinique's iconic trio of products used to cleanse, exfoliate and moisturize is specifically created to address your skin's needs and provides a refreshingly simple solution for maintaining beautiful, resilient skin twice a day, every day. Great Skin starts here. Visit clinique.com to learn more.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Mont Blanc invites you to use life's quiet moments to pause, reflect, and put Pen to paper.

[Mary Roach]

Chapter one.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Oh, no. No, no, no, no.

[Mary Roach]

Part one. Perfect. The mountains are impressive. Oh, I wish you were here to see them. Dear diary, meet my new writing companion, the Meister.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Stuck. For every journey, the perfect companion awaits. Montblanc. Let's write. Visit montblanc.com for exquisitely crafted writing instruments, leather goods, and more.

[Clinique Narrator]

Throughout the Fort Myers area, life unfolds at your own speed. Here, connecting to loved ones and yourself is an unhurried pleasure. Whether kayaking beneath mangroves, pausing to watch birds take flight, finding seashells along the shoreline, or walking the beach, each moment invites reflection. Fort Myers is a place to experience fully at a pace that just feels right. Discover a slower, more intentional way of living at. Visit fort myers.com welcome back.

[Gilbert Cruz]

This is the book review podcast. I'm Gilbert Cruz, and I'm here with Mary Roach, author of Replaceable Adventures in Human Anatomy. As I mentioned, you craft your chapters around scenes and characters and fascinating researchers and scientists and doctors you meet along the way. But you also have always incorporated humor. I think anyone listening to this conversation would not be surprised at that. How did you figure out, maybe early on in your career writing books, how to modulate between too much, too little? Is this the right place? Is this the wrong place?

[Mary Roach]

I'm not a good judge of that at all. My editor actually is. Here's an example. This was a section in Banc. There's a surgeon in Cairo who had published dozens and dozens of papers on specific. He called. It was like reflexes of sexual intercourse. And I was like, I don't. What reflexes are these? So I wrote to him, and he said, great, and I can show you. I can demonstrate some of these reflexes. And I thought, okay, that'll be interesting. So we went there, and he said, my volunteer has disappeared, but I can show you another reflex. And what he showed me was using somebody on staff at the hospital. He showed me the anal wink. Okay. Which is if you scratch right near the anus, it winks. It's a reflex. Probably a safety thing, right?

[Gilbert Cruz]

Absolutely, yes.

[Mary Roach]

Okay. So he showed me the anal wink. I'm like, this has got to go in the book. It's the anal wink. And I write it up, and I included this whole. Because there's this man standing on a platform, so his eye level with the winking. And I flashed on, when I was a child, those Easter eggs where you look through the little hole and you see a scene with the bunnies and the chicks. And I flashed on this whole scene, and I Turned the book in, and my editor. I get it back, and there's a diagonal line through the whole passage, and it just says, no, no, bad girl. No. So that came out. That came out.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Okay. Do you feel like that was a wise choice? Do you wish.

[Mary Roach]

Yes, I do. Yes, I do.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Sometimes editors know what they're talking about.

[Mary Roach]

Yes, they do. My editor knows what she's talking about. Thank God for my editor.

[Gilbert Cruz]

After eight books, you've met, what, hundreds of scientists and researchers. And does it ever surprise you just how many different categories and subcategories of science and scientific research there are? It feels like we all know the broad categories. But then you have this person who's devoted their entire life to just this small thing. I'm making very small space with my fingers right now.

[Mary Roach]

That is what I live for. The person who.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah.

[Mary Roach]

Who's not only has devoted their whole life to it, but is so interested in it. I remember for gulp, there was this guy in Food Valley. It's like the Silicon Valley of food in the Netherlands. And there was a guy who had studied for years, for decades. He was in his 60s or 70s. Chewing, chewing. How does the mouth take apart food? Form a bolus, swallow it. He was so excited. There's this cutoff reflex where, okay, if you're biting down on a peanut, at a certain point, the peanut will give way. And if you continued to have the same amount of force that you were applying, your teeth would smash together and be damaged. So your body, like, cuts off without you even knowing or doing. And he was so excited about this reflex and chewing. And I live for people like that. And down the hall, or maybe across the road or it was in the area, there was a saliva expert. It was a whole laboratory. And we collected my saliva. And there were two different. There's different types of saliva. There's the kind that's that background saliva. And then when you're eating the stuff that, like, comes pouring in to adjust the ph and help you form a bolus. And first of all, the stuff that I was learning was amazing. But just to meet these people who are so excited and passionate about this thing that none of us ever think about. I guess that's my turf, really. That's what I love.

[Gilbert Cruz]

You clearly are a very curious person. Were you always this way even before you started writing books as a kid, as a college student? Are you the same person you were then in terms of just your desire to find out about amazing, slightly disturbing and wacky?

[Mary Roach]

Not at all. Not at all. My whole high School experience. I wasn't popular. I didn't go to any parties. I was kind of a loser. I just. I could tell you the lineup. Abc, NBC, cbs. For every night of the week. I came home, I had a cupcake and a glass of milk. Cause I was really skinny. And my mom was always trying to get me to gain weight. I'd sit down, I'd do my homework. I got great grades in high school. And then I'd watch tv. I didn't do anything extracurricular. I didn't show any interest in the outside world. I have to say there was a period when in middle school, my neighbor and I would do these. We called them the potted meat experiments. Where we went out and we had clipboards. That's one of the only.

[Gilbert Cruz]

No lab coats. No lab coats.

[Mary Roach]

No lab coats because it was winter. But we had the clipboards. And we hung potted meat sandwiches. We hung from a tree. We buried one in the snow. We put them around. Then we went back and looked at them. And we maybe wrote something on the clipboards. I don't know. I think that's the closest I ever came to having any sort of interest in the scientific method. I had not the most exciting biology teacher. I got a good grade, but I wasn't. I just. I wasn't very interested. And then I went to college, and suddenly I. Now I have social life. And I was very focused on parties. At Wesleyan, I got by. I got B's and C's. But I was mostly figuring out what kind of human being I was going to be. I wasn't very curious. And I wasn't that into my studies, I'm embarrassed to say.

[Gilbert Cruz]

And then you became a magazine writer? I did, eventually. And were you in the science space when you first started doing that work?

[Mary Roach]

Yeah, but only by accident. I started writing for the Sunday magazine of the San Francisco Chronicle examiner, which was fun, but wasn't a science beat at all. I had an editor, Peggy Northrup, who went to work for this magaz called Hippocrates, which was about health and medicine. I started writing for that publication and also Discover around that time. The science magazine Discover. And these are always the most interesting things to report on. You can find science going on all over the world. So I was able to feed my habit of travel by pitching stories in far flung locales. But it was endlessly interesting. I find science and medicine to be genuinely fascinating. And that's where my curiosity has stayed over the years.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Science is also gross. And I am curious. When you knew you were just gonna regularly write about things that are pretty gnarly, or maybe that many people would consider to be gnarly, but still wanna read about. Which I think is the line that you were toeing in much of your work.

[Mary Roach]

I guess it started with a column for salon.com I don't know if people remember salon.com I do. They're still out there. I think it was. Salon.com was. It was an Internet magazine. It was exciting. It was on the Internet. This is around 1999, I think. It got rolling right around then. I was invited to write a recurring feature, a column, but it was a reported column. And because I'd been writing about science and medicine and body related things, that was the topic of it. But because it was salon.com, there were no breaks. It was the wild west of Internet, like just. It went up. There wasn't a whole lot of editing. And whatever I felt like reporting on, I reported on. So I did that stiff happened. The cadaver element of it just happened because I was wandering through the basement of the UCSF Medical School library. The basement had all the out of date stuff that no student would ever need or want to look at. But I love to wander through there and just see what they had. And I came across the STAP Car crash conference, which was the early days of automotive safety and the early efforts to create crash test dummies. And in order to calibrate them, you had to use cadavers. And it was. I wrote a column about that, about the use of cadavers. And then I had another cadaver column which was for Thanksgiving, and it was how much does the human stomach hold before it bursts? Because I thought it would be a cheerful Thanksgiving Day column.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah. Seasonally Appropriate.

[Mary Roach]

Seasonally, thank you. Appropriate. But the fact that they used cadavers made no sense. We don't need to get into that. But anyway, there was a study I found, and those columns got high hit rates. And I know that because an agent, my agent I still have had contacted me and said, you should think about a book. Which of your columns got the highest hit rates? And I'm like, you know, these cadaver ones seem to be popular. So these things that are taboo or gross. There is a kind of built in curiosity, I think, among readers and the public in general. So that's how I got headed in that direction.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yes, but you've continued to do. So what is it about you that really loves the taboo, you know, whatever word we want to use to characterize it. Because in each of. Not each of them, but in most of these books, there are a couple chapters where the average reader probably is, oh, they're reading through outstretched fingers or something. Yeah.

[Mary Roach]

I don't know, Gilbert. There may be something wrong with me.

[Gilbert Cruz]

That's not what I'm implying at all. I'm just asking where. Where the interest lies.

[Mary Roach]

I think that the people who. I think that my readers are. I don't know, I. When I picture my readers, I just picture a room full of Mary Roach. You know, it's like the scene in Being John Malkovich, you know, where the whole restaurant is full of John Malkovich and various outfits.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Totally.

[Mary Roach]

So I just assume that the people who like my books have a similarly weird bent, I guess. And I. I think also, because this is stuff that most people shy away from, it's available to me. People have written about the heart. People have written books, many books about the brain and the nervous system. People have written about skin, but I'm like, the digestive system. The stuff that. I'll take that. I got it. That's mine.

[Gilbert Cruz]

You've staked out your corner.

[Mary Roach]

Yes, exactly. Yes. And I'm happy in my corner. My filthy, dirty, little stinky corner.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Do you get icked out at this stuff? Are you capable of that at the Point?

[Mary Roach]

Yeah. Not at. Never been icked out by anything in my books. But I have a friend, she's moved to New Zealand, but she was the medical examiner for Alameda county, where I live. And she, I think, made it a personal goal to ick Mary Roach out. So one day she said, oh, we have. I have a couple of interesting cases this morning in the autopsy room. You should come down. And I did. And there were a couple of bodies that had been discovered after a few weeks in hot weather. And I had to leave quickly. I gagged. And I have no idea how she does what she said. What do you mean? It's no different than changing a diaper. I'm like, I'm sorry. It's really different. The visuals of that I won't even begin to describe to you. But it was beyond anything I'd seen, even at the body farm in Tennessee where I visited. So, yeah, I do have that capability to be picked out and to gag and run from the room, which is what I did. I didn't run, but I walked quickly out of the room and I couldn't go back.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Mary, you write so much about the human body. Bodies that are alive, bodies that are not alive. I'm wondering if that has affected the way that you maybe spiritually think about things in your life.

[Mary Roach]

I'm not a very spiritual person, but I will say that seeing, seeing a dead body, either on a gurney or in the case of the body farm laid out on the grass under a tree. And I'll use the latter example because that at a distance, that person, because they were clothed. It was the part of the experiment had to do with clothed versus unclothed. It's a forensic study. So at a distance you think that you could mistake that for a person napping, but there's no way you would. There is something about a dead body. It is so much a hull. You have this sense of something is checked out, something was there and it is gone. And this is a hull, it's just a shell, it's just meat now. And so that makes you think. The follow up thought is, where did it go? So it brought that to mind. I don't have an answer. If I had to give an answer, I would say, when I die, I'm going to go back to where I was before I was born. For all those millennia. I have no idea where that is or what that is, but it does, it does bring that. It certainly brought it to mind more than it normally would.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Are you capable with all that you know about the human body, both big and small, are you capable of looking at people not just thinking about, oh, their stomach is doing this right now as we're having this wonderful meal, you and I. It's actually as it goes through the mouth and down through the gullet.

[Mary Roach]

That one, that book was the hardest for me because I would go, especially after the chewing chapter, I would go to a restaurant and I would look at people chewing and swallowing and watching. And I think that's disgusting. I was like, people should have sex in public and eat in private because eating is disgusting. But fortunately that fades and then you move on to the next book. But there is temporarily this heightened awareness of these processes that you were up until that time blissfully unaware of. And that was true for Bonk too. All the phases of sexual, sexual arousal. It's very distracting, me going, oh, are the earlobes engorging now? It can be a little distracting.

[Gilbert Cruz]

What do you think is the perfect Mary Roach project? What are the elements that make it sing?

[Mary Roach]

I gotta be able to go places. Like, I couldn't do a purely historical book. First of all, I'm not trained as a historian and I would not know how to. I wouldn't know how to begin to go about doing that. I Can do little slivers of research chapter at a time. I like to have a little history. A little history, absolutely. I love to have a couple historical chapters. If I've got an archive and I've got a couple folders to play with and something to build from, a little bit of history is great. Lots and lots of places to go with people doing things that no one would have imagined are being done in the world, or they pictured them one way and they're actually completely different. So lots of just surprising settings and things that are sometimes surreal and things that lend themselves to humor. If I'm gonna make fun of anyone, it's me. I'm the clueless, bumbling outsider. Or sometimes it's just the weirdness of the situation that's funny. Those are the elements that I typically am looking for, and it's surprisingly hard to find. That's why I'm flailing right now. I'm always flailing. People think, oh, you know, people go, so you have a list of books that you're going to get around to writing. I'm like, would pay lots of money to have that list. I don't have anything on a list. I don't know. I never know. But anyway, those are the elements.

[Gilbert Cruz]

What is one thing that you had to leave out of your new book that you wish you could have gotten in?

[Mary Roach]

I wanted to include a chapter on. There were a couple of things where people just. I didn't have the access. I didn't have the scene, the characters, the setting. I didn't have that. I wanted to include a chapter on uterus transplants, which I found interesting because it's a temporary transplant. A woman can get a uterus if her own uterus is not able to carry a child to term for whatever reason. It's possible to take one either from a donor, a living donor who's not going to have any more children, or from a cadaver. And to transplant that the person can then carry the fetus to term, have the baby, and then the uterus is taken out so that the person doesn't have to be on a lifetime regimen of immunosuppression, which you don't want to be on immunosuppressive drugs your whole life. Yeah, it's a temporary transplant. I thought that was very cool. But the universities, the medical facilities that were doing it, didn't allow me to go. And I could have been there for the transplant, the birth, the removal. I'm like, I'll take any of them. Take any of them. But for whatever reason, didn't want to. Didn't want to play with me. Yeah.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Do you have any suspicions as to, without naming any places in particular, what the hesitation might be?

[Mary Roach]

Sometimes universities just would rather not have someone there for. I don't know if it's liability or just wanting to be very cautious and control what goes out into the world of social media. I don't know. They didn't say specifically, but it's gotten harder. I find there's more patient privacy issues than there used to be. It's gotten a little harder to be Mary Roach.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Well, I was not able to tell that by this book, and there's more than enough fascinating stories in this one. Thank you, Mary Roach, for coming on the Book Review podcast.

[Mary Roach]

Oh, absolutely. My pleasure. Thank you so much, Gilbert.

[Gilbert Cruz]

That was my conversation with Mary Roach about her new science book, Replaceable You. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and thank you for listening.

[Clinique Narrator]

Taking care of your skin is a personal, daily ritual. No matter what regimen works best for you, it's important to remember that great skincare doesn't have to be complicated. With Clinique's classic three step routine, fresh, radiant skin is as easy as 1, 2, 3. Clinique's iconic trio of products used to cleanse, exfoliate and moisturize, is specifically created to address your skin's needs and provides a refreshingly simple solution for maintaining beautiful, resilient skin twice a day, every day. Great Skin starts here. Visit clinique.com to learn more.