Mary Roach: Author and Investigator of Stiff and Spook

Spook Review- "Review of books" group

Stiff Review- "Blog Critics" group

Mary's Fantastic Columns on Salon.com

My Biography

My essay on Mary Roach, Stiff and Spook

When you search to find information on "Mary Roach", you probably will stumble upon a  hilarious audition video and story of an American Idol disaster, but in order to successfully find out who the real Mary Roach is,    ( that this website is dedicated to), you need to read her witty books and study this website's valid information about her.

Biography on Mary Roach

Because of the lack of experience and short amount of time Mary Roach has spent in the "Novel-Writing business", there is not a source of information where I could find which would give me enough biographical information to properly write a descriptive text in order to give the reader a biographical sketch. Instead of writing a lengthy biography, I found various interviews, quotes, and reviews of Mary Roach and her books, which I believe can give you a great idea of who she is.

When you search to find information on "Mary Roach", you probably will stumble upon a  hilarious audition video and story of an American Idol disaster, but in order to successfully find out who the real Mary Roach is, ( who this website is dedicated to), you need to read her witty books and study this website's valid information about her.

Journalist and former Salon.com columnist Mary Roach has written for Outside, GQ, Vogue, and The New York Times Magazine. She writes the humor column "My Planet" in Reader's Digest and is a contributing editor for the science magazine Discover. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Ed. She holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Wesleyan University. She appeared on The Colbert Report, a satirical news program, in November 2005

Praises for Stiff:

"One of the funniest and most unusual books of the year."
-- Entertainment Weekly

"A mordantly witty history of the scientific contributions made by the no-longer-living."
-- Outside magazine

"Mary Roach is the funniest science writer in the country. If that sounds like faint praise--or even an oxymoron--there's proof to the contrary on almost any page of this book. Stiff tells us where the bodies are, what they're up to, and the astonishing tales they still have to tell. Best of all it manages, somehow, to find the humor in cadavers without robbing them of their dignity. Long live the dead." --Burkhard Bilger, author of Noodling for Flatheads

Interview with Blacktable.com

BT: The reviews all call Stiff funny or witty, and it is. Did you use humor as a coping mechanism for yourself or to make the subject matter more palatable for readers?

MR: Neither, intentionally. It's just how I write -- or how I prefer to write. I like to make my prose as entertaining as possible, and it's more fun for me that way, too. Though I think the humor did have the effect of making the subject matter go down a little more easily.

BT: You recount a story in the book about posing as a writer for a funeral-industry magazine to get an interview about alleged cannibalism in China. Were your sources wary of you? How did you convince them that you weren't looking to paint them as weirdoes?

MR: Yes, lots of wariness. And I don't blame them. I think I'd be wary too if I cut off heads for a living. Whenever possible, I simply explained the premise of the book -- without mentioning that it would be a funny book -- and assured them that I support cadaver research.

The China folks were trickier. There's no tradition of books like Stiff over there, I don't think. There was just no way to do it but to lie! The plastic surgery seminar was the trickiest. I was just about ready to pay the tuition and get my own head. I was going to show up with an Exacto knife and a pickle fork and just fake it. Thankfully, an acquaintance in the industry got me in at the last minute.

BT: There's been a lot of "How X (salt/cod/nutmeg/umbrellas) Change the World" or "The History of X (zero, orgasms, uppity royals)" books published in the past few years. Stiff isn't like that but could have easily fallen into that rubric. Did you consciously avoid that structure? Is "How Cadavers Changed the World" still waiting to be written?

MR: I think I consciously avoided all structure! You're right -- the first cadavers to be dissected really changed the course of medicine. Up to that point it was all potions and hocus-pocus. Until someone dug in and really figured out how everything worked, the art of healing would have remained in the dark ages. Go cadavers!

The trouble with a structure like that -- for me -- is that it's limiting. You get a nice, cohesive through-line, but you have to jettison some of your livelier stuff, and I have trouble doing that.

BT: Stiff was used as a fairly significant prop on the last season of Six Feet Under. How did that role for the book come about, and did you like the portrayal of your book?

MR: Manna from heaven! God love and protect Alan Ball!! Portrayal was perfect. I didn't mind at all when Brenda called it macabre or morbid or whatever she said. Especially loved the close-up -- my Amazon numbers went way up they day after that shot.

People ask me if it was product placement, which is a logical question. But it wasn't. I don't think HBO does product placement, and if they did, Norton couldn't afford it.

I heard that it was going to happen about six months prior. A friend of mine was interviewing Ball and mentioned Stiff. (He played me the tape.) Ball says, "I know that book. Look, it's right here. We're putting it on the show next season." That's all I knew. I didn't realize it would be part of the plot. I figured someone might be reading it in the background.

BT: What's the biggest annoying consequence of writing Stiff?

MR: I get some peculiar phone calls and emails. A documentary producer for The Discovery Channel wanted to know where he could get a cadaver for a documentary about human sacrifice. He had heard that the Mayans sacrificed 20,000 people in three days (or something like that), and he had worked out the killings per hour and wasn't convinced it was possible. He wanted to get a cadaver and give an obsidian blade to a surgeon and time how fast he could get the heart out. Like maybe I had a torso down in the basement that he could use. I heard that show ran recently, sans the cadaver.

BT: I have to admit -- I was a little bummed about the lack of pictures. Except for the cops hanging out with the skeleton, there weren't any visual aids. Though your descriptions are vivid, are photo clearances that hard to get? Or I am just a repulsive person who should have kept that question to myself?

MR: Well, you are a repulsive person, and I love you for that. The feeling 'round Norton was that literal pictures (as opposed to the sort of whimsical ones we ran) might put people off. I think that with written descriptions you can sort of mete out the details, temper them with humor, step back here and there, really control the level of luridness. With photos, it's all there in your face, all at once, and you run the risk of shocking/nauseating your reader. Perhaps there should be a separate X-rated edition for people like you (and me). I tried to convince my editors to do a special Scratch 'n Sniff edition, but they ignored me.

BT: What about the use of cadavers in art? Michelangelo and other Renaissance artists were rumored to have obtained cadavers to learn more about the human form. Modern artists such as Joel-Peter Witkin use cadavers as part of their art. Was this not an area of interest to you, or did you find it to be so rare that it just wasn't worth commenting on?

MR: I was going to do a chapter on this. I wanted to go to Gunther Von Hagens's art/anatomy plastination facility in China, but Gunther managed to give me the slip (no fool he). It was mostly a matter of having to make the cut somewhere. If I were to expand Stiff, I'd add this chapter, and also a chapter about military uses of cadavers. I heard about Operation Mincemeat after the book came out. This was a WW2 ploy where the Allies dressed a dead guy up in an officer's uniform with fake maps and plans and set him adrift so that he'd wash ashore into enemy hands. (It worked.) Also would have looked into the catapulting of plague-ridden corpses over rampart walls in medieval times.

BT: Did you find it difficult to come back to the land of the living when you were writing the book? How did you mentally balance, say, finding yourself among 40 heads on a platter with making sure your stepdaughter's homework was done?

MR: There were definitely times when the one leaked over into the other, with disturbing consequence. When I was flying back from the head lab, I kept looking around at all my fellow passengers, thinking, "I know what you'd look like as just a head."

BT: The book's title is almost too perfect. What were some other suggestions that didn't make the cut?

MR: I tried to talk them out of Stiff, even though I came up with it. I felt it was too flippant and would horrify all the researchers in the book. And second, because I thought "stiff" was a cops and forensics term and didn't really fit. I came up with "Things To Do When You're Dead," which is a little too close to the indie film Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead. And the marketing people nixed it because it was too many words. The marketing people prevailed.

BT: I don't know what you're working on next (in other interviews you've declined to reveal the subject of your forthcoming books), and I'm not going to ask. But what's the next logical extension, if there were to be one? What comes after cadavers? Morticians?

MR: The next book is a sort of a spin-off from the chapter about people looking for the soul. It's about scientists and other enterprising types trying to PROVE that the soul exists/persists. More fun shenanigans in peculiar labs. Similar tone and (lack of) structure to Stiff. I just turned it in. Won't be out 'til fall 2005. One cadaver book is enough for me, I think. Morticians are interesting, but I think we might have reached market saturation there. Ditto forensics.

    Review from California Literary Review

What were your expectations going into this project? Were you hoping that science had made progress in detecting an afterlife, or were you a complete skeptic?

I was truly hoping to uncover some little nugget of overlooked research to suggest that life after death is for real. Though I suppose it was a little naive to imagine that Mary Roach, with her B.A. in humanities, would single-handedly solve the 10,000 year old mystery.
 

Who was Duncan Macdougall? Is his work being carried out by anyone today?

Macdougall is the man behind that line in the movie "21 Grams" -- "When you die, they say you lose 21 grams...." He's the "they." Macdougall was a Haverhill, MA, doctor, who, around the turn of the last century, took to installing dying TB patients on an elaborate bed-scale to see if the needle went down at the moment of death -- suggesting that that would be the weighht of the human soul. Thus proving that it exists. A creative, if mildly naive approach to the issue. I do love his can-do spirit. He made a cameo in my first book, Stiff, and was sort of the inspiration for Spook, which is all about people seeking evidence, or proof, of a soul or an afterlife.

Yes, variations on his work are underway today. One was done by a sheep rancher in Bend, Oregon, with a background in quantum theory. Sheep standing in for TB patients. The other is a lot more sophisticated - proposed by a Duke professor and requiring a picogram-sensitive scale and an array of energy sensors and an enclosed system. Leeches are involved. Always a plus in my book. I've got a whole chapter on soul weighers.
 

You follow a reincarnation investigator in India and were not impressed with the cases he was working on at the time, but was there anything in the research you did on reincarnation that made you think this is an area that might have promise?

There are some cases that have been written up a lot, which, if you take them at face value, would suggest that the person was indeed reincarnated. But they happened long ago and have to be treated as unverified anecdote, I think. The main criticism of this work is that you rarely hear about cases in cultures where reincarnation isn't part of the belief system. Hard to control....
 

You mention in your book that the spiritualism craze peaked after World War I when so many families had lost loved ones and wanted desperately to communicate with them. Can you tell us a little bit about one or two of the more colorful mediums from the 19th and early 20th century? What is ectoplasm?

Helen Duncan is my favorite. Huge, chain-smoking woman who used to swoon and occasionally pee herself in the frenzy of spirit possession. Helen had the scientists stumped. She'd produce ectoplasm (claimed to be a physical manifestation of spirit energy -- in reality either cheesecloth or sheep entrails) even though the researchers had frisked her and done a cavity search prior to her entering the séance chamber. Turned out she was a talented regurgitator. She'd roll up the cheesecloth, which is very compactable, swallow it in a rubber sleeve, and bring it back up under cover of darkness. (Conveniently, the lights were always out during these affairs.)

Then there was Rudi Schneide. Rudi would completely lose himself during especially intense séances, to the point of occasionally ejaculating in his trousers. To his credit, he did not try to pass off the semen as ectoplasm.
 

The Near Death Experience is something that seems to have happened to many people. How do people describe the experience? Are scientists investigating this? What are the results so far?

There are a few core elements of the NDE, as researchers call it: floating up above yourself, whooshing down a tunnel, moving toward a light, seeing dead loved ones who often tell you "it's not your time." The experience is pretty universal, though there's often a unique cultural overlay: for instance, a man in China was told "there's been a clerical error," rather than "it's not your time." A truck driver sped down "a tailpipe" rather than a tunnel.

A team of cardiologists and psychiatrists at the University of Virginia are taking a simple, rather elegant approach to trying to find out whether people who have these experiences are hallucinating or are actually leaving their bodies. They've got a laptop computer taped, flat open, on top of the highest cardiac monitor in an operating room, such that the only way you could see what's on the screen would be if you were floating up by the ceiling. You can't see the image (one of several rotating images, randomly chosen) from down below. Patients are interviewed after they leave the OR, to see if they report having seen anything. So far, none of the patients has had an NDE, but the project had only just begun when I was there.
 

After a year of research, field work and "Medium School" what do you think happens to us when we die?

No frickin' idea. I'm more confused now than I was when I started out!
 

Would you like to take this moment to publicly proclaim what sign people should look for soon after your passing (many years in the future, of course), that will let them know Mary Roach is communicating with them?

All over America, copies of Stiff and Spook will keep flinging themselves from bookshelves - in homes, libraries, bookstores. It's going to be very dramatic. Not to mention the effect on post-mortem sales.

Jason Zasky's Interview with Mary Roach

Here's a sobering thought: Considering the state of today's economy it might be easier to find a job and become a productive member of society if you're dead. Looking at the latest unemployment figures you realize there's a lot of people sitting around not doing much of anything. Then you read Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (W.W. Norton) and discover there's a host of cadavers out there in the world making themselves useful—fulfilling their prior commitment to help researchers pursue scientific initiatives.

Failure recently spoke with Roach about what it's like to be, uh, a working stiff, as well as how it feels to spend an extended period of time with a corpse.

How did you get the idea for Stiff?
The idea grew out of a Salon.com column I used to do that covered health, the human body and the unexplored fringes of medicine. The columns about research cadavers were very popular and we were actually toying with the idea of doing something called, "The Dead Beat." I started doing some research and then the entire section got cut when Salon went through budget cuts. But I had all this research and around that time I was talking with an agent. So it wasn't a lifelong interest of mine. I don't have family in the mortuary business and had really never given any thought to cadavers until I stumbled onto them.

When you were researching the book how did people respond when they found out what you were doing?
Writing a book on cadavers is a real conversation stopper. People want to be excited for you: "Oh, you're doing a book? What's it about? Cadavers?" People don't really know what to say. The book is very hard to explain because people think it sounds dark and depressing. And I say, "No, it's actually a fun book about cadavers." Some people just don't know what to make of that. So that was my least favorite part—trying to explain the book to people while I was working on it. Now that it's out it's a little easier.

What was it like to spend so much time around dead people?
It was surprisingly easy. Anonymous research cadavers are actually not that hard to be around, unlike the body of someone you knew or the victim of some horrible accident. Those kinds of sights are wrenching and emotional, but research cadavers are typically in the setting of a lab, they're anonymous [and] you don't get the feeling that their family is missing them. You don't have any sense of their identity. They are just part of the experiment and more objects than people. I don't mean that in a dismissive or disrespectful way but they are not people, they are the remains of a person. Also, their faces are often covered. In the anatomy lab I went to, a lot of the students left the faces covered. It makes it easier for them to cope. They are less human seeming when their faces and hands are covered.

It sounds really strange but I don't think I'm unique in my ability to be around cadavers. I think anyone could do it. The exception was the head lab [a facial anatomy and face-lift refresher course for plastic surgeons that utilized 40 severed heads, each in its own roasting pan]. That took some getting used to. Those were not covered and you could see where they had been cut off.

Was the severed head lab the first place you visited?
Yeah, that was the first thing I did. I was little concerned because on the plane on the way home I found myself looking around at my fellow passengers and thinking, "I know what you'd look like as just a head" [laughs]. I thought, maybe it's not so good that I'm doing this. Maybe I'm going to go insane.

Did you have any uncomfortable encounters with cadavers?
There was this one guy who was the body that the students at the mortuary college were practicing on. His identification card was there. Standing around looking at this guy and knowing something about his past, it made me very sad. It wasn't uncomfortable, just emotional. All the rest were so anonymous. But this guy I happened to know a little about and it just struck me as kind of sad in that way that death can be.

What's the difference between donating your organs and donating your body to science?
When you put a dot on your driver's license that's for organ donation only. Say you are in a car crash and your head hits the windshield and you're in a coma. You're brain dead but you're on a respirator so your organs are alive because you're being kept breathing. If you have the dot on your license your organs are going to get transplanted, but that doesn't mean your body is going to science.

"Everyone wants a piece of you when you're a research cadaver."

In order to become a research cadaver you have to have filled out something called a "Willed Body" form for a particular university. Oftentimes it's somebody who had surgery at a medical school or medical center and it saved their life and they feel grateful and want to give back to the school. You fill out this form saying, "I hereby bequeath my body…" to [insert name] university to do whatever they want with, essentially. Then you end up at an anatomy lab or on a research project. Very often you are parceled up. Your head will go one place, your liver might go someplace else. Nothing is wasted. Everyone wants a piece of you when you're a research cadaver.

So if you donate your body to science you have control over where you're going but not with what they end up doing with you?
That's right. You basically go to the project you would fit and where there's a need. You can put a note on your form saying, "I do not wish to be used for the following purposes." You can specify what you don't want to be used for, but you can't specify what you want to be used for. There are some places where if you contact the facility yourself—like the Body Farm [University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Facility] has people who have contacted them and said, "I want to donate myself to the Body Farm." Sometimes you can set stuff up on an individual basis, but it's typically not done. Usually you go where you're needed. About 80 percent [of cadavers] go to anatomy labs.

Based on what you saw, what's the ideal job for a cadaver?
Well, I think the best position you could have as a dead person would be the skeleton in the anatomy lab. Skeletons are sort of aesthetically beautiful. They're not icky and decomposing in any way and they don't smell funny. People can look at you and think, "Wow, that's really cool." You're still there and helping out in your dead way. I'd have to say that would be my number one pick.

Plastination is another one. There's a lab at the University of Michigan where they plastinate organs—essentially creating a hard, preserved plastic version. It's a liver but the moisture has been replaced with this polymer that's catalyzed and then hardens. You can pick it up and it doesn't smell and it never decomposes. You can do a brain. You can even do a whole body. I think that would be my second choice. I could be happy as a spleen on a shelf.

Is there any role a cadaver might not want to get stuck with?
I would rather not end up in an anatomy classroom. To have all those young, fresh-faced people looking at your dilapidated body for weeks on end. You're heavily preserved as an anatomy lab specimen because you've got to last for the three or four months of the course. So you look kind of ghoulish. You don't look like yourself dead—you look a little beef jerky-ish. Not that it matters. But if I had my druthers I'd rather not be an embalmed specimen.

In your experience, how do the living treat cadavers?
Very respectfully. For example, at the anatomy lab at the University of California, San Francisco, I went to a memorial service that they hold for the cadavers at the end of the class. It was really touching. Students read from journals. They sang songs they had written. They performed classical music. People were crying—I was all choked up. A lot of medical schools do this and some of them even invite the families of the cadavers to come to the service. Just talking to the students they were all very conscious of what a great gift this person was making.

About the only thing I saw that wasn't completely respectful was at the head lab where one guy picked up his head and had his photograph taken with it. That outraged a couple of the other surgeons.

Is there any research that scientists are unwilling to do with cadavers?
There is essentially no research done with child cadavers. There is a need for it in testing car seats, but it simply isn't done. First of all, children don't fill out "Willed Body" forms and nobody is going to approach a grieving parent and say, "Hey, is it okay if we use Johnny in our impact study?"

"The thing about decomposition is that it's so drawn out and each week it's a new set of ghastly things that are happening to you."

Also, no one tests weapons. You'd think the military would say, "Let's see what kind of damage this will do!" But that absolutely doesn't take place. They use ballistic gelatin—which is the same density as human tissue—to test new bullets.

What's the biggest drawback to appearing in public after death? Is it the inability to control or change your personal appearance?
I suppose. Looking back on what I just said about not feeling good about being naked, embalmed and disgusting in front of a bunch of college students…. If there is a drawback when you're dead that would be it [laughs]. I guess we tend to apply the hang-ups that we had as living people to the concept of ourselves as a dead person.

In your estimation, which is more unpleasant for a dead body to "endure": Decay or cremation?
Cremation appeals to me because it's cleaner and quicker. The thing about decomposition is that it's so drawn out and each week it's a new set of ghastly things that are happening to you [laughs]. So personally I'd rather have it over with quickly. Even though burning up for the 10 minutes or so that it takes is horrific, at least it's over with quickly and there's no mess.

Are there any foods that you can't eat anymore because of what you've seen?
Campbell's chicken soup—that kind of yellow soup with the bits of meat and oil floating on top. It's because of that comment that [scientist and professor] Arpad Vass made [regarding what decomposed tissue looks like]. "It becomes like soup . . . chicken soup," he said." So that yellow soup would always bring to mind my trip to the Body Farm. I don't eat Campbell's chicken soup much but if I were presented with it, I think I'd have a problem.

As far as you know, has anyone who has heard about or read your book been offended by it?
My first cousin, Claire, lives in England and is quite upper class and doesn't get her hands dirty very much. I was talking with her son who said, [adopts English accent], "Yeah, my mum told me you wrote a book. She said, 'Mary's written a book. It's disgusting.'" But offended? No one has expressed that to me yet.

Do you plan to donate your body to science?
I have a bit in the end of the book about that. My husband is very squeamish. He won't wear contacts because he'd have to touch his eyeballs. He has a thing about death, too. I was talking to him about the Harvard Brain Bank [Harvard Brain Tissue Research Center]. I kind of like the idea of having a wallet card that says, "I'm going to Harvard"—the Harvard Brain Bank, but it still sounds kind of appealing. I was describing how they get the brain out to them and he said, "No, I'm not doing it. I don't care what you say. If you die before me I'm not giving you to the Harvard Brain Bank." It was a really hard couple years for Ed while I was writing this book.

In the end I didn't want to put him through having to imagine me being used in research because it would absolutely freak him out. But if he dies first I would donate my body to science. It's so much more interesting than being cremated.