For her column at Salon.com Mary Roach has jousted, fought a bull, acted as a "pee buddy" for a man with a bashful bladder, eaten a raw fish eyeball, bowled with amputees, attempted vaginal weight lifting, smeared herself with costly bottled pheromones to test their effectiveness, wrestled alligators and sniffed armpits at a deodorant test lab. But her biggest challenge came with doing the research for her book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.
Live human beings owe a lot to dead people. For thousands of years, dead bodies have done things we havent been able to such as testing guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and been the test subjects for every new surgical procedure from heart transplants to gender reassignment surgery. In the book, Roach visits where dead bodies go to do good in such places as a human decay research facility in Tennessee, to a plastic surgery practice lab and to a Scandinavian funeral directors' conference on human composting.
This is not a textbook. It is one of funniest books I have ever read. I would even go so far as suggest reading it right before Max Brooks book, The Zombie Survival Guide. With Roachs book you can find out what happens to the body after you die and then you can find out how to kill them when they reanimate.
You can buy Stiff here.
Daniel Robert Epstein: I read that a lot of publishers were after you to publish the book. Did you have to pitch it?
Mary Roach: I did have to pitch it with my proposal. But there quite a few publishers interested and we ended up with five or six bidding on it. It wasnt like someone came to me and asked me to do a book about cadavers.
DRE: Did they already know about you?
MR: Yes, because at that time I was already doing a column for Salon.com and that was fairly well read among New York publishers. The column had to do with the fringes of health and the human body. It grew out of that because of three columns I did had to do with cadaver research. We had even discussed doing a column solely about that called the Deadbeat. We would have done that but there was another round of funding cuts.
DRE: Was the book always going to be funny?
MR: Thats just how I write, I cant really help it. If the subject matter doesnt lend itself to humor than I dont usually want to do it. Thats what I love to do and its what I do well. You wouldnt really want Mary Roach covering politics. This is the only thing I do. If it needs to be a sensitive portrayal of a family in dire circumstances then I cant do it. I cant be sensitive, serious and mature. There was no question about it being funny. People have asked me if I thought that would be a way to make the subject matter more palatable but in my mind it was quite a risk. I thought the combination of death and humor would be offensive. I was really nervous that the book would be lambasted for that.
DRE: The only people that could complain about being offended are dead people and theyre dead.
MR: I was thinking more like somebody who has just lost a family member. Maybe the tone would seem flippant to them in their time of loss or something. But I have not gotten any letters from people complaining.
DRE: Has this subject been done by other people more boringly?
MR: Not about research cadavers. There was a book called Death to Dust by Kenneth Iserson which is all about what happens after you die. Like in funeral homes and theres a little bit about donating your body to science. It does cover a bit of the same terrain but its compendious like a reference book. Its a good book but I dont think it was widely distributed. Certainly there is nothing on the crucifixion cadaver and things like that.
DRE: Did you ever get ill from looking at all the dead bodies?
MR: No, I never got physically ill but a couple of things made me feel like I was going to lose my mind. The second place I went to was the embalming college. They were doing a student embalming of a donated cadaver. The body was autopsied so his whole body cavity was open and his organs were in a bag. It was quite a disturbing sight. At night the image of what I had seen kept intruding in my thoughts and I remember thinking What if this is the way I am always going to be now? What if I cant stop thinking about it? So the first couple left an impact.
DRE: What was the first place you went to for the book?
MR: That was the head lab and I had this disturbing experience on the way home from it. I was sitting on the plane looking at all my fellow passengers and thinking I know what you would look like as just heads on a table. That was just the first chapter.
DRE: I read also that you were a bit odd even before you wrote the book.
MR: Well Ive always had a taste for, not exactly macabre, but weird stuff. On my wall here I have a USDA potato disorder identification chart which has amazing full color photographs of things like tuber rot, black heart and corky ring spot. People ask me why I have this potato chart and I say I dont know, it just cracks me up.
DRE: Are you more morbid now after writing the book?
MR: I guess I have a certain baseline level of morbidness which to me seems normal because Ive done the book. Things which would strike others as morbid are normal to me. An example being when the book first came out my editor called me and said that I got a good review from Kirkus Reviews. I hadnt heard of the magazine and what I heard her say was You got a good review in Carcass Reviews. I thought there was an entire publication devoted to carcasses. So my sense of normal has been tweaked. I assume that people know what plastination [the art of preserving human bodies] is and thats its common knowledge. In fact knowing these things marks you as weird.
DRE: Do you watch CSI?
MR: No I never have.
DRE: A lot of what you write about in your book is applied on a weekly basis in that show but they dont explain them. For instance they lay out the gel blocks to test how deep the bullets go into a human but they dont say what it is all about. Thats the stuff you explain.
MR: People want to know that stuff but with TV the drama gets in the way. They cant spend time explaining it.
DRE: Its so funny you explain stuff that happens on the most popular television show. Are people more morbid because of shows like that?
MR: No I think people have always been fascinated by these things, shows like ER, Six Feet Under and CSI have made it ok to be publicly curious instead of secretly curious. For a very long time people never thought to just knock on the door of a funeral parlor and go down to the lab to see what they do.
DRE: Did you get any flack from scientists for the book?
MR: I fully expected to but I have not. Ive heard from everybody who was in the book except for Dr. White [the head transplant guy] hes been ill and I never heard from the surgeons in chapter one but I didnt expect because I never named them. Also some of the government people never responded. I have no reason to think anyone is angry with me. The compost lady loved the book and her friend is doing the Swedish translation. If they are bashing me then they are doing it behind my back, which is good.
DRE: I heard that when you are writing a book, collecting all your receipts from traveling and expenses that you cant write this stuff off until the book is published.
MR: Is that a fact? Well dont tell the IRS then. I write it off from the year the receipt is from.
DRE: How much in expenses did you accumulate?
MR: I dont know an exact figure. I do store up frequent flier miles and I cash them all in. A lot of the trips were free because of that. The China and Sweden trips were the most expensive. The final number for everything might have been $10,000. At least eight of the chapters involved travel. I stay at Comfort Inns or even just drag a mattress onto the embalming tables [laughs].
DRE: Are you married?
MR: I am and my husband is very squeamish. He actually appears in the last chapter weighing in on whether I would donate my brain to the brain bank. In the book he says Ix-nay on the ain-bray ank-bay. That was a difficult year for him because I would tell him everything I visited and he started looking very stricken. So after a while I stopped telling him.
DRE: What are you going to do with your body after your dead?
MR: Im not sure. I really wanted to be a skeleton in an anatomy classroom but there is no program for that. The brain bank thing Im not going to do because they hate me based on a Salon column I wrote. They dont want my brain they would probably throw it to the dogs.
DRE: They wouldnt want to cut into it?
MR: They might enjoy exploding it. I like the Swedish womans idea of composting the body. Thats a lovely idea to be taken up by plants. Its kind of a literal reincarnation. But then again because of the book I think I should donate myself to a university. So the jury is still out.
DRE: Do you think the book could be used in research or schools?
MR: Sure, people who are vaguely interested in this area will sometimes write to me and say they made the decision to go to mortuary school. I think its good if you are thinking about getting a lab job working with cadavers.
DRE: Have you done many book signings?
MR: Yes I did a six city tour last year.
DRE: What kind of people show up?
MR: Youd be amazed at how all over the map the people are. I get ordinary folks, Goth people, mortuary students, doctors, undertakers and for the most part people who just found it interesting. If you look around the room it doesnt look like a roomful of weirdoes. People assume I get a lot of weirdoes but so far Ive only had two odd people.
DRE: What were they like?
MR: One guy was about seven feet tall and he had this shirt that had the alien from the Alien movie on it. He has this sterling silver ring with a coffin on it; he bent down to me and says Open it. I couldnt open the ring so he did it and there was a little silver skeleton in it then he went and ate a lot of the cheese. I ran into the same guy at another reading and I asked him what he did. He says Im a tennis pro. He looked like a ghoul. He did want to know if I could tell him where to get a human fetus in a jar. I really dont know where to get that.
Another reading there was a guy who stood up and said Do you know anything about the fact that the government takes the bodies of terrorists and wrap them in pigskin so they couldnt go to heaven? I said I hadnt heard that one. So only those two oddballs.
DRE: Do you have regular friends?
MR: [laughs] They are all just fucken nuts. No Im kidding. Some of my friends are normal and they are all interesting. There are a few lawyers and bankers though.
DRE: I bet those are more your husbands friends.
MR: Yeah they are.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Live human beings owe a lot to dead people. For thousands of years, dead bodies have done things we havent been able to such as testing guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and been the test subjects for every new surgical procedure from heart transplants to gender reassignment surgery. In the book, Roach visits where dead bodies go to do good in such places as a human decay research facility in Tennessee, to a plastic surgery practice lab and to a Scandinavian funeral directors' conference on human composting.
This is not a textbook. It is one of funniest books I have ever read. I would even go so far as suggest reading it right before Max Brooks book, The Zombie Survival Guide. With Roachs book you can find out what happens to the body after you die and then you can find out how to kill them when they reanimate.
You can buy Stiff here.
Daniel Robert Epstein: I read that a lot of publishers were after you to publish the book. Did you have to pitch it?
Mary Roach: I did have to pitch it with my proposal. But there quite a few publishers interested and we ended up with five or six bidding on it. It wasnt like someone came to me and asked me to do a book about cadavers.
DRE: Did they already know about you?
MR: Yes, because at that time I was already doing a column for Salon.com and that was fairly well read among New York publishers. The column had to do with the fringes of health and the human body. It grew out of that because of three columns I did had to do with cadaver research. We had even discussed doing a column solely about that called the Deadbeat. We would have done that but there was another round of funding cuts.
DRE: Was the book always going to be funny?
MR: Thats just how I write, I cant really help it. If the subject matter doesnt lend itself to humor than I dont usually want to do it. Thats what I love to do and its what I do well. You wouldnt really want Mary Roach covering politics. This is the only thing I do. If it needs to be a sensitive portrayal of a family in dire circumstances then I cant do it. I cant be sensitive, serious and mature. There was no question about it being funny. People have asked me if I thought that would be a way to make the subject matter more palatable but in my mind it was quite a risk. I thought the combination of death and humor would be offensive. I was really nervous that the book would be lambasted for that.
DRE: The only people that could complain about being offended are dead people and theyre dead.
MR: I was thinking more like somebody who has just lost a family member. Maybe the tone would seem flippant to them in their time of loss or something. But I have not gotten any letters from people complaining.
DRE: Has this subject been done by other people more boringly?
MR: Not about research cadavers. There was a book called Death to Dust by Kenneth Iserson which is all about what happens after you die. Like in funeral homes and theres a little bit about donating your body to science. It does cover a bit of the same terrain but its compendious like a reference book. Its a good book but I dont think it was widely distributed. Certainly there is nothing on the crucifixion cadaver and things like that.
DRE: Did you ever get ill from looking at all the dead bodies?
MR: No, I never got physically ill but a couple of things made me feel like I was going to lose my mind. The second place I went to was the embalming college. They were doing a student embalming of a donated cadaver. The body was autopsied so his whole body cavity was open and his organs were in a bag. It was quite a disturbing sight. At night the image of what I had seen kept intruding in my thoughts and I remember thinking What if this is the way I am always going to be now? What if I cant stop thinking about it? So the first couple left an impact.
DRE: What was the first place you went to for the book?
MR: That was the head lab and I had this disturbing experience on the way home from it. I was sitting on the plane looking at all my fellow passengers and thinking I know what you would look like as just heads on a table. That was just the first chapter.
DRE: I read also that you were a bit odd even before you wrote the book.
MR: Well Ive always had a taste for, not exactly macabre, but weird stuff. On my wall here I have a USDA potato disorder identification chart which has amazing full color photographs of things like tuber rot, black heart and corky ring spot. People ask me why I have this potato chart and I say I dont know, it just cracks me up.
DRE: Are you more morbid now after writing the book?
MR: I guess I have a certain baseline level of morbidness which to me seems normal because Ive done the book. Things which would strike others as morbid are normal to me. An example being when the book first came out my editor called me and said that I got a good review from Kirkus Reviews. I hadnt heard of the magazine and what I heard her say was You got a good review in Carcass Reviews. I thought there was an entire publication devoted to carcasses. So my sense of normal has been tweaked. I assume that people know what plastination [the art of preserving human bodies] is and thats its common knowledge. In fact knowing these things marks you as weird.
DRE: Do you watch CSI?
MR: No I never have.
DRE: A lot of what you write about in your book is applied on a weekly basis in that show but they dont explain them. For instance they lay out the gel blocks to test how deep the bullets go into a human but they dont say what it is all about. Thats the stuff you explain.
MR: People want to know that stuff but with TV the drama gets in the way. They cant spend time explaining it.
DRE: Its so funny you explain stuff that happens on the most popular television show. Are people more morbid because of shows like that?
MR: No I think people have always been fascinated by these things, shows like ER, Six Feet Under and CSI have made it ok to be publicly curious instead of secretly curious. For a very long time people never thought to just knock on the door of a funeral parlor and go down to the lab to see what they do.
DRE: Did you get any flack from scientists for the book?
MR: I fully expected to but I have not. Ive heard from everybody who was in the book except for Dr. White [the head transplant guy] hes been ill and I never heard from the surgeons in chapter one but I didnt expect because I never named them. Also some of the government people never responded. I have no reason to think anyone is angry with me. The compost lady loved the book and her friend is doing the Swedish translation. If they are bashing me then they are doing it behind my back, which is good.
DRE: I heard that when you are writing a book, collecting all your receipts from traveling and expenses that you cant write this stuff off until the book is published.
MR: Is that a fact? Well dont tell the IRS then. I write it off from the year the receipt is from.
DRE: How much in expenses did you accumulate?
MR: I dont know an exact figure. I do store up frequent flier miles and I cash them all in. A lot of the trips were free because of that. The China and Sweden trips were the most expensive. The final number for everything might have been $10,000. At least eight of the chapters involved travel. I stay at Comfort Inns or even just drag a mattress onto the embalming tables [laughs].
DRE: Are you married?
MR: I am and my husband is very squeamish. He actually appears in the last chapter weighing in on whether I would donate my brain to the brain bank. In the book he says Ix-nay on the ain-bray ank-bay. That was a difficult year for him because I would tell him everything I visited and he started looking very stricken. So after a while I stopped telling him.
DRE: What are you going to do with your body after your dead?
MR: Im not sure. I really wanted to be a skeleton in an anatomy classroom but there is no program for that. The brain bank thing Im not going to do because they hate me based on a Salon column I wrote. They dont want my brain they would probably throw it to the dogs.
DRE: They wouldnt want to cut into it?
MR: They might enjoy exploding it. I like the Swedish womans idea of composting the body. Thats a lovely idea to be taken up by plants. Its kind of a literal reincarnation. But then again because of the book I think I should donate myself to a university. So the jury is still out.
DRE: Do you think the book could be used in research or schools?
MR: Sure, people who are vaguely interested in this area will sometimes write to me and say they made the decision to go to mortuary school. I think its good if you are thinking about getting a lab job working with cadavers.
DRE: Have you done many book signings?
MR: Yes I did a six city tour last year.
DRE: What kind of people show up?
MR: Youd be amazed at how all over the map the people are. I get ordinary folks, Goth people, mortuary students, doctors, undertakers and for the most part people who just found it interesting. If you look around the room it doesnt look like a roomful of weirdoes. People assume I get a lot of weirdoes but so far Ive only had two odd people.
DRE: What were they like?
MR: One guy was about seven feet tall and he had this shirt that had the alien from the Alien movie on it. He has this sterling silver ring with a coffin on it; he bent down to me and says Open it. I couldnt open the ring so he did it and there was a little silver skeleton in it then he went and ate a lot of the cheese. I ran into the same guy at another reading and I asked him what he did. He says Im a tennis pro. He looked like a ghoul. He did want to know if I could tell him where to get a human fetus in a jar. I really dont know where to get that.
Another reading there was a guy who stood up and said Do you know anything about the fact that the government takes the bodies of terrorists and wrap them in pigskin so they couldnt go to heaven? I said I hadnt heard that one. So only those two oddballs.
DRE: Do you have regular friends?
MR: [laughs] They are all just fucken nuts. No Im kidding. Some of my friends are normal and they are all interesting. There are a few lawyers and bankers though.
DRE: I bet those are more your husbands friends.
MR: Yeah they are.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 8 of 8 COMMENTS
melx:
I've never heard of this book before but after reading this I think I'll have to look for it. Great interview.
nymphetalona:
This book is in my top 5 favourites. Love love love it, think it's about time I read it again! This woman is brilliant!