Mary Roach calls her best-selling books a gateway drug for science.
“There are moments of snark, and irreverence could be applied to them,” said Roach, the author of “Stiff,” Gulp,” “Bonk,” “Spook” and “Packing for Mars.”
The subjects of those books are, respectively: human cadavers, the alimentary canal from mouth to rear end, sexual physiology, a scientific look at the afterlife, and what it takes to survive in space. “Grunt” will be Roach’s newest nonfiction book, out later this year. It’s about the science of war.
Her popular science books offer an up-close look at subjects we might wonder about — but are too polite to discuss. In an interview Monday from her home in Oakland, California, Roach said she views her subjects, and the scientists who are the real experts, with affection, “and through the lens of my wing-nut curiosity.”
If all this sounds more like fun than a boring science class, you’re in luck. Roach will give a free talk at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Everett Performing Arts Center.
The event is part of the Everett Public Library’s 2016 Ways to Read program. In February, the program brought Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo to Everett. While Russo did a reading and talked about his career, Saturday’s program will be a conversation between Roach and Eileen Simmons, the Everett library’s director.
“I’ve read all her books, it’s true,” said Simmons, a fan of Roach’s for years. “I read a lot of nonfiction, sciencey-type things. She’s right in my ballpark. I love the humorous part of it.”
What’s so funny? Well, Roach said, “in sex research there are a lot of entertaining, surreal and certainly comic elements.”
For “Gulp,” a section on the stomach included interviews with eating contest competitors. Then there was Roach’s meeting, for a chapter on the rectum, with an inmate at California’s Avenal State Prison. His area of expertise? He was serving a life sentence for murder, she said, “but he happened to be a rectal drug smuggler.”
Roach, 57, is not a scientist. She studied liberal arts and psychology at Wesleyan University, and has been a prolific freelance writer. Her articles have appeared in the Sunday magazine of The San Francisco Chronicle and in many magazines. She also reviews books for The New York Times.
Her first book, “Stiff,” was an offshoot of an article for Salon.com, according to the biography on her website, www.maryroach.net.
“They are funny books,” Roach said Monday. “Not wisecracking, but I do goof around with the language. And there’s the natural comic nature of these situations. You won’t find these books on the curriculum of any medical school.”
Roach, who has appeared on “The Daily Show” and other TV programs, doesn’t disagree with academics who might raise eyebrows at her lack of science training. “I don’t have the background. I’m grossly simplifying these things,” she said, describing her books as “a gateway drug for science.”
Yet for each chapter, she does extensive research. She travels to spend time with scientists whose works she recasts for her entertaining books. “Each book is two to three years of researching and writing,” she said. “There’s a period of random flailing when I don’t know what is going to be in the book.”
To write “Packing for Mars,” which is Simmons’ favorite, Roach went on a zero-gravity flight, an experience often called the “vomit comet.”
“NASA would like us all to stop calling it that — and we never will — and instead call it something like ‘the weightless wonder,’ ” Roach said.
In “The Reading Life,” a community blog on Heraldnet.com written by Everett library staff, librarian Richard Woolf lists Roach’s books “in the highly subjective order of least embarrassing/disturbing to most.”
“Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers” is the one he finds most macabre, with its many ways workers use dead bodies — “realistic crash test dummies” to “simply rotting in a field to measure states of decay for forensic scientists.”
How creepy, and how riveting.
“She seems fearless in her willingness to ask questions,” Simmons said. “She would be a fun person to have at a party.”
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; jmuhlstein@heraldnet.com.
Science, humor writer in Everett
Best-selling author Mary Roach, whose books “Stiff,” “Gulp,” “Bonk,” “Spook” and “Packing for Mars” blend science and humor, will give a free talk at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Everett Performing Arts Center, 2710 Wetmore Ave. It’s part of the Everett Public Library’s 2016 Ways to Read program. For more information go to, tinyurl.com/eplsroach.
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