Mary Roach calls herself ‘the gateway drug to science’

By Lesley McClurg, California Health Journalism Fellow

Bestselling author Mary Roach has an uncanny knack for inspiring readers to care about cadavers, rectums and zero-gravity toilets. She shared her secrets earlier this month at HJ25 in Los Angeles: Show up. And be curious.

Roach's writing career took off with "Stiff," a book about cadaver research. But it almost didn't happen. "That's a terrible idea for a book," she remembers thinking. "Who would go into a bookstore and look at a table of new nonfiction releases and go like, 'Oh yeah, this one about cadavers, that's what I'm gonna do.'"

And yet, she found that when she paired humor with vivid scenes, readers followed her - even into the morgue.

"I'm sort of the gateway drug to science," Roach told moderator Christine Herman, an independent journalist and secretary of AHCJ's board. "I write books about science for people who don't necessarily think that they're interested in science."

Roach often has to work with public affairs offices, and they can be hard to crack. When NASA stopped responding after she asked to "smell the shuttle" upon touchdown, she didn't walk away - she emailed again. And again. When all else fails? She sometimes just shows up. For one cadaver test, she did exactly that. "We can do this the easy way or the hard way," she quipped.

For journalists interested in writing books, Roach had reassuring words: Don't let the 80,000-word mountain scare you, she said - just take it chapter by chapter. And while today's publishing world favors influencers with a big platform, she insisted it's still possible to break in the old-fashioned way. "The thing with agents is that they are always looking for the next big thing," she said. "They do read proposals."

Roach gave a sneak peek of her upcoming book, "Replaceable You," set to release in September, which dives into the science of swapping out body parts. As for what's next, she admitted she's still figuring it out. After eight books, she joked that the "low-hanging Mary Roach fruit" may be gone. But she's toying with the idea of writing for younger readers.

Lesley McClurg is a health correspondent for KQED in San Francisco and a 2025 AHCJ-California Health Journalism Fellow.