In HJ25 in Los Angeles, the successful author Mary Roach talks about scientific writing with the independent journalist and secretary of the AHCJ board of directors, Christine Herman. Photo by Zachary Linhares
By Lesley McClurg, California Health Journalism Fellow
The successful author Mary Roach has a strange talent to inspire readers to worry about corpses, rectums and zero-gravity toilets. She shared her secrets earlier this month at the HJ25 in Los Angeles: to introduce herself. And be curious.
Roach’s writer’s career has taken off with “stiff,“” A book on corpse research. But that hardly happened. “It’s a terrible idea for a book,” she recalls to think. “Who was going in a bookstore and would watch a table of new outings of non-fiction and went like” Oh yeah, this on the corpses, that’s what I’m going to do. “”
And yet, she discovered that when she associated humor with lively scenes, readers followed her – even in the morgue.
“I am in a way the drug of the gateway to science,” Roach told the moderator Christine Herman, independent journalist and secretary of the board of directors of Ahcj. “I write books on science for people who do not necessarily think they are interested in science.”
Roach must often work with public affairs offices, and they can be difficult to break. When NASA ceased to answer after asking to “feel the shuttle” during the touch, it did not move away – it again sent an email. And again. When does everything else fail? She sometimes presents herself. For a corpse test, she did exactly that. “We can do it the simplest way or the way to the hard,” she joked.
For journalists interested in writing books, Roach had reassuring words: don’t let the mountain scare you 80,000 words, she said-just take the chapter by chapter. And although the world of today’s publishing promotes influencers with a large platform, it insisted that it was always possible to break the old-fashioned. “The thing with the agents is that they are still looking for the next great thing,” she said. “They read proposals.”
Roach gave an overview of his next book, “replacing you”, which takes place in September, which plunges into the science of the exchange of body parts. As for the rest, she admitted that she always understood it. After eight pounds, she joked by saying that the “fruit of Mary Roach with low struggle” could have disappeared. But she plays with the idea of writing for young readers.
Lesley McClurg is healthy correspondent for KQED in San Francisco and health journalism of the AHCJ-CALIFORNIA in 2025.