Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestseller Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003). She is a contributing editor at Discover and a columnist for Reader’s Digest. Her work has appeared in Salon, Health, Wired, Vogue, Outside, and the New York Times magazine.

You wrote a peppy bestseller about dead people. What kind of reader response did Stiff evoke?

I was surprised at how mixed the audiences are. I guess I sort of envisioned whoever readers of Salon are – a little bit edgy, open-minded, curious. But it’s all different ages – everything from a sixth-grader to somebody in a nursing home. I get Goth mortuary students, housewives and high school students, lawyers and doctors, EMTs – it’s all over the map, which I love.

I got a letter from a girl recently, a high school freshman, who said she loved the book. And she said, “Well, the greatest thing is that, you know, I’m going to go to medical school, so maybe one day off in the distant future, you might be my cadaver!” And I thought, ‘Wait a minute, that’s only eight years. Only eight years off, OK? I’m not comfortable with that. Eight years? Is that all I have left?”

On the book tour, I was terrified before the first reading, but by the third one, I began to enjoy it. I don’t really understand writers who hate it, because really, it’s this group of people who come out to see you and tell you how much they like your book. And they laugh at things that aren’t even funny. They’re the best audience in the world. It’s incredibly flattering and ego-gratifying.

You’re known for your humor writing as well as your science writing. How did those two seemingly disparate paths come together?

I graduated from college with absolutely no job skills and no idea that I could or wanted to be a writer. I moved to San Francisco, and I got temp work – proofreading and copyediting. Then one day I wrote something, and just on a whim sent it in to the Sunday Punch, which was the humor section in the Sunday paper, the San Francisco Chronicle. And it ran. And I thought, “Well, that’s easy. OK, I’ll do that for a while.” It was a humor piece – the first thing I ever got published.

Then I got a part-time job writing for the San Francisco Zoological Society, writing for their membership magazine, about elephant laser wart surgery and baby polar bears. It was a bit of a goofy place to work; it kind of fit my sensibility. I worked in a trailer by Gorilla World.

The tone and the humor in my writing have been pretty consistent over the years. I remember early pieces for the Chronicle being not that far off in tone, really, from what I do now. Sometimes a little self-indulgent or stupid. So I’ve matured a little bit, but not very much.

The science thing happened when an editor at Discover read a piece of mine someplace else and just called up and said, “Do you ever write about science? Would you like to?” The first story that I wrote for them was on the ergonomics of plane seats. There was this mockup of the inside of a plane and they would have people just sit in airline seats for hours.

People assume that because you don’t see humor that much in science writing, it’s discouraged. But I don’t think it is. I mean, I’ve had editors say to me, “It’s so hard to find somebody who can explain science and have a lively, entertaining style.” People usually do one or the other, and it’s uncommon to find people who can do both – both informing and entertaining. It’s difficult, but it’s very sought-after by editors.

What kinds of difficulties have you encountered?

I write a humor column for Reader’s Digest, and one time I wrote a piece about Internet hypochondria – as in, you type “little red spots” into Google and you get all these obscure diseases that could have symptoms of little red spots. And one of them was Arnold-Chiari malformation syndrome, which is this thing where you have, like, tonsils in your brain. Cerebral tonsils. Anyway, I was kind of riffing on some symptoms of Arnold-Chiari. I didn’t make fun of sufferers of Arnold-Chiari, but they started an email campaign, writing to the editor.

The Harvard Brain Bank director accused me of causing irreparable damage (in Stiff) to Harvard. But that one had a happy ending, because the health columnist at the Wall Street Journal called her up, doing a serious piece on the benefits of donating your body, and said, “The reason I called you is because I read this great book, Stiff, by Mary Roach, and it mentions the Brain Bank.”

I do regret sometimes some of the earlier pieces, where in an attempt to be funny I latched onto something, like large eyebrows or the bags under someone’s eyes. Now I always describe people as good-looking. I focus on some aspect of their looks or their bearing or some mannerism that is either neutral or positive. There’s no reason to make people look bad.

What do you enjoy about science writing?

Science is just so huge. Science, to me, is thousands of tiny little worlds that I’m curious about, and as a journalist, I’m now able to step into this wonderful strangeness and foreignness. I used to do travel writing, and I found myself trying to get to more and more far-flung locales, like Antarctica. And at one point I realized there’s just as many interesting, foreign, weird worlds right in my backyard.

I’m actually very limited in my science writing. I could never possibly cover particle physics or chemistry or something purely abstract and brainy like that – it’s got to be science set in a scene, in a lab, with people doing things and holding things so I can describe them. So I am a science writer who treads a very narrow corridor.

I think researchers are kind of flattered when somebody from the outside is interested in what they do and is going to spotlight their work for an audience of not necessarily science readers but just folks, the public. I think they appreciate it. And I’m really very unabashed about saying, “Look, I’m an idiot. I really know nothing. I have no background in what you do, so I apologize for taking up your time this way and forcing you to explain it to an idiot.” I don’t mind doing that. Nobody complains about that. They’re very patient.

I actually feel like more of an outsider at gatherings of science writers, because I feel like I’m something of a fraud. I’m just not that dedicated a science reporter; I don’t keep on top of it. If you really are a science reporter, you usually have a couple of beats that you’re reading. It’s changing every day, and a tremendous amount of what you do is just keeping up to speed and on top of new developments. And I don’t do any of that. I just sort of land from outer space onto some little quirky chunk of science.

You work in an unusual setting: the Writers’ Grotto. What’s that like?

Someone once asked me, “Is that like a caving organization? What is the Grotto?” It’s an old animal clinic in San Francisco; it says “Dog and Cat Hospital” on it. It’s great, because the little exam rooms that vets use are the perfect size for a writer’s office. They’re very small and cheap. There are 20 of us, but on any given day, there’s maybe seven or eight there. We try to have a mix of established writers and new writers. I think it’s very helpful for someone who’s starting out to be in with a group of writers who are connected. It was founded by Po Bronson, Ethan Canin and Ethan Waters.

When I was invited to join, I was very skeptical; I thought I wouldn’t get anything done, I’d just gab all the time. But in fact I was much more productive there. And it’s nice to have someone to go to lunch with, bounce ideas off of, complain about your editor, whatever. It’s really just writers doing work in close proximity to one another. If somebody’s stuck, they’ll say, “Hey, can you take a look at this? It needs work.” We also have title-brainstorming lunches. And all the trading editors’ names and referring each other to editors – it’s a built-in network.

Your next book is coming out in October. What’s it about?

It’s kind of a spin-off of Stiff. It’s about scientists and other people trying to prove that there’s a soul or an afterlife. There’s more shenanigans in laboratories and strange characters and lots of weird footnotes. It was a fun book to do.

But we’re struggling – we don’t have a title. The problem is that in that subject area, the words tend to be New Agey or religious or earnest, and it’s hard to find an edgy, kind of fun word that sums it up.

What are you reading these days?

I’m in this phase where I’m getting a lot of requests to blurb books, and I try to do that, because the whole blurbing process was so stressful for me. Consequently, when people ask me to write one, I like to try to do that for people.

So right now on my reading table is a book by Elizabeth Royte called Garbage Land, about garbage, and a book about great white sharks, The Devil’s Teeth, by Susan Casey. And Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, which I haven’t succeeded in getting into yet. I’ve been told it’s an amazing book, and I have to read it.

And I have a junior encyclopedia of science stacked up by my bed – I was trying to find inspiration for titles in there, and I just got caught up in it. It’s a 1960s science encyclopedia, so it’s full of misstatements, like about marijuana and how it’s a dangerous substance that leads to heroin addiction. Wow. So I get kind of lost in that.

Name some authors who inspire you.

Susan Orlean.

Burkhard Bilger. He’s a science writer for the New Yorker, but very good at color and narrative and, in his own subtle way, humor. He does very informative, compelling stories, or glimpses of weird little corners of the world.

David Sedaris. I could never do what he does – I didn’t have his kind of childhood, and I’m not as funny as he is – but I still find him inspirational.

Bill Bryson, for his amazing ability to impart interesting information and never lose his personality and quirky way of looking at things. His tone is very consistent. The humor is subtle; it’s never knock-you-over the head. There may be some sarcasm, but it’s very gentle humor, and very effective. And he makes fun of himself a lot.

Anthony Lane is a writer who I want to read no matter what he’s writing about. Even if it’s a topic I have absolutely no interest in, I will read an Anthony Lane story because he’s just an amazing nonfiction writer. He’s funny. He’s just brilliant.

How do you do what you do?

I transcribe my tapes. And I circle the good stuff in my notebooks and transcribe that, and then I print all that out and that’s my pile of stuff that I’m going to build my story on. Then I go through and highlight the best stuff. And then I read that over a few times, and just by osmosis or something I try to come up with a lead. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t work. So I’ll just put in a temporary lead and come back to it.

I do an outline as I go; I’ll write for a while, and get a sense of where that’s directing me, and I’ll jot down the next four or five things that will kind of follow. And often I’ll go back and that’ll change. It’s an organic process.

It’s kind of like sculpting clay: I’ve got this very big blob that I start with, and I’ll go do a knee, and then I’ll go do an elbow. I don’t go in order. Sometimes I just do the fun stuff first and leave the more challenging or more boring stuff for last. It’s like opening a box of candy – you eat the ones you like first.

I don’t do drafts – I do a thousand microdrafts. I’m always going back, going over this, going over that. And then I reach this point where there’s this Teflon layer that kind of appears over it, where I cannot go back in and mess with it any more – I can’t even read it any more. It’s like your eye just skids over it. So I know it’s done. Whether or not it’s good, it’s done.

It’s very easy for me to spot a Mary Roach story. It’s something that’s going to give me some fun material to play with, a kind of strange or little-known setting. It’s just these quirky, little-known pockets of the world that I can go to and describe and have fun with. Sometimes it’s science, sometimes it has nothing to do with science. I’m happiest covering something that’s never been, or rarely been, covered before. The weird stuff.

I’ve never thought about going into fiction. I just know I could never do it well. Because in a way, it’s almost the antithesis of nonfiction. My job is to go out and bring home all these sticks, these pieces of material, and to build the most entertaining, interesting thing I can with that pile of sticks. Whereas with fiction, you’ve got to create your sticks. You’ve got to make them up. But I don’t want to make them up; I want to believe them, I want to see them and experience them.