Mary Roach sees dead people. And much more.
To make a name for yourself in the writing game you’ve got to carve out a niche. Oakland author Mary Roach’s specialty is writing about the science behind things that might be considered just a little over the top for polite conversation. Subjects like flatulence and the emergence of amputee bowling leagues were fodder for her magazine articles for The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ and others, but lately Roach is writing books. Her first, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (W.W. Norton 2003), became a bestseller and opened the door for Roach to investigate efforts to substantiate the existence of the afterlife in Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife in 2006. Despite the slightly ghoulish bent of these books, Roach assures us she wasn’t suckled by morticians—“I’m really just a normal, nice gal.” Currently she’s working on a book about sex-lab research, appropriately called Boink. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Roach onstage as part of College Preparatory School’s Livetalk series. Only the most scintillating excerpts of this conversation follow.
Paul Kilduff: I usually do interviews in my bathrobe over the phone and don’t even bathe, so thanks for the opportunity.
Mary Roach: You smell lovely.
PK: You seem to have made an institution out of writing about the unspeakable, correct?
MR: Lately I have. I think Stiff in particular. That was why I wrote Stiff, a book about the post-mortem careers that people have when they donate their bodies to science. For years I wrote for magazines and I always wanted to do a book, but I had this sense that everything had been written about and so I came across this cadaver stuff and I thought “Here’s something nobody’s written a book about precisely for that reason. It’s so kind of taboo and grotesque that who in their right minds would write a book about cadavers?” So I thought I would see how that went. It was kind of a career choice.
PK: When I first learned that there were cadavers as a youngster, I think it took me a week to get over it. I understand that it’s advancing science, but I don’t want to be a part of it.
MR: You don’t have to, Paul. Nobody’s making you donate your body to science. But people ask me now, “Well what are you going to do with your body when you die?” And I really do feel that after writing Stiff it would be so lame for me to say, “Well, I’m just going to get a plot in a cemetery and quietly decompose.” I feel like I pretty much have to. I have in my office the willed-body donor forms from Stanford and UCSF and I’m kind of like a high school senior right now: What can you do for me? How are the facilities? What’s the fridge like? But you don’t have to do that.
PK: That’s very gratifying. So, are you on the fence?
MR: No, I’m not on the fence, but the thing is my husband is a very squeamish man. And the whole time I was working on Stiff I would come back from somewhere like the Body Farm where they study human decomposition and go, “Oh my god, it was so bizarre and amazing and weird.” And he’d go, “Okay, you had a good time. That’s good. I’m happy for you.” I’m a very practical, utilitarian person and I just figure I’m going to be done with it. I’m not going to be using it. If somebody else can do something useful with it [her body], then, well, go ahead. Harvard has a brain bank. And this appeals to me because I could say, “I’m going to Harvard.” And I told Ed [her husband] that I really wanted to donate my brain to Harvard. If you donate, they’ll actually ship. . . to Harvard in this FedEx cooler and you get to fly up front with the pilot and I thought, “Wow, pretty special.” But Ed was very—this is actually what he said—“ix-nay on the ain-bank-bray.” He just didn’t want to picture parts of me on a slab being worked on. It’s interesting talking to some of these people who work with cadavers. They said sometimes the family finds out that the person had made a donation of their body and the family is uncomfortable and they say, “I didn’t know he wanted this done. I can’t even imagine him being cut open.” And what the willed-body program people say is, “We go with the family’s wishes because they’re the ones who are alive and they’re the ones that have to deal with it.” So, if it makes Ed uncomfortable, I’m not going to do it. Or, if it makes you uncomfortable.
PK: Well, if you want to have your brain in a jar at Harvard I’m all for that.
MR: It’s got to be a nice glass jar. In fact, they’re not even in Tupperware—they’re like Freezerette containers.
PK: What, do they have fluorescent lights around it with your name underneath?
MR: Masking tape on the lid. I don’t know.This is Harvard. Made me kind of wonder what the dorms are like there.
PK: In Stiff you talk about how the medical school professors who teach anatomy quite often donate their bodies to science.
MR: They fall into two camps. There is the camp that says, “I have seen way too much and I know what goes on in way too much detail. There is no way I would donate myself.” And then there are the folks who are very committed to the whole world of anatomy and dissection and very much want to make a contribution. In fact, the director of the anatomy department at UCSF died a year after Stiff came out and I know he planned to donate himself to his own lab which was kind of an amazing and bizarre thing, but that was his wish. That his own students, the next semester—I’m hoping it was the next semester, but not actually students who had been studying with him. Such is the world, the surreal world of cadavers. But he did in fact want to do that.
PK: Wanted to be just another severed head in a disposable aluminum turkey roasting pan waiting to get cut on by students?
MR: When people first start reading Stiff, they’re a little taken aback to realize someone would have a severed head on a table because a severed head is considered the most gruesome thing. You think of the Godfather with the horse head. It’s just about the most gruesome, horrific thing because a head and a face, that’s what we view. I try to explain to people that when someone makes a gift of their own body, part of the respect paid to that person is to make the best use of it. And that means you may end up in three or four different labs. Your hand might be in some automotive, safety thing where they’re testing to make sure a window doesn’t smoosh a child’s finger. Or your knee might be in some endoscopic lab where they’re trying out a new piece of equipment. It sounds grizzly but I think it’s just this sort of multitasking kind of thing.
PK: So, does America’s immature youth-oriented culture make it hard for us to deal with the concept of cadavers?
MR: I think what it has to do with is this sense of lack of control because when you donate your body to science you fill out this “willed-body form” saying at some point in the future, when I die and my body’s going to Stanford or UCSF or wherever it is you’re going to go, and you don’t know 25 years down the line what they’ll be doing with bodies so you can’t say specifically, “I only want to be used in an anatomy course. “Or, “I only want to be used to cure cancer.” It’s kind of giving yourself over to the unknown and you can’t really control it and I think people are uncomfortable with that aspect of it. And also it’s just hard to let go of the fact that you’re not going to be there. It’s you, yet it’s not going to be you. My husband Ed wants to donate, but he’s uncomfortable with people seeing him lying there naked. It would be embarrassing. But, you can’t be embarrassed when you’re dead, okay?
PK: What about just donating the best parts of your body?
MR: I actually have a friend, Clark, who on the donor form you can fill out on your driver’s license actually wrote in, “Anything below the neck. “ I said, “Why would you do that? I mean, your corneas would be valuable to someone.” He said, “I just don’t want them messing with my face.” There’s still that sense that somehow it’s still you.
PK: Are we running out of cemetery space like we’re running out of landfill space and should we all be recycling our body parts?
MR: I think that is part of it. I don’t know if we’re literally running out of space, but I think that more and more there’s kind of a consciousness about how best to use the land that we have and I think that cemeteries are kind of losing ground with cremation for example. Also there’s a big green burial movement. A plot of land is purchased and it’s not landscaped. It’s not turned into a cemetery. It’s left as it is and people are just buried under a tree or wherever and part of what they pay goes to conserve this plot of land so it’s sort of an environmental way to be dead.
PK: What’s next, Web site burial?
MR: Well, there’s a woman in Sweden that I’ve spent some time with who’s coming up with a very elaborate human composting technique. You freeze the body and then use vibration, because the body’s mostly water, to break it into small pieces.Then you freeze-dry those pieces and give them to the family in a cornstarch, biodegradable box and that’s buried about 15 inches down and you plant a plant. She uses a rhododendron, but I had a couple of rhododendrons and they died. Imagine burying your mother, planting this rhododendron that takes up your mother’s molecules and then the thing dies? I actually would use some very hardy shrub.
PK: Al Gore would salute you.
MR: What are your alternatives? You’re in a box. You’re underground. You’re just basically decomposing and becoming really disgusting or you’re burned up in a furnace. None of it is really pretty.
PK: Yeah. I know there’s some talk now about people living to be 1000, but what kind of Botox treatments are you going to need when you’re 999?
MR: I don’t want to live to be 300 years old because imagine the parking situation? If you could add the 100 years into your twenties or thirties, that would be fine. But it seems like it’s tacked on the end when you don’t necessarily want another 100 years.
PK: Obviously, Stiff put you on the map—I mean you’ve been interviewed on Mancow. But, you’ve got a new book out too about the afterlife, Spooked.
MR: This is more strange things going on in labs. I kind of specialize in things going on in labs that you wouldn’t expect to be going on in labs. In Spooked I came across this guy Duncan MacDougal, this Massachusetts doctor around the turn of the last century, who got interested in weighing people as they died on a big scale. And he worked at a tuberculosis sanitorium and alas had this steady supply of dying people and got their consent and he’d bring them in as they were just about to go, put them on the scale to see if the needle went down just a tiny bit and he believed that was the soul leaving the body which is kind of a very elegant and simple and kind of nutty plan and I just loved his can-do spirit. We can take scientific method and we can use it to prove anything including the human soul.
PK: And he figured the weight of the soul is 21 grams.
MR: According to Duncan Macdougal, yes. Three quarters of an ounce. Hollywood metricized him, I think, just because I don’t think anyone would go to a movie called “.75 ounces.” Twenty-one grams just sounds a lot better, but Duncan Macdougal was not working the metric system.
PK: Sounds like a drug deal. Do any souls weigh more than 21 grams?
MR: There’s a self-published book about the physical weight of the soul and using Duncan Macdougal’s figures, he somehow figured out the weight of Jesus’ soul which was literally like a pound. Through a complex mathematical formula, there’s a volume of the soul of Jesus and he actually figured out that the volume of the soul was larger than Jesus’ body and it would stick out and that was what the halo was. The soul was sticking out like he couldn’t cram it into the body. Donald Gilbert Carpenter was his name. I loved the book.
PK: In Spook you talk about how in order to believe in ghosts or messengers from the afterlife that someone your close to has to have had such an experience in order for you to believe in it.
MR: Well actually, I came across a survey and it turns out that the thing that most influences someone’s beliefs about whether there’s an afterlife or whether there are ghosts is not the religion they were raised in, not whether they read a scientific journal article. It has everything to do with their own personal experience or that of someone very close to them. People come up to me and want to talk about their own experience and across the board if somebody has had a near-death experience or their grandmother died and they woke up in the middle of the night and they heard a voice or something they are absolutely convinced and could care less what the skeptical society says or what the debunkers say. They believe and they know and that’s how it goes.
PK: Are you ready for the vital stats?
MR: Vital stats? What do you mean? My bust size?
PK: That would be a good category to add.
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