Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. Mary has written for Outside, National Geographic, Wired, New Scientist, The New York Times Magazine, and NPR’s “All Things Considered,” among many others. She is the guest editor of the 2011 edition of Best American Science and Nature Writing, a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and a winner of the American Engineering Societies’ Engineering Journalism Award, in a category for which, let’s be honest, she was the sole entrant.

More info is available at www.maryroach.net.

Crossed Genres: You’ve written two books about death, and countless other people have written innumerable more texts and novels that feature the subject prominently and graphically. Is death a trope that can be overdone? What do you think remains to be written about…remains?

Mary Roach: I don’t know that it can be overdone. Death is like sex; you just have to find a new way to come at it. I think it’s a particularly rich topic and one that is obviously relevant to everyone, unfortunately. I think I chose a particularly unusual angle on death – sort of post mortem careers – but there’s so much room for exploration that I don’t think it has been overdone.

About remains in particular… Well, I think it’s pretty much impossible to predict. Christine Montross wrote the wonderful book about dissection, Body of Work, from her perspective as a poet and an MD, and that was a unique point of view. When Thomas Lynch wrote The Undertaking – he’s a poet and an undertaker in the Midwest – he brought his own perspective. And there are those unexpected zombie books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. So I think as many people as have fresh, interesting perspectives are free to dive in.

Crossed Genres: Stiff is a book about cadavers and Spook is a book about the soul. After all your investigations into the end of life, what still scares you about death? Has your research into mortality changed anything about how you live?

Mary Roach: I hear from people that Stiff sort of de-mystified death, made them more comfortable. But me? Well, it really didn’t really change how I feel about death or dying. I’m still pretty much in a full state of denial and hoping to avoid it.

Crossed Genres: People are fascinated by death, and why not? It’s a universal experience and yet still full of mysteries to contemplate. After all your research, what do you find most interesting about death?

Mary Roach: You know, it’s funny. I don’t really see myself as an expert on death because Stiff was really about the aftermath and Spook was about not dying, in a sense. They were both really books about sort of off-beat scientific pursuits. I don’t really have a lot of musings on the dying side of it. I’m really more on the other side of death.

As far as I can tell, death seems like kind of a drag. I find peoples’ responses to it interesting and I find interesting the ways people try to cope with it or cover it up or confront it. I guess one thing that’s interesting about it is that we tend to define it as a moment, and it’s really a process with a fairly arbitrary point to which we assign the word ‘death’. You’re really just gradually shutting down, often over the course of months when someone’s really declining. The senses shut down one by one. On a cellular level there’s no sort of clean moment of death like what we tend to speak of (partly out of convenience and partly for legal reasons). But it’s not a moment, it’s a span of time.

Crossed Genres: Death seems to be largely a matter of luck, mostly bad; lightning strikes, car accidents, snake bites in the night, etc. What do you think is the worst way to die? What’s the strangest manner of death you’ve heard of?

Mary Roach: The strangest manner would be something that almost happened to me last summer. I was almost killed by a falling rock saw. A rock saw is huge and heavy – probably forty pounds. I was working up in the arctic in a Quonset hut at a makeshift computer table, and on a shelf above my head somebody had piled some vinyl banners and on top of it stuck this rock saw. At a certain point the banners went – the banners had been slipping, unnoticed – and this thing just fell and missed me by a couple of inches. It slammed into the floor, and everybody in the room turned around and there’s this impact crater where it hit the plywood and all the dust was blown away. That would have been it for me, and that would have been an odd way to go.

The weirdest thing is that there was a webcam watching me, which my husband was frequently checking. It could have been this horribly grisly and morbid scenario and if he’d happened to check the webcam… That would have been strange.

The most interesting way that someone else has died, though… You know, Stiff was more about interesting uses for people after they’ve died. But the actual dying part? They were anonymous bodies in labs, so of all the bodies that I saw while I worked on the book, I very rarely knew how they had died.

Crossed Genres: What was the most interesting use you heard of for a body after the fact?

Mary Roach: Probably the most bizarre was Pierre Barbet, a physician in Paris, who used cadavers to investigate his theory on the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. He had a theory about how the nails were placed in the hands and the blood marks on the shroud. He was actually putting cadavers on a makeshift crucifix in his office. I guess that was probably the oddest use of a cadaver.

Crossed Genres: In some ways, death is a social activity. There are wills written and whispered prayers, vigils and funeral processions, and lots of debate and philosophizing about the afterlife. It’s so prevalent that it’s difficult to imagine what a society might be like if nobody ever raised a fuss about death. How different do you think life might be if death was no big deal?

Mary Roach: Oh, there’d be a lot of people out of business. And wow, this is really hard to imagine, isn’t it? If death was just like getting your period, or something, you’d think about it a little bit, “Oh, it’s going to be a little bit inconvenient. Whatever,” and then you’d move on.

My husband is someone who wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks about not being here and being dead and gone. It’s sort of an existential crisis for him and it’s disturbing. But I’m actually someone who is much more afraid of old age and pain and senility. Decrepitude, poor financial situation, and all the things that can come with advancing age. I have this sense that by the time I get to the point that I’m about to die, I’ll be ready for it. “Okay, enough of this being old and in pain, stuff. Get me outta here.” So I like to think that, maybe it isn’t as big a deal as we who are healthy think it is.

The other thing that’s odd is that it’s not something you can easily ask an old person about. Sometimes I try. Sometimes I hear from readers who are in their seventies or eighties and I try to broach the topic. Say, “What’s that like? Not just the fear of death, but you know, getting really old.” They’re usually fairly upbeat about it, but I don’t really believe them.

I think it’s similar to when you’re a kid. You can’t imagine people in their forties having sex. Being middle-aged seemed so old and horrifying, and different. But when you’re here, you think, “It’s not that different, I’m still young.” So I wonder whether we’re just projecting that it’s going to be this horrendous, frightening thing, when in fact by the time you’re that sick you don’t even care. It might not be that bad. I mean, talking about the kind of death that comes after a long illness when you’re very elderly, not a sudden death when you’re young.

Crossed Genres: While you were writing Spook you spent some time searching for spirits. What allows you to bravely seek answers that most people would just as soon leave in the dark?

Mary Roach: I was interested in this notion that you could use science to prove something that is normally in the realm of religion. I thought it was an interesting overlap; using scientific method to pin down something like a soul. That was what got me interested. And it was more about looking at the people who got involved in that quest and what motivated them and how they went about it. It’s a peculiar thing to try to do in a laboratory. That was really what I was interested in. I mean, I was certainly interested to see if anybody found any evidence, but it was as much about how they had attempted it as whether they succeeded, so… It didn’t take any courage. I didn’t feel like I did something brave.

Crossed Genres: Speaking of things usually left in the dark, your latest book, Bonk, is about sex. Sex is sometimes called ‘the little death’. Have you come across any scientific justification for that euphemism? Or is that perhaps the subject of your next mysterious work of witty non-fiction?

Mary Roach: There’ve been people who’ve looked at the brain during orgasm and it is a sort of altered state in that if you ask someone – women specifically – to estimate the duration of an orgasm, they are off by a fairly surprising number of seconds. So you do lose track of time; it’s sort of an altered state. I think that’s where the term comes from, and there is evidence of that; not that you die, but you certainly are not operating on the same level as you are when you’re walking through the grocery store.

Crossed Genres: That’s probably a good thing.

Mary Roach: Yeah, you’d probably be escorted out.

Crossed Genres: Or have very, very dull sex.

Mary Roach: Yes, exactly.

Crossed Genres: And your next book?

Mary Roach: It’s about the very strange world of space travel and aerospace medicine, and all the strange things that happen to people in space. It’ll probably come out in May 2010.

Crossed Genres: In horror films, it’s fairly common for a female character to be killed, or almost killed, shortly after having sex. Does the human psyche instinctively connect sex with death, either consciously or subconsciously? And if so,why?

Mary Roach: I don’t have any special insight on that – I’m only able to answer like you or anyone else, as a member of mass culture – but it would appear there’s some sort of connection. I guess death is the ultimate surrender, the ultimate letting go. I mean, good sex is all about surrendering to your feelings and to what’s going on, and to not trying to control things.

That also came up in Spook. Some of the spiritualists would go into trances and behave in a very sexual manner. There was something about that – abandoning yourself to the spirit world and letting yourself be almost taken over. Some of the mediums were orgasmic. That was a fascinating time.

Crossed Genres: Stiff and Spook are very well researched. Now that you’re sort of an expert on the aftermath of death, what is the mistake you most often see other people make when they write or talk about dying? What death-related reference material would you recommend for writers?

Mary Roach: Well, people believe that your hair and nails keep growing, which they don’t. And people don’t know – this is something I didn’t know before I wrote the book, either – that rigor mortis is a temporary state. It’s actually something that comes on and then passes in a number of hours. People say, “Well, how could they be carrying that body that’s flopping around on their shoulder? Wouldn’t it be stiff?” But in fact, it’s a temporary condition. People also tend to think that if you’re embalmed you will be preserved indefinitely, but embalming is something to keep you looking decent for the funeral. It’s not meant to be a permanent preservation.

Sherwin Nuland’s book, How We Die is a very, very, very good book about the biology and physiology of death.

And of course, Stiff.

Crossed Genres: Science texts, including many popular science books, are stereotypically dry and humorless, but you write about science in a way that non-scientists can understand and enjoy. If you could teach scientists one trick when it comes to writing for the rest of us, what would it be?

Mary Roach: Pretend that you’re talking to a seventh-grader. I say to someone, “Look, I don’t have a PhD. I don’t really have a science background. You need to speak to me on a more basic level. Explain things to me more clearly and break it down for me because I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Then what they’ll do is think, “Oh, she’s got a BA, so I’ll talk to her like a baccalaureate,” and when they start talking again and it’s exactly the same.

I think what’s hard for scientists when they’re trying to write about what they do for a living is to step away from the very vast knowledge that they have and think like, you know, a moron like Mary Roach. It’s not easy to do. I think that is really the key to freeing yourself to be able to talk about it instead of lecture about it.

Sometimes pieces of Stiff have run in this magazine called MUSE, which is Smithsonian’s science magazine for young people, and my work goes into that publication without being changed. So I’m really writing at about a 7th grade level. I think that scientists aren’t used to that. They’re writing for journals, they’re writing for their peers all the time. For me the hard part is understanding the science, and for them I think the hard part is writing it in an understandable way.

I guess in a way I’m like an ambassador to this foreign land. The Academics.