Mary Roach, who’s made it onto the The New York Times Best Seller list seven times, has a new book, Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy, which she’ll dissect at an Oct. 23 talk and book-signing at the London Nelson Community Center. The new tome is available at Bookshop Santa Cruz, which is cosponsoring the event with the Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
In Replaceable You, Roach takes us step by step through her firsthand research on the nitty and deliriously gritty details involved in such things as making a vagina out of intestines, the applicability of getting skin grafts from frogs, and harvesting usable 3D-printed body parts.
Roach’s honed literary style surgically removes the fiction out of sci-fi, and serves the science with shards of skin-crawling details, historical facts and needed humor.
We are surfing during an interestingly odd moment in the technological tidal wave. Even the Jetsons didn’t have synthetic androids with lifelike skin and brimming with the Neuralink consciousness of Elon Musk. Rosey the Robot was built out of nuts and bolts and spoke conversationally, with a droll and depressed tone (one of out two?).
You would think that with the leaps and the bounds that science takes every day, replacing our body parts must be right around the corner, right? Not quite.
Due to the stickiness of the human body, our meat suits do not neatly dovetail with things like new brains, skin or eyes. We know this because Roach cozies up right next to the dreaming innovators and the brightest and most beleaguered scientists. She’s constantly taking mental notes, asking pointed questions and ingratiating herself into arenas never really seen before, or at least never noticed in such detail.
The 20th century’s George Plimpton was famously known as a “participatory journalist.” Someone who cribbed from the first-person perspective of a “regular Joe,” wedging himself into professional baseball, boxing, acting stand-up comedy, and playing with a world-class orchestra.
But here’s one thing Plimpton never did, which Roach delightfully relates. “I did this column on a ‘Bashful Bladder’ for Salon,” Roach begins from her home in the Bay Area. “You know what that is? Paruresis. It’s a thing where it affects mostly, if not entirely, men. Where you can’t get started if you’re peeing in public, like in a urinal situation. Or the ballpark, where it’s a freaking trough.
“So there’s a treatment for that, which is kind of like the treatment for getting over the fear of spiders—where you just inch closer and closer,” she explains, “I was somebody’s pee buddy. What that means is I start out on the other end of the house. I say, “Okay, I’m over in the living room.” And the guy would drink a gallon of water. And then I would get closer and closer, and finally I was like, “I’m outside the door.” Roach is quick to point out that she “didn’t go into the bathroom with him.”
Roach, by all accounts, is an even-keeled persona, with an East Coast edge, a prolific writer by hook or crook, and someone who has been called “a humorous science author” by almost every major publication. You can also find other choice words like “wry” and “weird” in many descriptions of her.
So consider that when you take only the first word of her award-winning book titles—Stiff, Spook, Bonk, Gulp, Grunt and Fuzz—it sounds like the Seven Dwarfs’ Canadian cousins.
But don’t let that fool you into thinking these are just cutely titled books. What you get are deep spelunking explorations into the history of cadavers (Stiff), science’s hot takes on the afterlife (Spook), the study of sexual physiology (Bonk), the digestive tract and how digestion works (Gulp), how humans survive war (Grunt), and when nature breaks the law (Fuzz).
How does an author dive into so many diverse subjects?
“I would say to new writers, follow your curiosity,” Roach says. “Also, if something isn’t really interesting to you, you’re going to regret deciding to spend two years looking into it, because two years is a long time.”
Mary Roach will appear at 7pm on Thursday, Oct. 23 at London Nelson Community Center, 301 Center St., Santa Cruz. Tickets are $37 and include entry and a hardcover book. More info at bookshopsantacruz.com.
