Q&A with Mary Roach

Aquila: Our journalism program has just started doing long form journalism pieces and going more in depth into the pieces. We were really hoping that as a professional in the field of journalism, that you could help us understand more about that process and share with us your experiences. Could you start by sharing with us on how you got into journalism?

I got started in journalism kind of by accident. I had just a general liberal arts degree, and I started working, and I got a job doing public relations at the San Francisco zoo. I was just writing for [its] membership magazine and doing press releases and things like that, and then I started freelancing part time for the San Francisco Examiner Sunday Magazine. I wasn’t doing very long pieces for them; I was doing fairly short form journalism.

It’s not a career that I planned to get into, but I kind of had just a general liberal arts degree without any real job skills. You guys will be better trained and prepared than me; back then I was really drawn to doing certain types of stories. I really just followed my curiosity.

Aquila: So many of your books are so rich and so deep in science and all of the topics, whether it is physics or it is biology, and you said you had a liberal arts background. I think that sometimes people think that if you write about science, you need to be a scientist. Can you talk a little bit about how you figured this out and what role science plays for you?

I got going with science because someone called from Discover magazine, as they had read something else I had written. I was talking to that editor and I told him that I didn’t have a science background, but he said “No, but you know how to ask questions and you have a lot of curiosity, and we like the way you write.”

I use my sources not just as sources but as unpaid tutors. I will have just no hesitation to sit down with them, and say “You need to walk me through this.” I’ll never hesitate to sound like an idiot and say, “back it up, can you just walk me through this, I’m really sorry, but I don’t have a background in it.”

I find that a person is worth 5 journal articles and 10 books, and a person can just zero in on an aspect that you are interested in, bringing you up to speed, and telling it in an interesting way. I mean, not everybody is, but most people are incredibly useful and helpful and willing to explain things.

Aquila: So I read your book Packing for Mars and it had a lot of great tangents and side stories, but it all went to the central question. I was wondering what you think about structuring, and how you organize all the research you get.

Some of my books have a really obvious structure, like Gulp, which was about the human alimentary canal, everything between the mouth and the butt. For that one it was like I’m going to start here and then go all the way down, so that was easy.

Packing for Mars was a little more challenging. What I do is, when I actually start reporting I don’t actually know the order of all the chapters. I’m unique and it not necessarily something everybody should do, but my biggest concern for the book is to find enough labs and things happening to report on and make a really lively chapter.

I keep my outlines. I have around 150 outlines, because I never follow them for more than a few days. I’ll have an outline, and I’ll say “Oh, this is how the book might go,” and then I’ll realize when I do more reporting, the real story is here, so this outline doesn’t make sense. I think it’s important to be fluid and not worry too much about changing the structure.

Aquila: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen or experienced in science?

The body farm was certainly unusual – that was for Stiff, my first book. That was forensics, where they study human decompositions, to understand the timeline of how decomposition happens, to find out the time of a crime, so they would have bodies of different types. One in a trunk of a car, versus the seat of the car, or maybe sand versus mud. But, it’s sort of this pretty piece of parkland, and if you stumbled onto it by accident, you would be like “whoa,” wondering what was going on there.

Aquila: Clearly you have a great passion for science, and I’m just wondering why you didn’t discover this earlier? I mean, you went into liberal arts as opposed to science, do you think it was the way it was taught at your school, or perhaps personal maturity?

I think you nailed it when you said the way it was taught. I had a really good physics teacher in high school but my biology and chemistry teachers…and biology had to be one high school subject that I was involved in now it would be biology, but the teacher I had didn’t make it come alive. To me this seems like an extraordinary feat, to not make biology interesting.

I know that there are certain things, basics that you have to get across. But for some reason, that teacher, I didn’t really feel a passion for it. I think also maturity, I wasn’t really that engaged with the world in high school, I was more engaged with television. I was driven by what is the assignment, what do I have to do to get an A? That was what drove me, and now it is from within, it is completely different.

Aquila: As someone now both in the humanities and the sciences, what do you think about the advantages of a humanities centric education as opposed to STEM centric education, or vice versa?

I think that ideally for high school, I think it is important to have a balance, because you don’t really know. From my own experience, I had no idea of what I wanted to do at that age. I think it is important to keep doors open, so you have an opportunity to experience different topics and see what you connect with. I’m not an educator, I’m not specialized in education, but you just never know where that spark is, and if you don’t expose yourself to it, it becomes too late.

Aquila: You mentioned that you worked at Vogue in your background. Can you tell us about your experience there and what it was like?

They didn’t let me anywhere near the fashion articles. I think I did one fashion story which got cancelled; it was a very Vogue experience. So I don’t really know the fashion side of it; I was just reporting stories as usual. It was a little different in that Vogue magazine has such a big budget that they would sometimes assign three writers a topic and then choose the best one, and kill the other two.

Aquila: How do you strike that balance between writing pieces for readers that don’t specialize in the field, yet still do justice to the science? If a specialist were to read your piece, how do you make them feel like you covered all the science involved?

I’m always writing with a little bit of fear that someone who is an expert in the field, or one of my sources is going to read it and think “Oh, what an idiot, she got all these things wrong.” I’m always careful; I have someone review it factually to make sure I didn’t make some kind of stupid mistake.