Roach reviews books for The New York Times and was the guest editor of the Best American Science and Nature Writing's 2011 edition.

Roach has had monthly columns in Reader's Digest (“My Planet”) and Sports Illustrated for Women (“The Slightly Wider World of Sports”).īesides being a best selling author, Roach is involved in many other projects on the side. An article by Roach, entitled 'The C word: Dead man driving,' was published in the Journal of Clinical Anatomy. She has also written articles for and tech-gadget reviews for Inc.com. That piece led to a number of humorous, first-person essays and feature articles for such publications as Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Discover Magazine, National Geographic, Outside Magazine, and Wired. In 1986, she sold a humor piece about the IRS to the San Francisco Chronicle. This is what literally lit the fire under my butt. So someone made the prediction that, 'Mary will have a book contract.' I forgot about it and when October came around I thought, I have three months to pull together a book proposal and have a book contract. Telander of BookBanter, Roach answers the question of how she got started on her first book:Ī few of us every year would make predictions for other people, where they'll be in a year. It was in this community that Roach would get the push she needed to break into book writing. On her days off from the SFZS, she wrote freelance articles for the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday Magazine.įrom 1996 to 2005 Roach was part of The Grotto, a San Francisco-based project and community of working writers and filmmakers. Her writing career began while working part-time at the San Francisco Zoological Society, producing press releases on topics such as elephant wart surgery. She worked as a columnist and also worked in public relations for a brief time.

After college, Roach moved to San Francisco, California and spent a few years working as a freelance copy editor. She received a bachelor's degree in psychology from Wesleyan University in 1981. To date, she has published five books: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005) (published in some markets as Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife), Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008), Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2010), and Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (2013).

Mary Roach is an American author, specializing in popular science.

Spook by Mary Roach