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For two thousand years, cadavers – some willingly, some unwittingly – have been involved in science’s boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They’ve tested France’s first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender confirmation surgery, cadavers have helped make history in their quiet way. “Delightful—though never disrespectful” (Les Simpson, Time Out New York), Stiff investigates the strange lives of our bodies postmortem and answers the question: What should we do after we die?
(Summary from publisher, WW Norton.)
Mary Roach is the author of eight New York Times bestsellers, including STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; GULP: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, FUZZ: When Nature Breaks the Law and PACKING FOR MARS: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Her new book, REPLACEABLE YOU: Adventures in Human Anatomy, debuts in September 2025. Mary's books have been published in 21 languages, and her second book, SPOOK, was a New York Times Notable Book. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, and the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, among others. She was a guest editor of the Best American Science and Nature Writing series and an Osher Fellow with the San Francisco Exploratorium and serves as an advisor for Orion and Undark magazines. She has been a finalist for the Royal Society's Winton Prize 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.
I grew up in a small house in Etna, New Hampshire. My neighbors taught me how to drive a Skidoo and shoot a rifle, though I never made much use of these skills. I graduated from Wesleyan in 1981 and drove out to San Francisco with some friends. I spent a couple years working as a freelance copy editor before landing a half-time PR job at the SF Zoo. On the days when I wasn't there in my little cubicle in the trailer behind Gorilla World, I freelanced articles for the Sunday magazine of the local newspaper. One by one, my editors would move on to bigger publications and take me along with them. In the late 1990s, magazines began to sputter out and travel budgets evaporated, and so I switched to books.
People call me a science writer, though I don't have a science degree and sometimes have to fake my way through interviews with experts I can't understand.
I have no hobbies. I mostly just work on my books and hang out with my family and friends. I enjoy bird-watching (though the hours don't agree with me), hiking, backpacking, overseas supermarkets, Scrabble, mangoes, and that late-night "Animal Planet" show about horrific animals such as the parasitic worm that attaches itself to fishes' eyeballs but makes up for it by leading the fish around.
(Biography provided by the author)
