We here at crabwalk.com Global HQ are proud to be today’s stop on the Virtual Book Tour. This month’s book: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. It’s an entertaining — almost breezy at times — look at the myriad uses to which human remains have been put.

I interviewed Mary by phone last week during one of her non-virtual book tour stops in Minneapolis. Herewith, an edited transcript:

Your background is primarily in magazines and online — both places where short, quick pieces are the norm and editors typically don’t think readers have the stomach for long-form work. What was it like working on your first book-length project?

On the one hand, it’s absolutely liberating and wonderful. You can do whatever you want, go off on all the tangents you want without some editor saying, “I don’t see why this is in there.” On the other hand, they don’t give you a little guidebook of what to expect when writing your first book. You constantly go through tense phases and wake up in the middle of the night wondering, “What am I doing? They’re going to kill this book, reject it.” You’re gripped with this insecurity.

My proposal was vague, not very detailed. I didn’t know where I was going. I floundered quite a bit.

How much did that book proposal change in the process of writing?

There were all these things I came across in researching that I didn’t know existed when that proposal was written. There were a few chapters in the proposal that didn’t make it into the book, and quite a bit of shuffling. The decapitated head chapter [Chapter 9, “Just a Head”], that was not in the proposal. The surgery lab [Chapter 1, “A Head is a Terrible Thing to Waste”] might have been something I came across later. The chapter on beating-heart cadavers [Chapter 8, “How to Know if You’re Dead”] I don’t think was in there.

I originally had something on live burial in the proposal, but there’s another book that’s gone into that in detail and it’d be like ripping off his book to have a lot on that. It’d be like doing a book report.

I think your magazine background shows through clearly. It’s very episodic, and you don’t allow yourself long stretches of dull narrative – it’s very bang bang bang.

It’s definitely a book written by someone with a very short attention span and by someone raised on doing magazine articles. I’m always thinking, “Am I going on too long about this?” And the magazine pieces I do tend to be short ones — features in the 3,000, 4,000 [word] range and some that are more like 800 or 1,500.

Did you repurpose any of your columns for the book?

A couple of the topics were Salon columns — the Harvard Brain Bank piece for one. A couple ended up as footnotes. Originally, I was going to do a column for Salon called The Dead Beat. They lost some funding and it didn’t work. But I’d been gearing up to do the column and had done a bunch of research. I had a list of column topics ready, and a lot of that went into the book.

How did the idea for the column originate?

I was riding my bike home on the street and I bumped into a Salon editor. We were joking that David Talbot has a real taste for the macabre and, joking, I said, “We should do a whole column on death.” The editor said, “Why don’t you ask him?” I’d probably already done three columns about bodies: a crash-test dummy piece, the brain bank, and a piece on Thanksgiving and how much food you can eat before your stomach bursts.

Some authors, faced with a book on death, would distance themselves from the narrative and approach the topic with a sort of clinical reserve. Stiff is very first-person — you’re in the middle of everything. Why?

Well, the column was even more Mary-heavy than the book. The tone was flipper, with more of an emphasis on being funny all the time. But I learned very quickly that my columns didn’t make me popular with their subjects. They’d read the column and say, “Oooh, I didn’t know you were going to do this.” It’s hard to get access to these places — these researchers typically don’t like dealing with the media — and I didn’t want to screw them over. I wanted them to like the book. So there’s a lot of me in there and a lot of humor, but not as much as their could have been.

The book’s fast paced and easily digestible. Was there any sort of message you wanted to communicate to the reader, or was a pleasant reading experience enough?

I have a very utilitarian bent. I think the things that people have ended up doing after death, however grisly, are great. It’s good to be helpful to others. So there is that message, that you can be useful after death. I’ve gotten letters from people who’ve said, “Now I’m going to donate my body to science.”

Particularly in the beating-heart cadaver chapter, I really came down strong on the side of being in favor of donating organs. It would be such a waste for someone in that situation not to donate with 18,000 people waiting for organs. But for the most part, it’s meant just as a fun and informative read.

You use a lot of color in your descriptions of corpses and their environments. How did you record those images for your writing? Did you ever bring a camera to snap some photos?

I’m telling you, you don’t need a camera to remember a room full of severed heads. I used to do that, but not any more. I use a tape recorder for interviews and I take notes. The person I’m talking to thinks I’m writing down what he said, when I’m really writing “Ewww, disgusting maggots” and writing what they look like.

Early on, you mention Christine Quigley’s book The Corpse: A History, which seems to cover much of the same turf as your book (although, I imagine, in a different style). How do you deal with knowing you’re not the first to cover a topic? Do you avoid reading the other book to keep the vision for the book your own and not be influenced by how someone else has done it?

It’s funny you mention that, because Christine is retiring from wherever it is she is [Georgetown University Press] and someone said they wanted to give her an autographed copy of my book. I thought, “That’s great, she’s going to hate it.”

I found her book very helpful when I was putting my proposal together. It’s more on the history angle, not on research cadavers, so there’s not as much common ground as you might think. There’s another book called Death to Dust that covers some of the same stuff.

I didn’t want to read them. I had friends who knew I was working on the book who’d buy these books on remainder tables and give them to me. I’d say, “I don’t want to look at it, I don’t want to know about it.” If it was covering the same terrain, I didn’t want to know about it. I did peek a few times, though.

Is there any part of the book you think would really be worth examining in more detail, maybe in a book of its own?

In Chapter 8, there’s the business about figuring out where in the body the soul is located, the heart, brain, or liver stuff. I found that fascinating. I was fine with the brain until Dr. Oz [New York transplant surgeon Mehmet Oz, quoted in the chapter] said he thought that part of us resides in the heart. He takes hearts out of people’s bodies, so there’s something there.

May I make a suggestion? I think you should write an entire book on this one quote from page 77: “Theoretically, it is possible in this way to grow a chicken heart to the size of the world.”

I know! I want to track that author down. [The quote is from Clarence G. Strub and L.G. “Darko” Frederick’s The Principles and Practice of Embalming, and appears pleasantly devoid of all context.] Presumably, this is a man with a degree. I want to found out what he meant. There was nothing more about it in his book – just that line. It wasn’t a joke, because believe me, this guy is not funny. I’ve got no idea what he meant.

I love lines like that. One of the great things about writing this book is that I could go off on little tangents like that. Sort of a “please, reader, indulge me for a moment.” I overuse them. I love parentheticals. They’re everywhere. I love having footnotes in the book for the same reason. I originally wanted to put a note at the start of the book saying, “Reader, don’t skip the footnotes. They’re the most important things in this book.” The publisher wanted to put them at the end of the chapter instead of in the text, and I put my foot down.

You’ve seen Pulp Fiction, presumably, since you mention it at one point. Any thoughts on what happens to Marvin in the back seat of the car?

You know, in my proposal, I wanted to go around with a person like Harvey Keitel who cleans up after grisly deaths. But the book really turned into “interesting things you can do while dead,” and being cleaned up really isn’t one of those.

Hypothetical situation: It’s the 18th century, and you’ve been diagnosed with an illness. Your doctor tells you that you can choose between one of the “treatments” you describe in Chapter 10: mummy elixir, human feces soup, “Poor Sinner’s Fat,” or “Spirit of Skull.” What’ll it be?

Oooh, tough one. I’d probably go with the Poor Sinner’s Fat. Fat is a flavor carrier. Fat tastes good most of the time. Your highly marbled beef, your Kobe beef always tastes the best. Aesthetically, it’s the least disgusting.

Yeah, but the flavor this fat is carrying is of a poor, dead sinner. What about Spirit of Skull? Maybe it’d just be a powder.

Too gritty.

Do you have your next project lined up?

I do have another book in the works.

Your topic?

Well, I don’t want to go into it too much, but it is in the Chapter 8 direction — the issue of where the soul is.

In the final chapter, you argue that what happens to a corpse should mostly be a decision of the survivors and that the dead person’s wishes shouldn’t take priority. That’s why, you say, that your husband will get to decide what happens to your body if you go first. But what if he goes first?

Well, his kids would get a say, too. But I know he’s got no interest in being a research cadaver. That’s the last thing he’d want. He’s very, very squeamish. But he did say, “I don’t care, do whatever you want.”

If he’s very, very squeamish, how’d he deal with being married to someone who spent a year writing about corpses?

He was actually very good about it. He didn’t complain much. He read the book, including Chapter 3 [“Life After Death,” which includes some very detailed descriptions of rotting human flesh]. He was really a good sport. I did feel bad about inflicting this on him. When I’d come back from somewhere, I’d give him a very truncated version of what I saw. I knew enough to spare him the details.

17 July 2003

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