Mary Roach: preference

Transcript context

…Now, you have six main books out, and they’ve all been very successful. Forgetting about what might be your central talent intellectually, but just in terms of your work habits or schedule or how you organize what it is you do, I would call it the Mary Roach production function. How would you describe to us the Mary Roach production function? What is it you do that you think other people maybe could learn from? I am essentially a massive filtration system. So when I begin a project, I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know what will be in the book. I know that my job is to cherry-pick the most interesting, surprising, funny, bizarre material within this quite broad topic that I’ve selected. So there may be mornings when I . . . For Bonk, I recall going to the basement of UCSF Medical School Library where they had the Journal of Sex Research, which started sometime in the late ’50s, I believe, and going through every table of contents and going, “Boring, boring, boring . . . Oh! Masturbation is a potential treatment for intractable hiccups.” [laughter] And then running off to the Xerox machine, or these days, taking a picture. So 99 percent, I suppose, of what I come across I’m jettisoning, isn’t making the cut. And that whole process helps me figure out what it is that this book is about. I don’t know for the first few months, really, even six months, I don’t really know what this book should contain, what fits and what doesn’t fit. It’s not very good advice to give anybody, to feel comfortable with randomness and chaos — because I think that is the healthy first stages of a book — well, for me anyway. If you had to name two or three other writers or other books that were influences on what you’ve ended up doing, what would those be?…

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