Eventually, she ended up in California because some friends were heading west. Roach started out as an English major at Wesleyan University, but because the English department didn’t do a semester abroad in England and the psychology department did, she switched majors. The first chapter in “Bonk,” for instance, is titled: “The Sausage, the Porcupine, and the Agreeable Mrs. Thus, “Bonk” is given the same treatments as her first two books, “Stiff” and “Spook: Science Takes on the Afterlife.” All three are loaded with footnotes that, instead of being dreaded, are gleefully anticipated they are often as funny as the text and the chapter headings. “I tell myself it would be a liability if I had a Ph.D. “I’m kind of science lite,” Roach says with a grin. “Bonk” is an immensely readable and informative tome that educates as well as amuses. The fact that it’s tricky to write even a newspaper article about Roach and her new book which scientifically - and hilariously - focuses on sex, makes it even more incredible that Roach has managed to pull off such a feat. “Words like ‘Harpoon.'” And more, which Roach, 49, quite casually shared, having become inured to the terminology after two years of research into all things anatomical. “There’s a British paper on the subject,” she enthuses from her Oakland home. For her first book, “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,” for instance, she came home bubbling with enthusiasm about how you can actually hear the maggots feeding if you listen closely.įor her latest book, “Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex,” the conversation is more likely to center on, oh, the hundreds of terms for “penis” she discovered in her research. When Mary Roach is in the midst of research for one of her books, dinner table conversation can indeed be scintillating.

Author of stiff and bonk