Mary Roach: A little more than diddly

Just before we walked onstage in front of a packed house last night, the director of our campus speaker series asked me, "Do you usually get nervous before doing things like this?"

Things like this? What, like sitting on stage for an hour tossing questions at the author of eight best-selling books? Not something I do every day!

The answer is: yes, I did get a little nervous before I had that very public fireside chat with author Mary Roach last night, but it was the most fun I've had in ages. Aside from being a terrific writer, she is a warm and funny person who can talk intelligently about just about anything. Here's part of what I said about her in my introduction:

Early in her new book Replaceable You, in a chapter describing treatment options for people suffering third-degree burns, Mary Roach tosses out the phrase exuberant granulations as if it's precious treasure. In Fuzz, we learn about pronking and stotting and frass and kerf, and we encounter people who work as Danger Tree Assessors or Falling Safety Advisors. This is what I love about Mary's writing: she takes such great joy in language, glorying in the weird and wonderful nomenclature of science and nature while she's looking at interesting topics in granular detail--exuberantly. Near the end of Fuzz she writes about scientists' attempts to genetically alter mice, admitting that she "knows diddly about how it works but wants to become someone who knows a little more than diddly." Well we all know diddly about a lot of things--but by the time we're done tonight, I hope we'll know a little more than diddly.

And we did! We all now know much more about how Mary Roach writes her books and what she's learned along the way. The first question I asked was How far will you go to get the story? I've read only two of her books, but I've seen her get mugged by monkeys, get trained in wildlife attack response, climb inside an iron lung machine, get a hair transplant on her calf, and travel all over the world to track down scientists and other experts so she could observe their work while peppering them with questions.

I wish I could have written down her responses, but I had my hands full with a microphone and lists of questions, some of them written by my Nature Writing students, who had read a chapter of Fuzz. They wanted to know why she writes about serious topics humorously and why she tucks so many little gems into very funny footnotes. Her answers made us all a little smarter while keeping us laughing. 

But then she'd been doing that all day. Because of an unusual convergence of events, I was in charge of getting the author where she needed to go all afternoon, so we spent a lot of time talking while tootling around town and having dinner before the show. She is just as warm and interesting offstage, so by the time we got on the stage, I felt very comfortable asking questions.

And then after the show, she sat and signed books for a long line of people who wanted to keep the conversation going. It was pretty late when I dropped her off at her hotel, where she had arranged for a 3:30 a.m. wake-up call so a car service could drive her to the airport in Columbus. Maybe that's why I woke up at 3:30 this morning--in sympathy with the author who'd kept me so well entertained all day. The whole event wore me out but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Maybe next time--if there is a next time--I won't be quite so nervous.