I’ve read a lot of Mary Roach’s books. And whether the topic is sex, death, or wildlife, you always know you’re in for an experience.
But Roach’s newest book, Replaceable You: Adventures In Human Anatomy, was the first I listened to as an audiobook, narrated by Roach herself. And I have to say – I Ioved it. I laughed out loud, a lot. I also squirmed out loud—if that’s a thing one can do.
Of course, it makes no difference if you read this book on the page or listen to it in your AirBuds, because Roach’s appeal remains the same. She doesn’t just explore a world usually closed to outsiders—she brings the reader along with her. (Though there are definitely times when you are glad you aren’t actually along for the ride, like when she crawls inside a negative pressure ventilator known as the Iron Lung.) And all along the way, Roach asks questions anyone would ask if we were, say, magically transported to a burn unit in Boston, a tissue recovery facility in Pittsburgh, or a tightly-controlled xenotransplantation compound in China.
“When and how does a person decide they’d be better off with a prosthetic than their existing limb?” asks the promotional material for Replaceable You. “Can a donated heart be made to beat forever? Can an intestine provide a workable substitute for a vagina?”
I was fortunate enough to chat with Roach in anticipation of her Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures appearance on October 5, 2026 at Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland. (Purchase tickets here.) We talked about her worst reporting experiences, the medical utility of frog legs, and the advice every fledgling writer needs to hear.
Jason Bittel: Can you tell us when and how you developed your unique sense of humor and the fascination with the icky bits many other writers shy away from? Was there a writer you grew up reading, a show you watched, a relative in the medical or scientific fields, or some other influence we can attribute either of these things to?
Mary Roach: My parents were not in any icky field at all. And there was nobody I was exposed to as a kid. I think maybe I was just a little weird as a kid, or I had a high tolerance for icky things. I remember my mother one day showing me a daddy longlegs, and like, pulling one of the legs off, which, looking back, that seems weird, and also not really in character for her, but maybe there was something in her genes. I don’t know. My father was a bit odd. He was a little bit eccentric. But I can’t point to a real, single influence. Part of it may be, when I was thinking about a book to write, I had the sense that everything had already been written about. And so, I was like, what’s the dross that other writers won’t consider? I’ll take that stuff—the stuff in the gutter.
JB: You’re coming to Pittsburgh, but this will not be your first time here—in fact, the book travels to Pittsburgh twice, including a visit to Carnegie Mellon University. Can you talk about the visit you did with Dr. Adam Feinberg and his regenerative biomedicine lab that is currently working toward 3D-printing human organs?
MR: People think, oh, it’s a 3D printer. You give it the data, and it just spits out what you need, but an organ is not a machine part. It needs a blood supply. It’s got different types of tissue. It’s got to be kept alive, and the cells have to be fed, and they have to be supported, which I found really interesting. And the fact that they were willing to take the time to talk to me on such a basic level, because I’m coming to it knowing, really, honestly, zilch. I tried to read some stuff about it, but when you read about 3D printing without seeing it and without having somebody take the time to explain it on a basic level, it’s very hard to understand.
I was there the better part of a day. And I know [Feinberg] is an incredibly busy person. And he was having to kind of explain the basics to me, while every few minutes I’d have to say, “Wait, hold on, wait. I don’t know what you just said. I don’t get it. Can we, like, dial it back and start over?” And not only him, but six or seven people there in the lab were all kind of down for explaining to the know-nothing who had showed up. It was a very cool, but complicated chapter.
JB: Your second Pittsburgh chapter, so to speak, is when you visit the Center for Organ Recovery & Education (CORE), which harvests various parts of a body after a person has passed. And I thought this chapter served as an important and surprisingly tender resolution for the book. Can you talk about the care you took to maintain your candor and voice in this section, while also conveying the gravity of what tissue donation means to both donors and recipients?
MR: You know, that was a burden to bear, and it’s something that I’m always very aware of the perils of going too far over the line in terms of humor. A lot of times the humor comes from my own kind of being a fish out of water, or not understanding something, but often it’s just the kind of the surrealness of the situation.
And the basement of CORE, where they’re doing tissue recovery, is a pretty strange scene. So, I had to kind of adapt to that, and I wanted to do it in a way that really paid homage to the people who agree to do this—the families and the people themselves. And that was the same with Stiff. I really wanted to encourage people to donate their organs because it’s such a waste when people just throw it in the incinerator. God, somebody could have used that!
So, that was important to me, but I also feel an allegiance to my readers that I don’t want to just drop the tone of the book. I want there to be a similar tone. I think I take more care with those chapters. I just proceeded with a little extra caution.
JB: One of the aspects of your books I always enjoy is the way you offer yourself up as a guinea pig to the story. In Gulp, you reached into a living cow’s stomach fistula and in Bonk, you and your husband participated in coital ultrasound research – which, if you don’t know what that means, dear reader, go look it up. For Replaceable You, you crawled inside an iron lung. Can you tell us what that experience was like?
MR: Well, I had no conception of what that would be. It was both more comfortable and relaxing than I expected, because it is negative pressure. Your rib cage is expanding and you’re pulling in air. It’s the same mechanism that we use as humans, but it’s completely under the control of this machine, which is weird.
You’re normally timing your own breathing, and when you’re speaking, and when a machine decides when you inhale, it cuts you off, and it’s bizarre. And the other thing going on is that you have a very tight seal on your neck, because it has to be a seal, and the air can’t be leaking out through that neck hole. So, you’re breathing deeply in a relaxed way, but at the same time, you feel like somebody’s strangling you.
And I had thought I might be able to sleep in an iron lung and, well, that didn’t happen. Partly because I think the machine was set too high. And it was making me hyperventilate, and you get that tingly feeling, and I was like, this doesn’t seem safe for me.
But it was pretty cool. Anytime I can understand something better by doing it, I like to do that. And it’s hopefully more interesting for readers that way.
JB: On a scale of sticking your hand inside a cow fistula and having intercourse while being ultrasound-ed, where is the iron lung on the scale of uncomfortableness for you as the writer?
MR: Oh, nothing can compare with the ultrasound. Nothing. In terms of awkwardness, nothing will ever top that, but also in terms of how fun I knew it was going be to write it up. The more uncomfortable something is, I think the better the chapter is going to be.
JB: This book takes the reader on a journey from Mongolia to the Monongahela River here in Pittsburgh. (Okay, CORE is actually on the Allegheny River.) And it covers every part of the body, from the hair on our heads to the tendons in our heels. But I was often most surprised by the historical examples of surgical experimentation. Do you have an example or two from the annals of history that you most find yourself busting out at dinner parties?
MR: I have a chapter on replacement noses, which there was a demand for because, historically, cutting off a person’s nose was a form of punishment. It’s a horrible thing to do to somebody, for obvious reasons, but it was also a very visible thing. The whole population would see. It was a crime deterrent. And then syphilis came along and there were cases where the structure of the nose degraded. There’s always been a need for innovation in prosthetic noses.
But my favorite of all time was Frank Tetamore, and his was an artificial nose that was attached to a pair of glasses. And in order to hide the line at the bottom of the nose, it got a mustache. Obviously, this was not going to work for women so well. But it was like a set of medical Groucho Marx glasses. And I was like, God, I love Frank Tetamore, that he came up with that.
I did try to figure out if that was what inspired the Groucho Marx glasses, but the answer seems to be no. Mostly because I don’t think a lot of people were familiar with Frank Tetamore’s prosthetic nose innovation. But it was pretty good.
I was also tickled by the guy who was in France during World War I patching up a lot of soldiers. And he had taken to experimenting with frog skin, because, as he said, there was already a large supply and demand for frogs [for eating]. And I sort of thought, wow, this is great—there was a use for the torsos after the legs had been used. It’s not a waste.
But then, in fact, this particular surgeon did prefer to use the top of a leg, that kind of underarm flap of the frog legs, so… everybody wanted the legs.
JB: We’ll have a lot of fledgling writers reading this, so what’s something you’ve learned over your long and storied career that you wish you knew when you were just getting started?
MR: Don’t wait to think about doing a book.
For a long time, I wrote short pieces thinking that you needed some magical amount of shorter writing experience in order to even pitch a book, which isn’t true at all.
These days, it does help to have a social media platform, but the basics are a good and selling idea and a sample chapter that shows that you’re a kickass writer—or a semi-kickass writer, at least.
And that’s what you need. You don’t need to have written for magazines. You don’t need to have a certain number of years in. I waited a long time to publish my first book, because I thought, “Oh, it’s a book. It’s big, it’s scary.”
But no, it’s not. Dive in. Do it.
