So someone made the prediction that, 'Mary will have a book contract.' I forgot about it and when October came around I thought, I have three months to pull together a book proposal and have a book contract.

Telander of BookBanter, Roach answers the question of how she got started on her first book:Ī few of us every year would make predictions for other people, where they'll be in a year. It was in this community that Roach would get the push she needed to break into book writing.

On her days off from the SFZS, she wrote freelance articles for the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday Magazine.įrom 1996 to 2005 Roach was part of The Grotto, a San Francisco-based project and community of working writers and filmmakers. Her writing career began while working part-time at the San Francisco Zoological Society, producing press releases on topics such as elephant wart surgery. She worked as a columnist and also worked in public relations for a brief time. After college, Roach moved to San Francisco, California and spent a few years working as a freelance copy editor. She received a bachelor's degree in psychology from Wesleyan University in 1981. To date, she has published five books: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005) (published in some markets as Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife), Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008), Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2010), and Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (2013). Nineteen pounds of food.Mary Roach is an American author, specializing in popular science. Roach explains: “Two pounds of kidneys, one and a third pounds of liver, a half pound of steak, two eggs, a pound of cheese, a half pound of mushrooms, two pounds of carrots, a head of cauliflower, two large slices of bread, ten peaches, four pears, two apples, four bananas, two pounds each of plums and grapes, and two glasses of milk. Of the few known instances of death by food, one Liverpool woman’s last meal was particularly epic. If you pour slowly, with less force, it may hold out for six or seven liters.” Writes Roach: “Key-Åberg found that if the stomach’s emergency venting and emptying systems are out of commission-because the person is in a narcotic stupor, say, or dead-the organ will typically rupture at three to four liters, around a gallon.

But how much do you have to eat, theoretically? Algot Key-Åberg, a late professor of medicine at a Swedish university, intended to find out by pouring water into the mouths of 30 corpses until they exploded. Thanks to a bunch of built-in reflexes, eating yourself to death is nearly impossible, Roach found.

Gulp by mary roach