Author Mary Roach brings Replaceable You to Liberty Hall on April 23
Mary Roach. // photo credit Jen Siska
Mary Roach appears at Liberty Hall on Thursday, April 23, for the 2026 Ross and Marianna Beach Author talk, presented by the Lawrence Public Library, to discuss her latest book, Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy. Details on that event here.
Author Mary Roach has explored science in all its interesting and varied forms over the course of her career, and readers have responded with voracious attention. From 2003’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers all the way through last year’s Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy, all eight of her books for W.W. Norton have made the New York Times bestseller list, and for good reason.
Roach’s sense of humor shines through in all her writing, and each book takes the reader on a path of unabashed curiosity about the world which surrounds us, the world within us, and to outer space and the afterlife, among other diverse topics. If you’ve read one Mary Roach book, you’ll want to read them all.
That humor and willingness to explore comes through in her live appearances, as well. If you’ve not had the chance to see her speak, Thursday, April 23, should be on your calendar, when Mary Roach appears at Liberty Hall for the 2026 Ross and Marianna Beach Author talk, presented by the Lawrence Public Library.
We hopped on the phone with the author to discuss her latest, Replaceable You, as well as what makes meeting her public so enjoyable.
The Pitch: You do a lot of traveling for your books, especially for your last one, Fuzz, but Replaceable You feels like you really went some places.
Mary Roach: I take any opportunity. Like, for Fuzz, you don’t need to go to the Vatican for a book on human/wildlife conflict. You really don’t. But I’m like, “They’re having some issues with gulls I’m gonna get into, and I was even like, maybe I can even get an audience with the pope. I can ask him what he thinks.”
I’m very optimistic, very ambitious in what I set my sights on. It makes it more fun for me, but more than that, it’s just more interesting for the reader, right? If you’re gonna write about cataracts, why not have it set in Mongolia?
Your books are always very science-driven, but Replaceable You feels like it was a couple of steps up in terms of technological history. Every chapter feels as though you’re covering the entire history of whatever you’re tackling, whether it be cataract surgeries or limb replacement or something like that. I appreciate it, because it’s so much more than I can do.
Thank you. Thank you. But really, it’s just the fun bits of that history. You know what I mean? It’s not a comprehensive coverage of the science or the history. It’s just me going, “That’s pretty weird that happened.” The history of cataracts with, like, the guy, and “Hold down the lens inside the eye, with your pokey stick for four ‘Our Fathers’”? I’m like, “Woo, that’s interesting!” so it’s really me just cherry-picking the pieces that I wanna share with people, ’cause they’re just weird.
But, yes, to your point, I had to step into–kicking and screaming, I might add–stem cells and genetics and bioprinting in a way that I seriously put those chapters off till the end ’cause, “Oh shit!” but it ended up being really interesting. It was super interesting and a little weird. I try to make it fun. I did hair follicles, hair farms.
Do you find that the topics for your book come about just as a sense of, “How? Why?” I get the sense that it’s all just disbelief and then wanting to get to the heart of the matter.
Yeah, I think that’s a good way to characterize it. I feel, especially with this topic, there’s a lot of coverage out there that’s very kind of “Gee whiz” and just assuming that people know how this stuff works enough that they’re just gonna buy it, and I’m not buying them. I’m like, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. What’s actually going on in these labs? Where are we at?” and that’d be cool if that was true, but I don’t know. It’s just me wanting to step inside that world instead of getting these salivating, frenzied tech stories about the latest thing coming down the pike, and then five years later you go, “Yeah, whatever happened to that bioprinted penis? Where is that out on the horizon? What happened to that?”
Do you ever find yourself–when you’re in the middle of traveling and you’re in a lab or wherever it might be for one of your books–regretful that you’ve chosen a topic that’s so sticky?
Sticky ethically or sticky gross-wise?
Sticky gross-wise. With this book and Gulp, there’s a lot of fluids involved and they get sticky.
Yeah, they do. Do I, personally? No. Nothing is too sticky for me, but I do sometimes think, do I really wanna subject my readers to this? Am I crossing a line, and are they gonna be like, “You know what, Mary Roach? I’m done with you. This is too much.”
I try to keep that–perhaps not successfully–in the back of my mind.
I think anyone who has read any of your books should be aware of what they’re in for, eight titles in. What do you get from a Q&A event like the one that’s happening in Lawrence?
I find that a Q&A/in conversation style event is just more fun for the audience, I think ’cause it’s always gonna be a hundred percent fresh, because I don’t know if people are gonna ask and what they’re gonna bring to it and hopefully it’s a bit of a conversation rather than just me going over the same material. I find these events to be a bit more fun and more interesting.
What’s been your relationship with libraries, given that I imagine you have to go to so many different ones to find the very specific research you’re doing?
My idea of an ideal day, or afternoon sometimes, is to be in the stacks of a library, like the part of the stacks where nobody’s been in ages, with books that nobody’s taken out and who knows how long. It’s just this sense of looking around on the shelves and who knows?
Not so much going in to get a book that I need–or maybe that, but then I just get distracted and just could spend a whole day pulling out books and just being gobsmacked by what’s out there in the world. Libraries are just this world on paper. To go to some obscure archive, and–yeah. Makes me just pee myself thinking about it.
How have librarians helped you over the course of your career?
Oh, librarians and archivists are unbelievably helpful. To stumble onto the kind of librarian or archivist who’s really excited that somebody is interested in this material that’s just been sitting there for ages, and they wanna help you, and they get it ready for you, and you end up spending two hours chatting with them?
I remember, when I was working on Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, there was this guy, Robert Latou Dickinson. He’s the guy who got Kinsey interested in sexual physiology, and Dickinson was an artist, and he made this amazing cast of vulvas. It makes him sound like a perv, but he wasn’t–he was just celebrating the tremendous diversity in distances, sizes, shapes. I have his book right here, The Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy.
Anyway, the Dickinson vulvas are at the State University of New York. This archivist, I wrote to her and she wrote back–it was Thanksgiving Day, I remember–and she’s like, “Mary, we’ve located some of the Dickinson vulvas for you.”
I’m like, “Whoa, look at this!” At the Thanksgiving table: “They found some of the Dickinson vulvas!” That shared excitement that you have can’t be beat, it’s so I’m a huge fan of librarians and archivists, and they’ve been not just helpful, but validating, because their interests and enthusiasm overlap with mine sometimes, and it’s just a lot of fun.
As someone who grew up with a nurse for a mom and married a woman who worked in healthcare and has family who are nurses and doctors and hospital administrators, I have learned that what our household considers to be appropriate dining room conversation is very different than most. Have you found that to be the case with yourself?
Yes. There are certain environments where I don’t have to worry about that, and that is an event where most of the audience is familiar with my work. Those people know what they’re in for. But sometimes just on a plane, somebody says, “Oh, I see you are a writer. What are you working on?” and I try to explain what I’m writing about.
I’m used to people talking to people who get it, who are in the same boat with me, but sometimes you’re like, “Oh, yeah, okay, that is really weird. I do seem weird. Okay, go back to your book. Sorry I said anything.” That does happen.
I really do notice the difference the difference between doing an event that’s been billed as “This is Mary Roach. This is her new book. If you like that kind of thing, come along” versus a group event where there’s five or six authors and no guarantee that anyone in the audience is familiar with what you do–like for example the TED Talk that I did about stimulating sows when you artificially inseminate them.
Because it was a TED Talk, the audience is expecting big ideas and important things and earnestness, the TED thing and I’m up there showing a video of a guy massaging the teats of a sow and people are like, “What is this?” You don’t really get a sense of that in the video of that talk, but that was not a Mary Roach audience, and they were perplexed, I think.
Mary Roach appears at Liberty Hall on Thursday, April 23, for the 2026 Ross and Marianna Beach Author talk, presented by the Lawrence Public Library, to discuss her latest book, Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy. Details on that event here.
