Mary Roach

Photo by Jen Siska | jensiska.com

Bio for Publicists | About Mary

About Mary

I grew up in a small house in Etna, New Hampshire. My neighbors taught me how to drive a Skidoo and shoot a rifle, though I never made much use of these skills. I graduated from Wesleyan in 1981 and drove out to San Francisco with some friends. I spent a couple years working as a freelance copy editor before landing a half-time PR job at the SF Zoo. On the days when I wasn't there in my little cubicle in the trailer behind Gorilla World, I freelanced articles for the Sunday magazine of the local newspaper. One by one, my editors would move on to bigger publications and take me along with them. In the late 1990s, magazines began to sputter out and travel budgets evaporated, and so I switched to books.

People call me a science writer, though I don't have a science degree and sometimes have to fake my way through interviews with experts I can't understand.

I have no hobbies. I mostly just work on my books and hang out with my family and friends. I enjoy bird-watching (though the hours don't agree with me), hiking, backpacking, overseas supermarkets, Scrabble, mangoes, and that late-night "Animal Planet" show about horrific animals such as the parasitic worm that attaches itself to fishes' eyeballs but makes up for it by leading the fish around.

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