What Happened to You When You Wrote for Magazines?

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"I wrote for magazines for about 15 years. Never the ones that, you know, the atlantic harpers or the new yorker, those always felt out of reach," she says. "And also, i think my style wasn't very well suited, and i'm not, i'm not enough reporter for those." Her future agent told her to take a look at which columns had the highest haird rights in salon dot com's on-line magazine. And he said, why don't you think about that as a book? He sold it 10 years later.

Mary Roach is the author of seven nonfiction books, including her latest, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law.

"In these realms of the taboo, there's a tremendous amount of material that is really interesting, but that people have stayed away from. ... I'm kind of a bottom feeder. It's down there on the bottom where people don't want to go. But if that's what it takes to find interesting, new material, I'm fine with it. I don't care. I'm not easily grossed out. I don't feel that there's any reason why we shouldn't look at this. And over time, I started to feel that ... the taboo was preventing people from having conversations that it would be healthy to have."

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