When the eyeball pops out and bounces down the street before the steamroller hits it? 'Boink.' My editor was very anti- Boink. Bonk discussion, not so much with me and my people at Norton but with friends and acquaintances telling me it's 'boink' and not 'bonk.' They actually did market research at Norton to make sure that people knew what it was about in case Bonk wasn't clear enough.ĪC: 'Boink' sounds like an onomatopoeia sound effect Mad magazine's Don Martin would've used. Coming up with Bonk was a little more difficult. I would submit a list of 30 titles, and then my editor would say, 'Mary, none of these really sing for us,' and then she'd come up with one like Ghost Hunters, which, of course, sounds like a cheesy Discovery Channel show. Mary Roach: Well, talking about all three titles, with Spook it was an incredible, insane journey of probably 250 titles. I imagine it's tough to distill the essence of one of your factoid-dense books into a single-syllable word. Roach spoke to the Chronicle by phone prior to her upcoming appearance at the Alamo Drafthouse's the Best of Sex Ed show (sponsored by BookPeople) this Monday.Īustin Chronicle: Your books have the best titles.

With Bonk, Roach manages to render even the squirmiest of sex-research topics (penile flensing, for example) if not palatable then at the very least excellent fodder for dinner-party icebreakers. Such is the wit and imparted wisdom of the ages that Roach trades in, to great, laugh-'til-you-gag, or vice versa, effect, in not only Bonk but also in her two previous books, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. ' Hello, yes this watch you sold me is all sticky and stuff?' : 'A pale and watery blood often dripped from his nose, he drooled continually subject to attacks of diarrhea, he defecated in his bed without noticing it, there was a constant flow of semen. Who was Samuel Tissot, you ask? He was the author of Onanism or, A Treatise Upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation, a 'slim, pernicious work of hyperbolic quackery' published in 1760, which is quoted in Roach's new book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.ĭescribing 'the effects of self-pollution on a watchmaker referred to as L.D. Mary Roach is the funniest science writer since Samuel Tissot, bar none. Mary Roach will be at the Alamo Ritz on Monday night to discuss her new book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.

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