Mary Roach, the author of Spook: Science Tackles Afterlife, was invited to Stockton for a convocation with the freshmen class and talk to the students about her book Spook. Her convocation was in the Performing Art Centre (PAC) on 26th September, 2013. After reading Spook I was very reluctant to go and listen to a writer who had a very annoying style of wetting. But eventually I did end up going.

I had presumed Mary Roach to be someone who would be old, with her hair already turning grey and someone with a very dull personality. But when I saw her, she was nothing like that. She looked young, fresh and full of energy. She diffused positive aura in the auditorium when she stepped on the stage. Her sense of humor which was not very evident in the book could be clearly sensed in her speech. Also, she was not ashamed to confess that she had never talked in a huge auditorium with a stepwise arrangement like PAC before. She was very friendly and bombastic. Her way of talking was similar to her writing style (she got off track very frequently and easily). But her divergent stories were usually very interesting and funny.

Mary Roach kept on stressing the importance of curiosity during her entire speech and said “Curiosity opens Doors”. This explains the reason why her book Spook was so much in depth. Her curiosity had forced her to look for more and more convoluted facts about afterlife, which made the content of Spook very boring and hard to keep track of. But her speech on curiosity was very enthusiastic and pumped up my energy level.

At the end of her speech Mary Roach wasn’t ashamed to affirm the fact that most of the students didn’t like the ending of the book, and they felt like it debunked her research about afterlife. Addressing that Mary Roach confidently said that she was trying to draw a line between knowing and believing when she presented her side on afterlife, but wasn’t clear enough in doing so. And if given a chance she would like to change it.

Roach is so far one of the most interesting speaker I have encountered. It seemed like she was enjoying every bit of the convocation too. After her talk on Spook, we had questions and answers session too. Students were asking her very random question, not related to the book, and she was very friendly in answering those questions. Sadly, I had to leave the convocation half way through the questions and answers session as I had a class. I wish I could have been there for a longer period of time to be amused by Mary Roach’s enchanting sense of humor.

After her speech, when I re-read certain parts of the book, I picked up the humor behind those snarky comments in her book. This was because now I had a general idea of how Mary Roach talked. I would’ve regretted not attended the convocation. I would now like to attend other guest speakers invited by Stockton, hoping they would be as entertaining as Mary Roach.