The snail arrives in a pot of wild violets dug up from the woods beside a friend’s studio apartment, and it becomes a companion to Bailey during her illness. Mixing genres effortlessly, the author relates detailed facts about the lives of snails, literary appreciations of gastropods, her own medical history, and the moving story of her long, bedridden year with one very particular snail for a pet.

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elizabeth Tova Bailey, is a brief study of snails, among other important subjects. I remembered the snail from the world of childhood, perhaps the last time I had the opportunity to stop what I was doing long enough to appreciate the tiny life-form. Its brown body was retractable into its slightly darker brown shell. “Snails teach children about vulnerability and safety,” the catalog claimed, but I had already gone past the text and was gazing instead at the little snail head, its two horns happily protuberant, its mouth open, holding a couple of fragments of leaf. Once, a catalog of children’s therapy supplies offered something I instantly wanted-a hand-puppet of a snail. I’d bring them upstairs, then flip through them at the kitchen table. Sometimes, catalogs arrived in the mail for special purposes: play therapy toys, professional development courses. Years ago, I had a housemate who was a psychologist.

The sound of a snail