If you're an attentive listener, you can hear a snail eating. It sounds like 'someone very small munching celery continuously', says Elisabeth Tova Bailey in her debut memoir, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.
Bailey is an astute listener and observer. She has witnessed events in the life of the tiny New England forest snail, neohelix albolabris, that scientists have rarely seen before. Scientists and literary critics on both sides of the Atlantic are enraptured by her memoir, which details her relationship with a snail over the period of a year and won a 2010 US National Outdoor Book Award.
'Scientists are totally fascinated,' says Bailey, 'because none of them have actually observed one for a long, long time. They're not used to seeing snail behaviour in this kind of detail.'
And in case you're wondering how interesting can a snail be, Bailey makes them out to be astonishingly entrancing, although she hastily confides that two decades ago, snail behaviour was, as it is for most people, the last thing on her mind. But then it had never occurred to the Maine-based author and essayist that she would be felled by a mysterious pathogen while holidaying in the Swiss Alps. Aged 34, her active outdoors life shrank dramatically to confinement in a bed in a single, sparse room. She relied on others for care while her neurologically compromised body stubbornly resisted diagnosis.
One day a friend potted some woodland violets as a gift for her, plucking a snail from the forest and plonking it into the pot for good measure. 'People talk about how turning points in life happen and this was one of those moments.'
Bailey was initially annoyed at her friend's uprooting of the snail, but as she reveals in the book's opening chapter - aptly titled The Violet Pot Adventures - she soon became captivated by its nocturnal adventures. When she realised it was searching for food, she fed it a violet petal, then a mushroom, and was rewarded by the 'teeny teeny sounds' of its crunching. 'That immediately made me much more attuned to its life, and so I began to watch it and it was seeing the patterns of its daily life that got me so intrigued, and at that point it just became this incredible connection.
'Every living creature needs to be connected to other creatures in the natural world and when you're ill, you're cut off from your own human community enormously. So I could look over at the snail and not feel like I was left out of this world. In fact it did go about a much busier life than I could,' she laughs, 'and so it became this role model, because at a very slow pace it continued to do things, and that made me more accepting of my own limits.'