Despite being recommended by a friend, I almost dropped this book midway through, but thankfully chose to press on to the finish.

The author, a 34 year old Maine writer, tells her story of being stricken by a difficult to diagnose vague neurological illness that sounds nearly identical to that written about by Meaghan O’Rourke in her superb book, “The Invisible Kingdom.”

Both women were eventually diagnosed with autoimmune dysautonomia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and/or some form of chronic inflammatory disease.  In other words, the doctors didn’t have a clue what was accounting for their profound weakness, headaches and joint pains, and feelings of lassitude and depression.  While O’Rourke chose to write about the medical profession’s failures to deal with this form of chronic illness, Bailey has chosen to write about her personal experiences with a land snail, Neohelix albolabris, who kept her company in her bedroom where she was confined, unable to even raise her head to look out the window or walk to the kitchen.

One day a friend during the early stages of her illness, a friend brought her some wood violets along with the snail which she had found in the humus under the violets.  Over time Bailey grew attached to the snail who eventually moved from the flower pot with the violets to a terrarium in Bailey’s room.  Bailey’s detailed observations of the snail’s daily trips to a mussel shell filled with water, the use of its 2400 teeth to eat mushrooms, the trails of slimey mucus left as it traversed the glass walls, and finally, the laying of dozens of eggs and the hatching of dozens of new snails helped her to maintain her sanity during this terrible period when her body was failing her and the doctors were stymied and essentially useless.

If you want to learn more about land snails than you could ever hope for, this is your book.  More importantly, it’s another excellent contribution to the literature of illness and the identification of a new role by the patient.  Think Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” or Susan Sontag’s book, “Illness as Metaphor”.  Along with O’Rourke’s book, “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating” and the aftermath of long COVID may be changing how medicine views these strange and terribly debilitating conditions.

This is a book worth reading by anyone living with a chronic illness, by physicians who may be caring for those patients, and for anyone deeply interested in the life cycle and ways of Neohelix albolabris.