The “Seam of the Snail” by Cynthia Ozick is a short story about a girl’s perception of her mother and perceptions of herself. Through the lense of first person reflective, the story begins with the girl looking back on her childhood, growing up in the depression. Within this memory the girl talks about how her mother used to sew her dresses. On the outside the seams of the dresses were exquisitely sewn, but on the inside of the dress there were small errors. There might be a loose thread or the spacing between the stitches may not be even. This recollection spiraled into a rant about her mother, explaining how, although her mother was a jack of all trades, there was always error in her work. As this girl found fault in all of her mother’s doings, she pegged herself as being a “pinched perfectionist” and decided she was a human snail. Kindly she said, just as a snail leaves a trail of its own essence everywhere it goes, “I use up my substance and wear myself out making nearly no progress at all.” The girl concludes by saying, “her mother has escaped her now.” At the end of the piece when she says that, there is still disdain in her attitude toward her mother. Her mother is gone yet she still stressed the fact that her mother measured her life in “sentences pressed out” and her mother’s heart was, in her eyes, “dreadfully inexact.”, Which seems to be of the most importance to that girl.