A humorous, profound debut memoir about chronic pain, accessibility, and young adulthood, by an acclaimed essayist and cartoonist.

In 2021, Gabrielle Drolet developed a condition that made her unable to use her hands. It only worsened over time, and as a writer and artist, she had to learn new ways of creating and expressing herself. The experience completely changed her life and her outlook.
Look Ma, No Hands explores both the difficulty and the humour of developing chronic and life-altering pain in her twenties. Each chapter looks at a different aspect of her life touched by her disability: how she learned to write when she couldn’t type; how she learned to manage the most mundane daily tasks. She moves cities and as her work as a writer and cartoonist builds has to navigate different byzantine health systems without the privilege or security of having a family doctor, even as she moves into her new apartment and embarks on first dates. And she does all of this with the most wonderful sense of the absurd.
Look Ma, No Hands is utterly charming and shares profound reflections on life’s curveballs, and explores how, in Drolet’s words, “you can live a full—even funny—life in a disabled body.”

Gabrielle Drolet's profile page

GABRIELLE DROLET is a journalist, essayist, and cartoonist based in Montreal. She is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, she contributes cartoons to the Globe and Mail, and she has been a guest panellist on CBC’s Commotion. Her written work has been published in the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, VICE, Teen Vogue, and more. Her essays on disability have been nominated for a Digital Publishing Award and won gold at the Canadian Online Publishing Awards. Gabrielle holds an MFA from the University of Guelph.

“I have loved Gabrielle’s voice and writing for a long time, and Look Ma, No Hands pulls together everything I love about her work—it’s a book overflowing with beauty and heartbreak and intimacy, held together with Gabrielle’s steady intelligence and gentle compassion and hilarious self-reflection and so, so much grace: grace for the life she thought she’d live, and grace for the ache of accepting it may have to look different. I couldn’t be more thankful for this book, and for Gabrielle’s willingness to tell her story.”
—Elamin Abdelmahmoud, host of Commotion and author of Son of Elsewhere

“Look Ma, No Hands is an extremely refreshing, moving, and realistic look at life with chronic pain and disability. Gabrielle’s frankness about how the sudden onset of debilitating pain can change your relationship to a world that treats the disabled as an afterthought is infused with wit, perfect moments of real humour, and a lot of wisdom. She beautifully and clearly takes us through her own experience that will make anyone think deeply and question the value society places on our physical being. What a remarkable debut from an incredible voice.”
—Sarah Hagi, journalist and co-host of Scamfluencers