Gabrielle Drolet: "Look Ma, No Hands: A Chronic Pain Memoir"
May 27, 2025 at 7:00pm
Join us for a visit with acclaimed essayist and cartoonist Gabrielle Drolet to talk about her new book, Look Ma, No Hands, debut memoir about chronic pain, accessibility, and young adulthood.
Gabrielle Drolet: "Look Ma, No Hands: A Chronic Pain Memoir"
In Conversation with Words Director Josh Lambier
Tuesday, 27 May 2025
Zoom Webinar
This event will be hosted in partnership with London artist Diana Tamblyn.
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.”
Authors & Presenters
Gabrielle Drolet
GABRIELLE DROLET is a journalist, essayist, and cartoonist based in Montreal.
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