Hands-free, a writer drags us laughing into the weeds of loss and pain
Look Ma, No Hands, Gabrielle Drolet. McClelland & Stewart, 2025.
Imagine waking up in pain, your ability to do the things that define you — who you know yourself to be — suddenly lost. You assume it’s temporary. Maybe a little rest or some physio will fix it. But day after week after month of excruciating pain proves you — and all sorts of therapists and doctors — wrong. For Gabrielle Drolet, it’s drawing, writing, and a nascent journalistic career that she loses, only a month after her first cartoon is accepted by The New Yorker.
Drolet is 24 years old when her chronic pain hits — barely old enough to have revelled in what she is beginning to achieve. At what point must she admit that she is unlikely to get back to how things were, and that a new path, demanding the use of unrecognizable tools, must not simply be taken, but broken, and fully constructed? Spoiler alert: there is no categorically happy ending, but there is happier, complete with wonderful cartoons found in the pages of this memoir.
Look Ma, No Hands, Drolet’s beautiful, often hilarious hamster wheel of pain, hope, and disappointment, tracks her from first twinge to admitting a certain kind of defeat that involves biting the bullet and picking up the hacksaw, or, in her case, voice-activated dictation software. Drolet describes her written voice as having a specific cadence and style, as “recognizably my own. As I started to speak the words out loud, that style was eroded until it was lost to me. I found myself unable to achieve the same voice I had before, no matter how hard I tried.”
As a writer myself, I almost cried when I read that, so foreign and gruelling did that task seem. “Writing” now requires Drolet to speak not only the words but the deletes and the punctuation. She has no choice. Occasionally, the results are ridiculously amusing: “Hey comma what are we doing for dinner tonight?” she asks out loud, accidentally incorporating her new way of writing into daily conversation.
In Chapter 1, “First Date,” Drolet is out with a fellow journalist, a man. This detail is important as we soon find out that she left a long-term relationship with a woman months after she was “diagnosed.” In part, they split because her girlfriend has become a fulltime caregiver, down to helping the author brush her teeth, and in part because certain things became impossible. For anyone who knows anything about lesbian sex, hands are critical. Her choice to date men is thus a pragmatic one. “Why,” she writes jokingly, “would I want to have a big conversation about sex and disability when I have another option?” Then she explains that while not being able to type was brutal, “sex was the thing that made me feel most disabled.” One of the author’s great strengths is moving between lighthearted humour and hard hitting statements to explore her loss of choice and agency.
Well into drinks, inhibitions down, she explains to her date why she now writes about disability. She expects one of three typical responses: 1. I’m so sorry that happened to you. 2. Have you tried this cream? This therapy . . . ? 3. You are such a brave and noble inspiration.
His response — none of the above — takes her aback. “Wow, I really can’t imagine . . . If I were you, I literally would have killed myself.” Then he laughs, adding, “I’d crawl into a hole and die.” Navigating this particular conversation in all its permutations never gets easier for Drolet.
In addition to the vivid description of physical and psychological pain, loss, intimacy, and connection, Drolet’s memoir offers an excruciating indictment of a health care system that strings her along, drags her an hour and a half by bus deep into the suburbs of Montreal and lets her down repeatedly with misdiagnoses, best guesses, and false expectations. Our ride alongside her feels like so much more than simply witnessing. She sets us up with her hope before letting us crash into her disappointment, with humour as the only cushion.
One of Drolet’s strengths as a writer is handing us the unexpected and playing with expectations. While most people enter therapy to manage complicated issues and the resulting anxiety — the author states that one of her top goals is to test out jokes to include in her master’s thesis (which eventually becomes this memoir). As someone who also entered therapy in part for material, I appreciate her willingness to laugh at herself, and her honestly stated need to land the joke.
A series of gifts and insights, this memoir rises above the particularity of Drolet’s experience to human loss in general. She forces us to realize that unless the suffering is ours, we prefer not to see it in its gory, boring detail — where the devil always lies. In the chapter “On Progress,” she writes about the non-linearity of “getting better,” where a day, a week or a minute can be pain-free, then suddenly not: “[S]o few things in our lives we allow ourselves to do purely for fun and for our own entertainment. I don’t think I realized that until I couldn’t do them anymore: gaming, watching TV without thinking about my posture, sketching outside of work.” Describing the simple thrill of finally beating a Pokémon game, Drolet makes us understand how loss is in the weeds, like not flopping down on a couch or playing a game you love.
Look Ma, No Hands (could there be a better title?) is about much more than accepting a disability and moving on with life. It’s about tumbling permanently into another world that non-disabled people can only pretend to understand — if they even bother doing that. It’s a meditation on limitations to the imagination — our own and those of others — that anyone who truly wants insight into the pain and banality of profound loss should read.
— Aviva Rubin is a Toronto-based writer of memoir, essays, and the debut novel WHITE (2024).
Read this review and many others in Issue 308 (Summer 2026) Disability: The Revolution. Order the issue now:
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