Gabrielle Drolet on chronic pain, humour, and the memoir she never meant to write

When Gabrielle Drolet started her MFA in creative writing, she had one plan: write a novel.

“I had this really specific idea of what that book was going to be,” she says. “And it just wasn’t coming out that way.”

Halfway through the program, a sudden onset of chronic pain made it nearly impossible for her to use her hands. “It went from being kind of bad and painful to—I couldn’t type anymore.”

What followed was a total creative upheaval: “Because I was in school, I had to suddenly adapt and learn to use voice-to-text, but I didn’t learn to use it well. The way we speak is just different, fundamentally, from the way we write.”

She tried to keep going with the novel, got 20,000 words in, and hated it.

“I took a year off. And when I came back, my advisor—who I adore—was like, hey, man, you don’t like this book. You’re not happy. So I started writing about what I was going through.”

That book—Look Ma, No Hands—came out this month on May 20, 2025. It’s funny, painful, and profoundly self-aware, built around a voice Gabrielle had to relearn from scratch. For some time, that voice she developed was seen as a crutch she was using until she could type again—only the plan never went away.

"I realized I would have to lean into it. And once I accepted that, my writing got a lot better again.”

"It just forced me to accept a different pace"

Drolet's memoir's title, Look Ma, No Hands, is both a punchline and a warning. Popularized by mid-century comic strips and nervous mothers watching their kids attempt ill-fated stunts, the phrase first started as a boast: proof that someone could perform a tricky feat without support. It eventually became shorthand for tempting fate with misplaced confidence—but Drolet repurposes the phrase with both irony and affection. In her case, it’s a record of what happens after you lose control, not a declaration of having it.

And this feed into the tone of the book. It doesn’t try to resolve the discomfort of chronic pain. Instead it just sits with it, jokes with it, yells semicolons into Tinder, and keeps going.

“I didn’t want it to be a book that you read and were just sad,” she says. “There’s so much humour in it, even if it didn’t feel funny at the time.”

Still, the process of writing wasn’t the hardest part. It was everything that came after. “I had to write the whole book over six months,” she says. “And I wasn’t thinking too hard about how personal it all was. But later, during edits, I thought 'this is a really personal thing about the worst thing that ever happened to me.'”

That clarity, laced with both affection and exhaustion, is what powers the book. It’s not a story of triumph, exactly. It’s about the messier, slower process of redefinition. And about how most people don’t know what to say when your hands stop working.

“There’s no one right way to respond to disability,” she says. “But I’ve learned there are a lot of wrong ones.” The most surreal example made it into the first few pages of the memoir: a date with a fellow journalist who, upon hearing she could no longer type, told her, “Man, if I was you, I would have killed myself.”

Gabrielle laughs when she brings this up, not because it wasn’t brutal, but because absurdity is part of the point: “That was one where in reading the audiobook, I was pissing myself every time that line came up. I was like, 'OK, we need to take a break.'”

What makes the story stranger is how invisible her condition is. “People either underestimating or overestimating my abilities was a big thing,” she says. “People kept being like, what if you got a barista job? Or a desk job? And I’m like, what do you think those jobs require?”

Pain becoming part of one's identity

Chronic pain didn’t just limit her physically—it scrambled her sense of self. “If I can’t write or cook or play video games or draw—like, who am I? What’s going on?” She pauses. “Pain shifted what I could and couldn’t do. But it didn’t actually shift my interests that much. It just forced me to accept a different pace.”

That recalibration was slow, and it happened across all areas of her creative life—including how she thought about her career. Before the pain started, things were just beginning to click: a New York Times byline, her first cartoon in The New Yorker. “In the moment, it felt really frustrating,” she says. “Because I was like—what would my career be if that hadn’t happened?”

Even now, Gabrielle grapples with how people perceive her. “I still think of myself as a writer before I think of myself as a cartoonist,” she says. “But it’s so much easier to share a cartoon than it is an article. I’m producing more writing. But I understand why people think I’m a cartoonist. Because I am.”

Her “rat-sona” comics—where people in her life appear as animals—started as a joke. “There was this viral video of rats popping out of a sewer grate, like a whack-a-mole situation,” she says. “I painted it on a whim and sold, like, 150 prints. I was in rat mode. And then I drew myself as a rat. And then my mom was like, why am I a rat? I want to be a goose.” The rest evolved from there.

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making 100 sewer rat paintings is hard work but someones gotta do it

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Despite her initial resistance to combining writing and drawing, Gabrielle eventually relented. “I used to think it would cheapen my writing if my cartoons were attached to it. Which is silly. They’re both mine.”

What she’s most grateful for now—besides better tools and better health—is the people around her. “I host parties and there’s never even a question of whether my friends will do the dishes. I don’t think I’ve opened my own can of beer in years. It’s just understood.”

That spirit of mutual care, not independence, is what makes the future feel possible. “I used to push through the pain because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. Now, I’m really good about doing what I can and also knowing my limits.”

“My life rocks.”

Asked if she sees herself returning to fiction, she doesn’t hesitate. “It might not be the same novel I set out to write, but I still think there’s something there,” she says. “I don’t know if it’ll be immediately. But the next long-form thing I work on will probably be fiction. Unless something else memoir-worthy happens—God forbid.”

As for advice for anyone creating in a body that won’t always cooperate: “Figure out what works for you. I kept pushing myself to do things the ‘correct’ way, and it just made me miserable. There are tools out there. There are new ways to work. You don’t have to abandon what you love—you just have to adapt.”

And has her understanding of what it means to live a full—even funny—life in a disabled body changed since writing the book?

“My life rocks.”

Then, following a beat: “No, but truly. I think that’s what changed. I don’t hope for the day I’ll be completely pain-free anymore. I just live. I go out with friends. I work. I leave a concert if it’s too long. I rest when I need to. And when stuff does happen—yeah, I see the humour in it a lot faster than I used to.”

And that’s what she hopes readers walk away with.

“For people who don’t have experience with chronic pain, I hope it widens their perspective. And for people who do, I hope the book feels like a friend.”