Adjusting to a New Normal

Look Ma, No Hands: A Chronic Pain Memoir
Gabrielle Drolet
McClelland & Stewart
May 20, 2025
$24.95

One month after her first featured cartoon in The New Yorker, Gabrielle Drolet begins to feel pain in her hands when typing or drawing. She ignores it for over a year, thinking it’s nothing. The pain doesn’t pass; instead, it worsens. She decides to go to a doctor, where they misdiagnose and dismiss Drolet’s pain for years until she gets her final diagnosis: Thoracic Outlet Syndrome. She eventually comes to terms with her chronic pain, but there are many struggles and challenges on the way to that acceptance.

In her debut memoir, Look Ma, No Hands, award-winning essayist, journalist, and cartoonist Gabrielle Drolet invites readers into a world full of grit, heartache, humour, and most notably, honesty.

Drolet details her journey with medical professionals and confronts the faults of our medical system head-on, highlighting the obstacles people with disabilities must overcome to receive a proper diagnosis. It’s a bleak reminder that the journey to getting help isn’t an easy one, but rather exhausting, dismissive, and frustrating.

While Canada has taken steps in the right direction toward accessibility – such as the Canada Disability Benefit – the day-to-day barriers remain prominent, and this book emphasizes society’s negligence when it comes to creating spaces that are supposed to be for everyone. Whether it’s taking a break when mini golfing with her friends because holding the club is too painful, or the shape of a bar stool causing pain to spread to her hands and neck, her anecdotes show readers how simple tasks can be difficult for someone with a chronic condition.

Drolet also showcases her dating life as a person living with chronic pain. Her stories give readers a peek into what dating is like: an uphill battle. Drolet’s honesty will resonate with young-adult readers navigating single life. Readers will feel comforted that their dating nightmares are not just their experiences, but a reflection of how apps have changed dating from a search for love to a fixation on hooking up. For example, Drolet endures a dating app with a waitlist, and suffers through the “first date ritual” of asking the same surface-level questions. Her experiences, positive and negative, are relatable to people trying to find love in our online world.

Drolet’s voice shines, figuratively and literally. After she becomes unable to type for long periods of time, she starts using voice-to-text software for longer projects, including this book. Adjusting to a new normal is challenging – Drolet losing her ability to type meant she had to start manually inserting commas and periods, which took time, and forced her to learn a new way to work. Her experience may be familiar to others with disabilities, where adaptation can be harder than receiving a diagnosis.

Every story Drolet tells feels like being with a close friend, listening as she spills her life story. Her anecdotes are both witty and clever, with excellent pacing in each. However, her writing can sometimes get bogged down by her humour. Her jokes and funny details don’t always feel necessary, and can undermine the impact of her stories when they need it most.

Look Ma, No Hands provides a deeper understanding of accessibility, healthcare, and relationships in a digestible way, inviting readers into Drolet’s world, no matter how raw or vulnerable it may be. The difficulties of living with chronic pain don’t end because of jar-openers or adaptive writing tools – they continue whether you see them or not.