Look Ma, No Hands
Read by
Gabrielle Drolet
Release:
05/20/2025
Runtime:
6h 11m
Quantity:
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
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.”
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.”
Release:
2025-05-20
Runtime:
6h 11m
Format:
audio
Weight:
0.0 lb
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780771019180
Praise