My guest on this episode is Gabrielle Drolet. Gabrielle is a journalist, essayist, and cartoonist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Globe and Mail, New York Times, The Walrus, VICE, Teen Vogue, and more. Her essays on disability have been nominated for a Digital Publishing Award and won gold at the Canadian Online Publishing Awards. Her first book, Look Ma, No Hands: A Chronic Pain Memoir, was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2025, and was a finalist for a 2026 Lambda Literary Award. Journalist Sarah Hagi called the book “a remarkable debut from an incredible voice.”
Gabrielle and I talk about some of the more ethically dubious gigs she has taken on as a freelance writer, about writing using voice-to-text software, and how that has changed her style, and about her worries that next book, which is not a memoir, might have less of a hook in comparison with her first.
This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.
Music: \"simple-hearted thing\" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.
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