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.”