Ruth Madievsky’s first novel, All-Night Pharmacy, is a story about two sisters whose lives are deeply intertwined. We meet them as they age into adulthood. Debbie, the eldest, has been kicked out of her mother’s house for stripping and shares pills and heroin with her older boyfriend; she flirts with danger as though it’s a game. The narrator, meanwhile—who remains nameless throughout the novel—is a recent high school graduate and lacks direction. To celebrate her graduation, she is taken by Debbie to Salvation, a Los Angeles dive bar, and so begins a sequence of dangerous nights driven by competition, dependence, and drugs.
No relationship, of course, is subject to more volatility—fights, jealousy, drama—than one between siblings, but there is also a shared pain between these sisters that brings them together as if by gravitational force. Both are survivors of sexual abuse and parental trauma; both wrestle with their Russian Jewish immigrant heritage. This closeness, however, often makes each more sensitive to betrayal by the other.
On her birthday, the narrator suffers a miscarriage after a night of partying, and Debbie abandons her in the emergency room. “This was classic Debbie: following her high wherever it took her, dooming everyone else to soak in her mess,” Madievsky writes. Shortly thereafter, Debbie disappears for two months. Without her, the days blur. The narrator learns that Debbie has gone into rehab but is leaving early; before the bus ride home is over, the two are taking pills together again.
The first half of the novel offers cascading consecutive events, often teetering on the edge of danger. But that first night out of rehab is a turning point; the narrator stabs her sister in the arm in a drug-fueled fury. Debbie disappears again.
Madievsky’s portrayals of drug use, addiction, and loneliness are often terrifying. At one point, she tracks the narrator’s paranoia in the shower as she wonders where the dirty water goes and what might crawl up the pipes. “I felt the vibration of my drain stretching to the size of a manhole,” she imagines. “Debbie clawing her way out, coming for me. I grabbed my phone and searched how to cure addiction to another person. It drew up 437,000,000 results.”
All-Night Pharmacy is Madievsky’s second book, after the 2016 poetry collection Emergency Brake. Many of the themes she explored there—sensuality, intoxication, surviving sexual abuse—return here. Her writing is informed by both her work as a primary care and HIV clinical pharmacist and her experience as an immigrant from a former Soviet republic. Nearly all the principal characters in her novel, notably, are women. Men drift around the edges like phantoms. They do not consume the narrator.
The women, however, radiate life, detailed and particular. The sisters’ mother, for instance, “didn’t like entering stores with surveillance cameras, made our father taste the food first at new restaurants, and hid money inside a ceramic pot beneath a fake cactus.” The narrator is absorbed by her relationships with Debbie and later with a girlfriend, Sasha. These connections are so consuming that all other characters become minor.
Sasha is a respite, an “amulet,” as she calls herself. She’s a Jewish Moldovan refugee who claims to be psychic and treats the narrator with tender care. “I’m here now,” she says. “It’s going to be okay.” The relationship blossoms into romance as the narrator grapples with new sobriety. Sasha is withholding about her own life, but she invades that of the other woman quickly, learning about her missing sister and offering cryptic messages about the narrator’s past and future. She paints abstract art and cares for a pet iguana.
The narrator sees Sasha through the rosiest of lenses, which strips their scenes together of the gritty realism that makes the first half of All-Night Pharmacy so vivid. Sasha’s apartment illustrates perfectly a cottagecore aesthetic. But perhaps this is meant to contrast with the dinginess of the narrator’s past, the seedy bar bathrooms and overflowing laundry baskets.
Eventually, the relationship collapses. The filter is pulled away, and the illusion shatters. Love is just another form of dependence, it seems. And the narrator can be distracted from her sister for only so long.
At the heart of Madievsky’s novel is a sense of loss, a mourning that transcends generations yet remains just out of reach. In the ER, the narrator overhears a woman complain about Shoah grief. “I could feel her gloating,” she tells us, “beaming I told you so from across the world. But told me what? That my suffering was historic, that my sister’s disappearance was the latest iteration of a trauma imprinted in my bones.” The hold of this generational trauma keeps bringing the narrator back to Debbie, as she searches for someone who might understand.
“Our bond couldn’t be severed with a knife. It was cellular, metaphysic,” Madievsky writes. “I needed to know if my sister existed in the world.”•
Jessica Blough is a freelance writer. A former associate editor at Alta Journal, Blough is a graduate of Tufts University where she was editor in chief of the Tufts Daily.
