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The epigraph of Ruth Madievsky’s debut novel All-Night Pharmacy reads: “With you it’s good, but without you it’s even better.” This Russian proverb aptly describes the tension of the unnamed narrator’s bond with her older sister, Debbie. As far back as the narrator can remember, Debbie has led and she has followed.
But even as she looks up to Debbie, the narrator doesn’t want to become her. She feels beholden to her sister, who introduced her to alcohol, drugs, and the bar Salvation, but that sense of obligation is laced with judgment. Whereas Debbie is always chasing the next adrenaline high, often with chemical assistance, the narrator wants to “live for more than fleeting hits of chaos.” Whereas Debbie insists on characterizing her relationship with the sisters’ pediatrician as an affair, even though she was a minor, the narrator refuses “to recognize their gross friends-with-benefits arrangement as consensual.”
When the sisters have a fight worse than any they’ve had before, Debbie disappears. The narrator scours Los Angeles for things to fill the void left in her sister’s wake: pills, men, and eventually, Sasha, a queer Moldovan who came to the U.S. as a refugee and identifies as a psychic.
All-Night Pharmacy is both hilarious and painful, a keen exploration of a woman’s coming of age as she tries to locate a selfhood outside the bonds of sisterhood, obligation, and expectation. Below, Madievsky, who immigrated from Moldova in 1993 as a political refugee, speaks to Them about her process, psychics, and sisterhood.
How did this novel come to be? What was its germ?
My favorite genre of fiction to read is voice-driven. I’m very into hyperspecificity and writing that feels like it’s of the world. You know, it’s got Tic Tacs and watermelons and lube and colonoscopies — things that feel like they were written by a human being about real humans that I know. That’s the only way I know how to write, too; I don’t outline.
Any time I sit down to write, I wait for a voice to follow. When I sat down to write this book, I didn’t know that I was writing a novel. I thought I was just writing short stories that all turned out to be in the same universe. I basically wrote that first line, “Spending time with my sister Debbie is like buying acid off a guy you met on the bus.” And I thought, Who the fuck is this person?
I basically just wrote one line after another with that same kind of confident, bitchy, darkly comic, judgmental lens, following the beauty of language [and allowing it] to basically dictate the plot. It’s very much the kind of novel that a poet would write, where you write in pursuit of beauty, and let that tell you what the story is.
Your unnamed narrator enjoys reading “dark, woman-authored novels” “about unlikable women behaving badly” and it often feels like she sees herself mirrored in those women. But she’s so likable! I was wondering if that contrast was a conscious decision, and whether you want readers to like her?
I had no idea what people would make of her when I wrote her. It’s almost like trying to discern how the pacing of your book is going to be for a reader. Like, I was enjoying reading my book cover to cover when I was doing revisions, but it felt completely impossible to know if a reader was going to be bored, if they were going to binge-read it, if it was going to be the kind of thing they read one chapter at a time. To me, predicting the reader experience was just totally not possible.
I think [the narrator is] funny. I think she’s a good hang. But she’s also extremely unreliable and very judgmental, which I think makes her fun to sit with at a bar and people-watch. But is she someone you’re going to call when you’re bleeding out and need someone to take you to the ER? No.
I understood a lot of her bad behavior because of how in thrall she is to her older sister, Debbie.
I think she doesn’t like herself and doesn’t think she’s necessarily a great person, but she does see herself as the victim of Debbie. I had to complicate their relationship a bit by showing that it’s not purely a victim-victimizer dynamic. Because it’s not that interesting when you have someone who’s so virtuous up against someone who’s a total monster.
Early readers raised questions like “Why does [the narrator] still keep Debbie around? Debbie sucks!” At first, defensively, I was like, “Well, clearly you’re not Jewish. Clearly, you don’t have relatives who died in the Holocaust and Soviet terror if you can just get rid of people willy-nilly because you don’t like them.” Like, how many Jews do you know who don’t like their relatives, but keep them around anyway? And not just that, but see them three times a week!
It’s [also] a very immigrant thing. I think when you’ve been through these historical traumas together, just casting people aside is harder, especially when you understand where they’re coming from to some degree. [The narrator] and Debbie grew up in the same kind of pressure cooker fucked-up household where she understands why Debbie is the way she is, even if it oppresses her in some way.
The narrator becomes addicted to benzos and opiates, and even though she judges herself for it, the project of the book doesn’t seem to have any judgment of her at all. What was important to you about portraying — without stigmatizing — the realities of addiction?
As both a people pleaser and someone who’s very committed to trying not to cause any unnecessary harm, it felt so important not to portray her substance dependence as a moral failing. So I tried to show some of the reasons why she falls into it, how her sister is kind of her Virgil into the world of mystery pills, and how in some ways her whiteness is something she weaponizes to get what she wants. She can turn on how trustworthy she is with doctors who think that “oh, she’s not someone who’s going to lie about having chronic back pain,” or “she seems really anxious, I’ll just write her 200 million Ativan prescriptions.” She abuses her privilege, but it also hurts her in the end because people enable her because of it.
I felt like it was really important not to portray addiction as any kind of failing; it’s just texture. It’s just another thing about her and some of the [other] characters, a thing they’re working against, some more successfully than others.
Sasha literally walks into our narrator’s life and decides to be part of it, and the narrator questions it for a while but chooses to trust Sasha. While Sasha is a psychic, I was struck by how much of her psychic abilities are forms of storytelling. How did the whole notion of psychic abilities end up in the book?
Part of it is that you can’t live in L.A. without having some relationship to the occult, whether you believe in it or not. We’re surrounded by psychics, crystal healers, so many forms of mysticism. And I was interested in the idea of “psychic” as an identity and not something that would be monetized. It felt important that Sasha wasn’t financially grifting people. She’s very selective about how she shares her psychic abilities, and it’s only with the intention of helping people and not for any financial gain in return.
That’s been true to what I’ve seen with a lot of people in L.A. who see alternative practices as healing for themselves or for others. So I think it’s hard to grow up here without thinking about that as a kind of social praxis or mutual aid almost. I wasn’t really interested in litigating in the book whether psychics are real because to Sasha her abilities are real.
The narrator goes through a lot, and she’s young — a teenager when the book starts, in her early twenties when it ends — and yet for all the tragedy and pain and trauma she undergoes, the book is so funny. How did you do that?
I feel like that's a very post-Soviet Jewish orientation toward life, always being able to see the humor in darkness, because that’s how a lot of us survived. That’s how I grew up. Everyone in my family is pretty funny. All the curse words and disgusting vulgar jokes I know in Russian, I got from my parents.
In terms of the books I like to read, it’s very hard for me to fall head over heels for a book if it’s not also kind of funny. Like, “beautifully rendered,” “gutting,” “raw,” all of the buzzwords people love to use, especially for debut books — I’m in! But in order for it to really hit on that molecular level for me, it also has to make me laugh. I can’t imagine writing darkness without also having a humorous angle to it.
This conversation has been condensed and edited.
All-Night Pharmacy is available now via Catapult.
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