A Review of All-Night Pharmacy

Ruth Madievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy begins in the underbelly of Los Angeles. The unnamed nineteen-year-old narrator and her chaotic sister, Debbie, frequent Salvation, a former Christian bookstore that was converted into a bar in East Hollywood. Like an LA parking lot in the haunting glow of evening, the place turns majestic at night. Its regulars are the Los Angelenos you never hear about: theater actors turned porn performers, an energy healer who stores a jade egg in her vagina to transform sexual trauma into power, fake art buyers. It’s a world of witty banter and emotional repression.

All-Night Pharmacy’s heroine and Debbie fit right in. Our narrator crawls from precarious situation to precarious situation in the shadow of cruel and otherworldly Debbie. Through the ache of the sisters’ fraught relationship, Madievsky deftly details the gaps in logic one has to leap over in order to achieve a warped sense of intimacy in a dysfunctional family. Though Debbie drags her into downing mystery pills with strangers and driving to deserted overlooks with shady men, the narrator is still flooded with a desire to curl up next to her sister at the end of the night. Like many big sisters, Debbie is equal parts ethereal and terrifying. “Spending time with my sister… was like buying acid off a guy you met on the bus,” the narrator says. “You never knew if it would end with you, euphoric, tanning topless on a fishing boat headed for Ensenada, or coming to in a gas station bathroom, the insides of your eyes feeling as though they’d been scraped out with spoons. Often, it was both.”

All-Night Pharmacy’s world feels like a Phoebe Bridgers song—spooky and sexy, stringing pop culture together with the abject, and always swelling with feeling. The novel is populated with mythological women. Debbie disappears without a trace, pushing the narrator into a complex relationship with a pseudo spiritual guide and fellow member of the Jewish diaspora, Sasha. Then there’s the unnamed narrator’s mother, who has been in and out of institutions and now rarely leaves the house. Her various mental illnesses evade diagnosis. Her mother’s mother, the narrator’s grandmother, who immigrated in her twenties from Russia, compulsively tells the story of her father’s murder at the hands of the government for teaching the Torah in his basement. She doesn’t understand her “spoiled” American daughter’s paranoia.

Under the surface of these characters’ addictions and obsessions, All-Night Pharmacy...