All-Night Pharmacy
Ruth Madievsky
1 ratings • 1 reviews
All-Night Pharmacy
Ruth Madievsky
1 ratings • 1 reviews
*An instant national bestseller* Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction Finalist for the California Book Awards Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Novel Rachel Kushner meets David Lynch in this fever dream of an LA novel about a young woman who commits a drunken act of violence just before her sister vanishes without a trace. On the night of her high school graduation, a young woman follows her older sister Debbie to Salvation, a Los Angeles bar patronized by energy healers, aspiring actors, and all-around misfits. After the two share a bag of unidentified pills, the evening turns into a haze of sensual and risky interactions—nothing unusual for two sisters bound in an incredibly toxic relationship. Our unnamed narrator has always been under the spell of the alluring and rebellious Debbie and, despite her own hesitations, she has always said yes to nights like these. That is, until Debbie disappears. Falling deeper into the life she cultivated with her sister, our narrator gets a job as an emergency room secretary where she steals pills to sell on the side. Cue Sasha, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who arrives at the hospital claiming to be a psychic tasked with acting as the narrator’s spiritual guide. The nature of this relationship evolves and blurs, a kaleidoscope of friendship, sex, mysticism, and ambiguous power dynamics. With prose pulsing like a neon sign, Ruth Madievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy is an intoxicating portrait of a young woman consumed with unease over how a person should be. As she attempts sobriety and sexual embodiment, she must decide whether to search for her estranged sister, or allow her to remain a relic of the past.
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3.5
I definitely enjoyed some moments in this book, but overall it wasn't super remarkable to me. I liked the themes of intergenerational trauma, sisterhood, queer love, mental illness, and family that were explored though.
* Being a person didn’t come naturally to me the way it seemed to for others.
* We both thought that what happened was fine, but it wasn’t fine, and only the other immediately recognized that. We never seemed to understand each other, or ourselves, at the same time. Our sister’s clarity was the other’s delusion. That was the tragedy of our sisterhood. As soon as we came close to a mutual understanding, one of us changed, or both.
* I was a little jealous. I wanted parents who took offense at my life choices. Criticism is still a cousin of attention.
* women… with a kind of graveness, a shared understanding that every throb of pleasure was a needle in the eye of someone who didn’t want you to have it.
* He bit into an apricot and smiled, closing his eyes. Witnessing the little ways the elderly cared for themselves devastated me. My paternal grandfather rubbing gardenia-scented lotion into his gnarled feet. My grandmother slicing lemon into her tea, no matter what kind of tea it was.
* I wondered… what utility she saw in organizing her life around resolving ancestral traumas that were, fundamentally, unresolvable. I would not live in service of my dead’s vision for me, a descendent they never knew, who’d never asked them to sacrifice what they lost. I wanted to believe I could honor them by living the life I chose for myself, by making choices that, for them, were never even on the table. That there was a world where my dead saw me—a recovering addict with a psychic girlfriend and a missing sister, estranged from Judaism and unable to speak any of their languages—and felt proud.
* Banish one god, and you’ll end up worshipping another.
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