In part, that’s due to the fiction’s high level of verisimilitude - from L.A.’s dives and ratty apartments to the predictable patterns of addiction. (Madievsky has also published a poetry collection called “Emergency Brake.”) Or, more specifically, she worries that regulators at the California State Board of Pharmacy might conflate her characters’ predilections with her own lifestyle choices. She does worry colleagues might take her writing the wrong way. “It’s very rewarding,” Madievsky says, “because I’m helping to make people’s lives better and it’s really nice for my writing, too, because if I have a writing day, at least I know that I did something good in the world.” Her specialties are HIV and primary care. She works in a clinic with patients she sees on a regular basis. She would like you to know she has no experience dealing Class A drugs, and she has a few other misconceptions to clear up about her profession: She does not count pills, nor does she work in a CVS. In her intimate tale of two sisters, the unnamed protagonist is alternately compelled and repulsed by the toxic narcissism of her older sister, Debbie, a wild child who works in a strip club and is “so alive it was scary.”Īlthough “Pharmacy” crackles with the energy of Hubert Selby Jr.’s “ Requiem for a Dream” or Patrick deWitt’s “ Ablutions,” Madievsky’s knowledge of drug lore is strictly professional. Madievsky does draw on her knowledge of pharmaceuticals to paint a realistic portrait of what it’s like to have one’s life go off the rails due to destructive drug use. “Whenever I’m asked if the drug use is fictional,” Madievsky tells me, “I always say, ‘It’s fictional! So fictional!’” You’d never guess that the characters in her debut novel, “ All-Night Pharmacy,” blaze a trail across L.A.’s bar scene under a haze of benzos, opioids and psychedelics, risking death or degradation at every turn. Sitting at her dining room table in her tidy Santa Monica apartment, the author exudes serenity as she discusses juggling her job as a clinical pharmacist with her writing career while her 3-month-old infant naps in the next room. Ruth Madievsky doesn’t seem to have a high tolerance for risk. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

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