All-Night Pharmacy

May 1, 2023
Poet Madievsky (Emergency Brake) makes her fiction debut with an electric tale of two sisters. “Spending time with my sister, Debbie, was like buying acid off a guy you met on the bus,” recounts the unnamed 18-year-old narrator, the result being either “euphoric” or “coming to in a gas station bathroom.” They’ve grown up in an unstable home, their father absent and their mother receiving a “kaleidoscope of diagnoses.” Along the way, the acquiescent narrator learns to defer to the older, imperious Debbie: “I didn’t like who I was when I was with her, but I didn’t like myself any other time either.” After hanging out with Debbie and doing drugs at a dive bar, the narrator develops an addiction to prescription pills. She also becomes codependent with Debbie, a dynamic that comes to a head with the narrator stabbing Debbie. The latter survives, then disappears. Afterward, the narrator finds admin work in an emergency room, where she meets and falls in love with Sasha, a queer Jewish refugee from Moldova who claims to be the narrator’s spiritual guardian (“She had all of Debbie’s larger-than-lifeness, but without the dangerous edge or the bitter comedown,” the narrator reflects of Sasha). Madievsky renders her protagonist’s search for selfhood vividly and viscerally, resulting in a coming-of-age story that radiates like a Lynchian fever dream. Agent: Mina Hamedi, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.