“You have to have a backup!” they told her.
“At some point, I wanted to be a writer more than I wanted to be a pharmacist,” Madievsky confesses, but her parents insisted she get her pharmacy degree in case they had to move again and start over somewhere else. Madievsky recalls growing up in a neighborhood where shop signs were in Russian and English and old men played chess in the park. She lived in an apartment near Fairfax and Santa Monica (“in the Russian diaspora district”) with her parents, her grandparents and her great-grandmother, whose husband was murdered by the KGB. from Moldova as Jewish political refugees when Madievsky was 2 years old. “I knew I was going to be a pharmacist - just like my mom - from the time I was 8 or 9,” Madievsky explains. After she received her undergraduate degree, she enrolled in USC’s four-year PharmD program, which was followed by a yearlong residency. community reemerges: the poetsįrom Boyle Heights to Filipinotown to the Autry Museum, venues are hosting poetry readings again, restoring a vital link between artists and their communities.ĭespite her achievements in poetry and prose, Madievsky has little formal training as a writer. “I really didn’t want to write about anything that either I hadn’t personally experienced or people that I was in community with hadn’t experienced,” Madievsky says, “because I feel like it’s so easy to do harm if you’re conjecturing about what a experience is like.”īooks After COVID lockdowns, an essential L.A. 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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