For Ruth Madievsky, Voice Is Everything

Ruth Madievsky‘s All-Night Pharmacy is as bright as a neon bougainvillea bush, a fever dream of a novel about a 20-something second-generation Soviet-Jewish American woman who commits an act of violence on a Los Angeles hillside before her sister vanishes. It’s about Los Angeles nightlife, friendship, bisexuality, pill-popping, the complexities of sisterhood, nostalgia for a lost motherland, and a young woman’s search for how a person should be.

I spoke to Madievsky about her debut novel, immigrant shame, and how it takes empathy to be a great writer and healthcare professional (Madievsky is both).

Diana Ruzova: You’re a poet, an essayist, and now a novelist. Did you always aspire to write across genres? What surprised you most about writing a novel versus writing poems or essays?

Ruth Madievsky: I wouldn’t say I aspired to write across genres, but I have this inability to read genres that I really love without feeling a compulsion to write in them. I never thought I’d be able to write a novel because it just seemed impossible to build the scaffolding for a whole book length work. I always assumed that to write a novel, I’d have to know what it was going to be about first, and then I would have to outline it. But it ended up not being like that at all. The book started out as a collection of linked stories. And eventually, it became clear that the stories really weren’t more than the sum of their parts, so I tried to kind of reverse engineering the stories into a novel. That was when it became clear, like, “Oh, this is working so much better!” The thing that made it different from poetry is that with poems, I kind of bled over every word. For the novel, I had to let go and be okay with sentences like, “She sat on the couch.’

DR: Your sentences! How do you go about constructing them?

RM: I’m always really influenced by who I’m reading. The main thing I like to consume is voice-driven fiction. I always gravitate toward a voice more than anything else, especially a darkly comic voice. I love hyper-specific imagery that feels like only a human who’s walked on this earth could have had this thought. And so that’s something that I tried to bring to both my poetry and to my fiction. It makes it really fun to write sentences, because you get to pick things that seem both of this world, but also kind of surprising.

DR: Can you speak a little about your untraditional writing journey?

RM: I’ve always been a big reader, and I’ve always written for fun. In college, I was really lucky to fall in with a group of friends who were writing seriously, who were sending out work for publication, who were performing at open mic nights with real rigor. And it made me realize that this was something I could do, that it wasn’t just these extremes of either you publish bestselling novels and make millions of dollars, or you are a total failure. I did the Tin House Workshop after I graduated college. I became dedicated to understanding the craft. And throughout all this, I was a biology major, and then I went to pharmacy school. I followed the traditional path of a good immigrant daughter.

DR: You have a day job as a clinical HIV pharmacist. How has that informed your work?

RM: I think that empathy is key. Throughout pharmacy school you’re really trying to understand the people that you’re seeing as patients and figure out what’s important to them. How can you improve their quality of life? Part of my job is I see patients by appointment, and I help them manage things like their diabetes and their high blood pressure. I can adjust their medications and order labs. A big part of that is understanding what motivates them. What would a good life look like to them? And I think that those questions are also kind of central to building characters in fiction.

DR: Is it challenging to balance the scientific and creative parts of your brain?

RM: It’s very natural. I think we all contain lots of divergent interests. For me, it’s never really a struggle to switch gears from one to the other. I would say the harder part is managing two different careers that both ask for a lot of time. In the case of the writing, it always has to ask for permission because the pharmacy day job has strict hours.

DR: I read your Good Housekeeping essay about returning to Moldova in 2019 for the first time since your immigration to buy your wedding dress; I also went back to my birthplace in Minsk, Belarus that same year! Moldova made it into All-Night Pharmacy. Was this pilgrimage always going to be in the novel? Did it change your perspective of home?

RM: It was not part of the original conception of the book. It was always going to be really LA-focused. I’ve had a lot of stability in my life. It was very surreal to go to Moldova and see this completely rundown Jewish cemetery that looked nothing like the cemetery in LA where my Jewish relatives are buried. We saw the apartment complex where my family lived before we immigrated. Some people who lived there let us into their unit that was newly renovated. It was lovely, small, but it was not what it looked like when my family lived there. This showed me that not everyone there was living in squalor. There’s a lot of grace. But there are contradictions. It was hard to see and to think about what life would have looked like if we’d stayed. And so, I left not really knowing how to write about that experience. I didn’t think I could write about it in nonfiction, because the material felt too hot, so it ended up in the novel.

DR: There’s this great passage in All-Night Pharmacy: “You are so lucky, you will grow up in America, the land of the free, no more crying in front of your dead, they deserve to see you happy, they deserve to know you will honor their sacrifices.” Do you think it’s possible to tell an immigrant story without including shame?

RM: I don’t know if I’ve read one. I can’t imagine moving to a completely new country in my early twenties with a baby where I barely knew anyone like my parents did. And trying to transfer my degree and master a new language and navigate getting a job. I think for me, a lot of that shame comes from knowing that there is this weight of debt that I can’t repay.

DR: What is the last thing you read that floored you?

RM: I really liked Nazli Koca‘s novel The Applicant. It’s about a young woman from Turkey who is living in Berlin after failing her master’s thesis. She’s working as a cleaner at a hostel, but she wants to be a writer. And she’s writing this diary that kind of feels like it might be the novel that we’re reading. She has this really interesting relationship with her mother and sister where she feels like she has to pick up the phone every time they call. There’s a line about how she felt like she needed to live in the prison of their relationship. And it’s very tied to this idea of shame and what you owe your family, where it feels like your desires are completely tangential.