On ‘All-Night Pharmacy’

Early in the pandemic, it seemed apparent the world—and certainly my world—teetered on apocalypse. Against a backdrop of empty shelves and crowded hospitals, my relationship ended and I lost my job to layoffs. For an addict like me, it was a recipe for disaster. I self-medicated my commingling paranoia and grief into submission, turning to binge-drinking and self-harm. But those empty days also gave me an awful lot of time to reflect. When I finally sobered up and entered recovery, I tore through contemporary addiction narratives, desperate for company. I needed reassurance that I wasn’t alone, that others—living or fictional—felt the same awful urge to self-annihilate. I found it in the shoot-from-the-hip works of Scott McClanahan, Nico Walker, and—most of all—Ruth Madievsky.