The anonymous narrator is the protagonist of All-Night Pharmacy, Ruth Madievsky’s debut neo-noir novel.
The narrator takes the audience through approximately five crucial years of her life, starting from the night of her high school graduation. She has an emotionally enmeshed and co-dependent relationship with her sister, Debbie, a charismatic wild child. The two spend a few years drifting into various forms of drug addiction and toxic relationships while frequenting a seedy West Hollywood bar called Salvation, before Debbie disappears after an altercation with the narrator. After getting a job as a secretary at an emergency room partly as a way to get access to pharmaceuticals to resell, the narrator debates whether she should find Debbie — or is better off without her in her life.
The narrator’s bisexuality is never up for debate. In the first chapter, we see her get involved with Ronnie, a barfly with a heart of gold, but also see her attractions to women backstage at Debbie’s strip club where she dances. She also flirts with other men and women throughout the novel. Her major entanglement after Ronnie is Sasha, a beautiful Moldovan immigrant and psychic who claims she is the narrator’s “amulet,” brought into her life to help her (very loosely) find her sister. The narrator’s first queer relationship and sexual encounters are with Sasha, who helps her get clean and sort out her life before the narrator finally decides to try to find her missing sister.
Though the narrator’s queerness is never questionable, the narrator’s morality and strength of character are. The character does come from an incredibly tragic family background and traumatic upbringing, so she gets afforded a lot of grace when she turns to substances in order to calm her emotional state. However, despite these graces, she still behaves rather horribly throughout the novel to nearly everyone around her, perhaps past the point of forgiveness we give even to antiheroes. As such, much of her behavior — greed, manipulation, cheating, etc. — falls into typical villainous bi territory.