Stephanie Wambugu​
Author of LONELY CROWDS
​Ruth is timid, reserved, and the only Black student at her Catholic school—until Maria arrives. The mysterious, motherless little girl is spirited, confident, and unrepentant—everything that Ruth is not, and their lives soon become intertwined in a way that will forever alter them.
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In her debut novel, Stephanie Wambugu navigates a volatile interdependent friendship that ages more like venom than a fine wine, making for an absorbing tale of identity—how we form our own and how we define ourselves through others. From Ruth and Maria’s initial encounter as children, through their turbulent teenage years and into early adulthood as they pursue lives of creativity and love in New York City, Lonely Crowds dissects the treacherous bonds of attachment and desire in a voice so assured, it feels like Wambugu has always been here, writing about it.​​
Photo courtesy of Stephanie Wambugu
Girls on the Page​
From the very first page, a distinct atmosphere is established. I was struck by Ruth’s tone as a narrator—Lonely Crowds me of a certain age of literature, evocative of novels like The Bell Jar. I know you’ve also mentioned Jean Rhys as an influence, and I feel her running through the sentences as well. Can you talk about your earliest influences as a writer, what books you grew up loving, which stories, poems or pieces informed your style?
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Stephanie Wambugu
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Thank you. I find Jean Rhys hugely influential because of her ability to create dramatic tension and real pathos with relatively simple materials. Her choice of language is spare, but charged. There is no excess in her style and she writes suspenseful and devastating stories in a clipped and understated style: repeating herself, putting things plainly and having her characters say and do what is necessary. It’s extremely charming. Her work is timeless and that is a quality I admire.
My favorite Jean Rhys line is “This is another lavatory…another of the well-known mirrors. “Well, well”, it says, “last time you looked in here you were a bit different.” It’s such a simple, childlike depiction of what it is to return to familiar surroundings and find yourself changed. I think writing something that simple and true is aspirational for me. Jean Rhys is also a very funny writer. My other influences work in a similarly subtle style using humor in sly ways. These influences include John Ashberry, Franz Kafka, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison (particularly her novels Sula and Song of Solomon), Frank O’Hara and the filmmakers Ousmane Sembene and Mike Leigh. When I was younger my favorite poem was “The Bean Eaters” by Gwendolyn Brooks. I still think it is an excellent poem that condenses an entire life and marriage and modest way of living into a few short lines.
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Where did Lonely Crowds begin and how did Ruth first introduce herself to you—what drew you to her as a narrator?
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Ruth came to me, fairly fully formed, as a character just before I started graduate school. I had just left a job I had working for a (relatively new at the time) art collection in New York and had many thoughts about the fraught nature of being an artist and being slotted willingly or unwillingly into identity categories of gender, race, class and sexuality. Ruth seemed like an interesting avatar for posing these questions which in some ways feel unanswerable and have only been further complicated for me by the publication of this novel and my growing resistance to talking about art on these terms. I began with the passages in the early part of the novel where Ruth describes the Catholic girls school she attended as a child and it all flowed very quickly from there.
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I’m always so interested to hear about the early stages of a novel. Are you a planner and outliner, did you know where the plot was heading for the most part when you started writing, or do you follow where the characters lead and figure things out along the way?
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I did outline and threw away as many outlines as I wrote just as I tossed a couple hundred pages that sit on my computer in a document titled Scrap Parts from Novel. In terms of the effectiveness of outlining, I found that once I knew how the novel would end (which I knew fairly early on), I didn’t need to adhere to the outline anymore because the events I needed to describe would follow a seemingly inevitable progression and at times I felt I was just transcribing events as they unfolded. I know that writing fiction isn’t actually a simple act of transcription or anything like automatic writing – every last word is chosen – but the structure unfolded in a fairly seamless way that I was satisfied by as I reread the novel while editing and as I remember it now.
​What were your writing days (and set-up) like while working on Lonely Crowds? How long was the writing process and how did it feel to be in it?​
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I shut myself away from my social life while writing my novel. I spent most of my days alone or with the person I was in a relationship with at the time. If I wasn’t working, I went to the movies, museums and parks alone. I don’t think that it’s the only way to do it, but becoming cloistering yourself a bit while working seems like the only way to write the kind of books I want to write. It has been nice to be more social and feel my world expand as the book is published, but I’m sure I’ll have to retreat again soon to work on my second novel. I’m sure this will be a lifelong cycle, or I hope so.
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To observe Maria as a reader feels a bit like watching a shark in an aquarium or a lion at the zoo—you’re grateful for the layer of protection that comes from not being in her direct orbit. How was it to develop a character that Ruth refers to as “a black hole of a person”?
In Saul Bellow’s excellent short story, A Silver Dish, he writes that “It’s usually the selfish people who are loved the most.” I return to this line not only because I believe it is true but because I think that writing “the selfish people” as opposed to just “selfish people” is an important stylistic choice that alters the meaning of the sentence. “The selfish people” suggests a class of self-centered people who belong to a separate category and will always remain in this category. In Bellow’s formulation they are a clearly delineated group that has always existed and will always exist. And I think that if certain types recur across cultures and time periods, it is because they serve a necessary social function. In other words, we need the selfish people to make the unselfish people legible as a group. Ruth and Maria need one another in order to play out age old roles that are painful, but also pleasurable, to both of them. I never saw Maria as villainous or even willfully malicious. I think it is more interesting to think of their friendship as a co-created dynamic that fulfills both women’s needs. The “black hole of a person” thing was a bit of a private joke with myself because that’s what my friend once said when upset with me. I remember thinking “that’s a good line.”​​
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The relationship between Ruth’s parents and Maria is an interesting one. Of her mother, Ruth reflects that “She seemed to have her sights on Maria, almost as if she’d use her to get to heaven. Finally an orphan she could put all her kindness into.” Later, Ruth will recount how eager she was to move away from her parents—“though they were not violent or neglectful, I felt I had a wound that was just the size of their mouths.” The mother is such a striking character. Can you share more about writing her, and the dynamic between Ruth’s parents and Maria?
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I was talking to a friend recently about how your own relatives can evoke such strong responses in you, negative or positive, but then you see them interact with other, unrelated, people and realize they do not elicit the same intense feelings in them. To other people, your mother or father is just a colleague or a person in line at the grocery store. But a person’s own mother, father, or child is never a neutral person from whom you can become totally emotionally disinvested. Maria represents, to me, the opportunity to parent another person’s child, without all of the intensity present in the actual parent-child relationship. I think that Ruth’s mother, who is bright, hardworking, quick-witted, and resilient, sees something of her thwarted self in Maria, who has many of the same qualities. I think that Ruth’s father, who is a more gentle and passive person, sees Maria as a destabilizing (in a good way) figure in his and his daughter’s life. They’re both very drawn to her. Some children are just more charismatic and magnetic than others, that’s a sad fact.​
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“Where did Maria’s authority come from?
While I was amassing self-doubt, she had built up great reserves of power that she could dispense quietly without appearing to.”
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—from Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu
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“Things seemed to exist only once I’d drawn them,” Ruth says in the beginning of the novel. She later describes drawing as a sort of vanishing that she relishes in. Both her and Maria eventually move to New York City and become successful artists: Can you talk more about what art means in the context of their relationship?​
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It’s a difficult question to answer because I think that, after a certain point, art is the thing that mediates both women’s experience of the world, at the expense of forming politics or even truly meaningful interpersonal relationships. I feel the same way about writing and remember telling my psychoanalyst at the time that when I do not write, I don’t feel any contact with reality or a sense that I am “living my life”. Writing is my way of mediating, and making sense of, experience. The way that you narrativize your life is almost more important and impactful than the actual things that happen to you. I think that this is the way that I thought about the way that Ruth and Maria viewed art. They use it to construct a narrative of their lives. Artists like Beverly Buchanan, Brice Marden, Beauford Delaney, Coco Fusco, Nicole Eisenman, Arshile Gorky, Lorna Simpson, Rodin and others appear explicitly and implicitly in the novel, but their names are obscured because I was more interested in describing the way Ruth and Maria interact with these objects and figures, than using proper nouns to situate them in their time period. In my mind some of the most pivotal scenes of the book are when two women negotiate how to make art about one another. It’s difficult to make work about a person you know too well.
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Without spoiling anything for readers, I’d love to discuss the ending. What made you decide to end the book in the way that you did? And was there ever another ending you had in mind?
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It’s a good question. I alluded to this in a previous answer, but I knew the ending very early on. I wrote it long before I wrote and did multiple revisions of the rest of the novel. It is basically unchanged from its original version and, for me, it is the most satisfying part of the novel to read. I think that a book should end with a total feeling of finality, as in: life may go on for the characters but what happens to them after the conclusion of the book is sort of beside the point. Something irrevocable has to happen, otherwise the previous choices and events can feel inconsequential.
I have been really interested in readers’ responses to the end of the novel. People write to me about it, usually saying kind things and asking questions. I thank them but don’t offer any interpretations of the ending and never will.
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On the topic of endings, what is your relationship to Ruth and Maria now that you’ve finished writing—are they characters that you return to, do they continue to have active lives in your mind, or when a writing is complete, do the characters go silent? What’s your take on this?
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I don’t really think about them at all except for when I am rereading the book or doing interviews. They occasionally cross my mind when I read other novels or watch other films that seem to contain similar personalities and archetypes or when I am walking through parts of New York or parts of Rhode Island they would have spent time in. As I answer this question, I realize that my response sounds like the song “I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except in Spring)” which is a song I’d imagine both characters listening to.
For me, it was enough to give readers a pleasurable or at the very least interesting reading experience, following these two women’s lives over the course of roughly 300 pages. I’m eager to move on to other things, other personalities, other characters, etc.
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As a debut novelist, what has been the biggest revelation about the publishing process?
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A big revelation is that (at least a few thousand) strangers care what I think and have to say. I don’t say that in a self-deprecating way at all, but having (an even relatively) captive audience, for at least the time it takes to read a novel, is a very unique experience that I realize many people will never have. Ideas that I labored over privately now don’t belong to only me and they move through the world independent of me. That’s a gift, but it’s also changed my relationship to myself in a way I haven’t quite figured out and hope to dwell on in a second novel. Not an auto-fictional one, though!
Where in writing do you find the greatest joy?
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I find the greatest joy in reading and the feeling of tiredness after many hours spent writing. I also enjoy talking to other writers, usually.
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Can you describe how it first felt to hold a finished copy of your novel, and how it feels to see readers interacting with Lonely Crowds now that it’s out in the world?
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Unbelievable and unlike anything I’ve experienced in my life. I can’t begin to describe it.
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Stephanie Wambugu is the author of the novel Lonely Crowds. She was born in Mombasa, Kenya and grew up in Rhode Island. She lives and works in New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, The Drift and Bookforum and other places.
To buy a copy of Lonely Crowds, consider supporting one of Stephanie’s favorite bookstores:
Recluse Books, Riff Raff Bookstore, Liz's Book Bar, McNally Jackson, and Sunny's Bookshop.
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Interview by Emma Leokadia Walkiewicz
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