Stephanie Wambugu’s Tale Of Two Art Friends

Every generation gets The Bell Jar they deserve. While not all on the level of Sylvia Plath’s prose, young novelists remain perennially interested in writing about being in your 20s in New York City. Think: The Guest by Emma Cline, Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman, Luster by Raven Leilani, and — the most frequently scapegoated — My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. On the one hand, write what you know. On the other, we’re more than a bit bored.

So when Stephanie Wambugu’s debut novel, Lonely Crowds, began with the narrator celebrating her birthday in downtown Manhattan, I assumed she’d be a young striver the same age as Wambugu, with 27 candles on her cake and an iPhone to photograph it with. It unfolds that Ruth is middle-aged and it’s sometime in the early 2000s.

“I had a desire to do something escapist. I did not want to write about the internet,” Wambugu says. “I wanted to write a bildungsroman… But I heard the voice of someone a bit older, from a different generation.”

After the opening scene, the book backtracks, introducing us to Ruth and her Kenyan immigrant parents the summer before she starts Catholic school. There, she befriends Maria, the only other non-white student — and from then on, Ruth and Maria’s close yet strained relationship is a constant, carrying them through childhood in New England, cultural upheaval at Bard College, and, indeed, an attempt to make a living as artists in New York. At every turn, Wambugu upends conventions of class, race, and gender, pushing the female friendship story into secret corners where we must face our own shameful proclivities.

Below, Wambugu discusses unreliable narrators, the specter of marriage, and pesky art-world grifters.

Despite being set in the past, the book doesn’t feel like a period piece. Forming friendships with people who possess things you want for yourself — that's totally timeless. Or do you think it was particularly prevalent among artists in the ‘90s?

While I was working at the McNally Jackson bookstore in Soho, Do Everything in the Dark by Gary Indiana was reissued by Semiotext(e) and I chose it as my staff pick. I wrote that it’s incredibly timeless how openly ambitious and calculating and callous these characters are, because grifters crop up in every generation. I think Lonely Crowds is similarly true because it could have been written in the ‘80s, or the ‘90s, or 1910. People instrumentalize one another all the time; that will always be an element of romantic and platonic relationships.

Once Ruth and Maria get to New York, they encounter a constellation of white women trying to capitalize on this moment and bring them into their orbit. Part of the reason why I set it when I did is because it felt like a parallel moment to what was happening in the art market after Black Lives Matter. There’s a desire for collectors and museums to atone for real political grievances by buying art from members of a given group. At these two times it just so happened to be Black people, but there's a cycle where it will be someone else next… However, I also find it too easy to position characters from different groups as inherently against each other. It's actually really interesting to have these things play out intraracially, to have a cast of characters who are both within and without the group, who can serve as interlocutors.

What were you excited about borrowing from past bildungsromans and past female friendship novels, like Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend or Toni Morrison’s Sula? And what did you want to reinvent?

There's something colonial about all schools. They're trying to create a certain kind of person or citizen, to take you from your family or system of origin and refashion you. The Catholic school [in Lonely Crowds] had one way of doing that, which was very rigid. Then when Ruth and Maria went to Bard, it's fairly ideologically rigid as well. It’s a homogenous or hegemonic culture you're supposed to accept wholesale. I think that Ruth leaves feeling conflicted about who she is in light of these very strong influences.

I was also interested in marriage being kind of a specter over the lives of girls. It's maybe more implicit now, but there’s an idea that you're being prepared for your romantic life from the time that you're born. As far as the idea of an intense friendship that’s almost a homoerotic relationship with a friend, I wanted to undermine some of that, too. I think the most erotic thing in a book or a movie is when people are positioned to have a sexual relationship and they don't or can't. No one actually gets off in any relationship in the book.

Ruth has a relationship to sex and her own sexuality that I really appreciated. It’s not that she fears it exactly, but it felt like ambivalence.

I've been critical of how anhedonic and unfeeling certain characters in contemporary fiction can be. There's a sense that they can't feel sexual pleasure, they can feel only an inability to feel. They're emotionally blunted in the way that someone might be from taking the wrong antidepressant. I don't think Ruth is like that. I think she genuinely has empathetic experiences but she sees sex in a utilitarian way — it's what you do with people who you want to have a certain kind of relationship with.

For me, in order for a character to be dynamic, they need to be open to various interpretations.

I like the way you talk about her. Like, “I think this is true of the character I wrote.”

For me, in order for a character to be dynamic, they need to be open to various interpretations. Even in the process of doing interviews for the book I've learned different things about the way that her personality is presenting, and my feelings about her have changed. The power she wields didn't occur to me initially. When I was first drafting, I saw Ruth as sort of being victimized, or being at her friend's mercy. Now I actually think that Ruth’s weakness can be tyrannical. She’s the kind of person who uses weakness as a cover for actually being very ambitious and fairly opportunistic.

Introducing the characters to us as children allows those judgments to blur. I'm thinking about the first time Ruth sees Maria from afar at the school uniform shop, where Maria is turned away because she doesn’t have enough money. It originally scanned as Ruth thinking, “I'm curious about this beautiful, tragic girl.” But you could see it more cynically: “I need a friend and no one else is gonna befriend this loser.”

Looking back, you always interpret your behavior charitably. I have these bouts of paranoia. I'm like, “Oh, I actually only did that thing that seemed altruistic because I'm playing a long game, and it's all part of an elaborate plan to use people.” The relationship with Maria does end up being very advantageous for Ruth. They have a confrontation where basically Ruth says, “I've done so much for you and I feel sorry for you. You're incapable of expressing gratitude.” What a crass thing to say. It betrays something about her true feelings. Her motivations are as mixed as all of our motivations.

Like Ruth, you were raised in Rhode Island by Kenyan parents and you attended Bard College.

Guilty as charged.

Was this always going to be your first novel, then? A story set in these contexts you’re familiar with?

It seems inevitable that this was my first book because it's suited to my disposition — which is wanting to appear exhibitionist but isn't actually autobiographical at all. You appear to be sharing a lot about yourself without actually sharing anything. A trickster, chameleonic quality is important to me; I’m not saying I necessarily have it, but I find it aspirational. It's an important quality for an artist to have, especially when there's such a conflation between authors and their fiction. People think there is always a self-insert in every author’s books, especially first books and particularly books written by women. Even though I don't mind a certain kind of slippage between me and Ruth — of course, there are biographical parallels — I was careful about not wanting to speak on behalf of a group.

Writing about landscapes and institutions felt deeply personal, even though it was impersonal in that it's not about me, Stephanie, but about places that I spent time in that feel very charged. I could have invented a school like Bard, and I could have invented a school like the Catholic school in Rhode Island, but if they exist then why not just write about them?

I think many of the artists we know are traditional careerists, just the trappings of their lives are different.

I think that Lonely Crowds is a book about choices and what we are unable to choose. How do you think choices propel a story forward?

As you age, as the years start to accumulate, you realize how inevitable intense feelings of regret are. Some people live according to the idea that there's a window of time in which you marry; there is a window of time in which you decide if you're going to have this career or that career. I was listening to someone today talk about how divorce is so wonderful because you can go into every marriage seeing it as impermanent. It actually frees you up to enjoy whatever relationships you do enter into because there's no gun to your head. Ruth is someone who thinks there actually is a gun to your head, and there's a punitive and watchful force — that is maybe just God — that can either condemn you or absolve you. Despite the fact that she's an artist, she's an incredibly traditional woman — which I don't think is all that rare anyway. I think many of the artists we know are traditional careerists, just the trappings of their lives are different.

Ruth is obsessed with how others see her. What was the decision behind employing a unique kind of first-person voice that becomes, in Ruth’s darkest moments, very detached and verges on third-person?

The dissolution of self is what's aspirational about religion. We come to religion or certain kinds of collective action — like protest or even education, in some ways — wanting to dissolve the boundaries between ourselves. Of course it's not possible. Ultimately, your experiences with another person are not interchangeable. There's always a kind of miscommunication; there's always distance between you and even the person you're closest to. People remain unknowable to us, just as we remain unknowable to ourselves.

When Ruth becomes fixated on her mother or Maria or someone else, it’s almost like those people begin to narrate the book, but it's unclear if Ruth is actually doing them justice or seeing things clearly. I think she goes through life feeling as though there's something she's missed. As if there is a day in school where everyone gets a lesson on how to interact with people, how to go about relationships, how to be a person — and you happened to miss it and never made it up. It's a terrifying thought.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.