Cruel Indifference

Tess Pollok interviews Stephanie Wambugu about her debut novel “Lonely Crowds.”

By Tess PollokJuly 29, 2025

• Fiction

STEPHANIE WAMBUGU’S debut novel, Lonely Crowds, charts decades of disillusionment: promises broken among the cold, unenlightening halls of higher education; the inevitable dissipation of relationships and ambitions. It’s a book of obsession and quiet brutality, interrogating what it means to chase goals—artistic success, fulfilling friendships—that may, ultimately, hold no real value. The novel’s narrator, Ruth, grows up in Providence, Rhode Island, as the only daughter of Kenyan immigrants. A tentatively pursued friendship with her beguiling neighbor Maria blossoms into a passionate bond, only to culminate in a devastating separation when, as adults, the two relocate to New York and vie for status among the city’s artistic elites.

Wambugu and I spoke over Zoom this April (two months before Lonely Crowds’ publication in late July) to discuss the novel’s gripes with higher education, the inescapable influence of distinct cultural environments, and the author’s own lifelong love of The Sopranos.

¤

TESS POLLOK: What was the impetus behind writing a novel about female friendship?

STEPHANIE WAMBUGU: I didn’t set out to write a novel about female friendship. The book was originally a character study of Ruth in her late thirties or forties, reflecting on her early life. But there was something a little bit claustrophobic about that, so Maria emerged as a sort of foil to Ruth, and in writing towards that relationship I became aware of the canon of “female friendship novels.” Still, while their friendship is, obviously, an extremely prominent part of the novel, I never thought of it as what gives the novel momentum. I was thinking more about family systems, schooling—those kinds of things.

Do you think the novel has anything in particular to communicate about friendship?

Ruth and Maria’s friendship has a lot of tension and conflict—but I think if you have a friendship without those things, you’re probably not that close. I think the yardstick for how close you are to someone is how much ambivalence (and frustration!) is channeled towards them. Friendships are more interesting to me to write about than romantic relationships because they could end at any point; there’s almost a mutually assured destruction to our shared confidences, and there’s nothing you can really do when a friendship ends. Divorce or some kind of formal “separation” tends to mark the end of a romantic relationship or marriage, but there’s no equivalent for friendships. [The break is] not legible in the same way. At the same time, friendships are often the closest relationships women have in their lives.

Some reviewers have commented that Ruth seems obsessed with Maria.

“Obsession” is an interesting choice of words because I think something needs to be incomprehensible to qualify as obsessive, and I don’t think Ruth’s fixation on Maria is entirely not understandable. But I don’t think you can trust Ruth’s objectivity about who Maria is. There are some interlocutors who confirm throughout the book that Maria is somehow exceptional, that she’s beautiful or that there’s something distinct about her, but I wondered while writing if she wasn’t just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill person whom Ruth has projected [various things] onto.

Still, I wouldn’t necessarily use the word “obsession” to describe the dynamic, even though there’s a utility to that, because it’s a dynamic of fixation that spans decades. Maybe it’s just my personality, but I wonder what the distinction is between an obsession and just caring about someone or thinking about someone. There are definitely people I think about every day—and I wouldn’t say that I’m obsessed with any of them.

For the most part, the novel does stay firmly embedded in Ruth’s consciousness as she travels through life; I can see how one function of her friendship with Maria is to generate the friction that makes her internal journey compelling. Did you like writing Ruth that way? What attracted you to that character?

I think her dissatisfaction with life and success were interesting to me. I started writing this book a bit after Black Lives Matter exploded, and it was a moment where a lot of Black art markets were booming. I was feeling a bit cynical about the instincts of the curators and collectors behind that, about why they were acquiring that art at the time that they were. So I came up with the character of Ruth as someone who’s not coming of age at exactly the same time as I was, but who exists in the 1990s art world where she grapples with many of the same issues that I did in the late ’10s. I thought of Ruth and how she might feel being on the sidelines watching Maria’s star rise and feeling bitter about it. Over time, I started to hear her voice more, and that just calcified the first-person narration and made her definitive for me.

I love the epigraph from Kafka: “When I think about it, I must say that my education has done me great harm in some respects.” Lonely Crowds is clearly, in many ways, a novel about schooling. I also saw it as being a novel of towns and cities, and the boundaries between innocence and experience.

I was sitting in the Columbia Butler Library reading Kafka’s diaries when I found that [quote], and I had that feeling of Wow, someone beat me to it. I realized it had something to do with my feelings about both Bard and Columbia. I felt very critical of both institutions that I was in, and I think I inadvertently wrote towards that.

Kafka goes on to address that sentiment throughout his diaries; he has so many grievances about the way he’s been taught, the effect that his teachers and schools have had on him as an adult. [Thomas] Bernhard writes a lot about this, as well—this feeling that children are almost always kind of ruined by their education, by being either spoiled or neglected by their teachers. There’s something human that’s stripped away from you over the course of getting an education. All schools almost remind me of colonial schools, in the sense that they’re always working towards making a certain kind of citizen. That’s certainly something I was feeling at Columbia—and it feels so appropriate now that I encountered that quote in their library while they were arresting and, in some instances, deporting student protesters.

I also thought a lot about place while writing: how certain environments are more culturally insular than others, for example. I went to Bard and now I live in New York City, but I grew up in Providence, which is a fairly small town. I guess it’s less of a small town because it’s also a college town, and certainly there were a fair [number] of transients coming in and out—but it felt like a small town, growing up there. I do think your relationship to landscape has a real psychological effect. Ruth does things in New York City that she wouldn’t have done in her hometown. That’s partially because in Rhode Island she’s a child and [in New York] she’s an adult, so there’s the process of maturation. But it’s also due to the anonymity of the city, and there’s something about the sense of permission that [allows] you to be more secular and less traditional. I’m sure that most of my readers don’t care specifically about Bard, but it was important to me that the book specifically reference all these places because the landscape is so specific. I wanted Ruth to be in this idyllic place where you can go into the woods and it feels like you’re at summer camp; I wanted to write towards the effect that had on her as a person.

How do you feel about the culturally insular environments that evolve in cities, particularly among artists?

Ruth and Maria respond to city life very differently. With Maria, I envisioned her as having the personality type to flourish in an environment like that—she’s extroverted, she’s highly comfortable with being visible and self-exploiting, and she has ambition. There are some people who just thrive on being in New York, I think in part because they have that type of disposition. I think there are others who do it in spite of themselves because they need to do it to get ahead. Ruth falls into the latter category more. She finds herself working in a cultural moment in which she feels an urgency to fashion an identity as a working artist, but it’s something she feels obligated to do, not necessarily something that comes naturally to her.

You mentioned that the novel is also about family systems. Ruth has a quietly dissatisfying childhood with her distant parents in a nuclear family, while Maria is neglected by her bipolar aunt in a far more pronounced way. How do you see the adult outcomes of their lives as being influenced by these distinct family configurations?

I spent the past year in psychoanalysis, which really helps you understand how certain minutiae from your childhood can rear their head at any time. I was curious about ongoing discussions of the “trauma plot”—to what extent should early life traumas be considered an index of someone’s entire life? I don’t think it’s at all fair, but it’s true that life can’t be relived. Once childhood is over, it’s over. You don’t actually get the chance in adulthood to change these experiences or adjust your neuroses. The best kind of freedom you can find is understanding why you’re coping in the way that you are and navigating around that to find some kind of agency.

I think of both of them as being neglected, in different ways—Ruth is maybe more emotionally neglected, whereas Maria is materially not being looked after. For her, certain basic needs are not being met. But personality is so alchemical. I don’t think I could say how this affects their adult personalities specifically. I couldn’t say that Ruth is this way because her parents did this, or so on. It’s interesting, and you see this with siblings, that parents can raise very different children. It’s so unclear what goes into making a person who they are. When you send your kids off to school, whatever differences exist between you and them arguably just get even bigger and become more divisive. In the book, I think of school existing as another form of parental authority. It’s acting on the girls as much as the people who are raising them are.

There’s something about Maria; she has a toughness and resilience that I admire. I do wonder about how that relates to how she was raised, if that came from there being times when she had to make these kinds of appeals as a child to get what she needed. Whereas I think with Ruth’s family life, she has working-class parents, but they’re not starving. She doesn’t brush with precarity the way Maria does. Despite their proximity in their girlhood, the two of them are having very different experiences.

The novel is, additionally, about disillusionment and the empty promises of ambition. Ruth has an ambivalence towards life that felt almost necrophilic, as if she was an anti-natalist.

It’s funny, I hadn’t read Bernhard at the time I wrote the novel but I’m starting to read him now, and he has this sentiment: why would you have children when life is already so unbearable? Which feels, of course, like such a succinct articulation of anti-natalism. I think Ruth feels that way, as well; I don’t think she even knows why she’s so unhappy. It’s the futility of life, the futility of making an art object, the futility of trying to paint a painting. Or it sometimes makes me think about the disappointment of romantic love, the feeling of loving the pursuit and then getting what you want and [then] you just don’t love it anymore. That’s just the nature of desire. It’s so disappointing to finally get what you’ve been pursuing for so long and have it be underwhelming. I think, what Ruth finds compelling is the pursuit, and then something about the actual acquisition deflates her.

I’m rewatching The Sopranos, which is something I often do, and it’s the biggest cry for help. But there’s one point where Dr. Melfi tells Tony that his mother is a person who has an inability to feel joy. I watched that feeling, like, yeah, there are many such cases in life. I think of Ruth as someone like that. I don’t think she’s ever felt joy or really had an ecstatic experience.

I find that haunting: although both characters are damaged, their lives and backgrounds are not terribly uncommon. It’s the banality of evil—the most shocking thing about it is that it’s not shocking at all.

I think that’s true. I think the kind of person who would introduce themselves and label themselves as troubled or damaged is a deeply unserious person. Everyone is just trying to get by, even if there’s depth to the pain and disappointment going on under the surface. I think we all owe it to one another to keep it together a bit more—again, in my opinion.

There’s a great line from Gary Indiana’s Horse Crazy where he says—and I might completely butcher this, I’m sorry—but he meets a new person and he says, “I spared them the story of my sad childhood because everyone had a childhood like that.” Yeah.

¤

Stephanie Wambugu was born in Mombasa, Kenya, in 1998 and grew up in Rhode Island. She lives and works in New York, where she received her MFA from Columbia University. She is an editor of Joyland Magazine. Lonely Crowds (2025) is her first novel.