"A question of intensity"
A Q&A with Stephanie Wambugu on female friendship, orthodoxy, and her debut novel
“EMBLEMS CONCEAL. MAKE SURE THERE AREN’T ANY ‘SYMBOLS’ IN YOUR PAINTINGS,” one character writes in “Working,” our Issue Fifteen excerpt of Stephanie Wambugu’s debut novel Lonely Crowds. Wambugu herself has internalized this advice: there are no emblems in her book, only real, knotty, complex characters and their entangled lives, realized with a keen and patient eye. Wambugu’s deft observations render the pleasures and heartbreaks of romance, family, and lifelong friendship with sharp, often painful clarity. The Drift’s associate fiction editor, Livia Wood, talked to Wambugu about the distinction between romantic and platonic love, the accidental wisdom of children, the downsides of education, and more. Lonely Crowds is out on July 29 from Little, Brown. Read our excerpt online today.
Lonely Crowds is structured around an intense and tumultuous friendship between Ruth and Maria. They meet as young girls, and from the beginning, Ruth gravitates toward Maria, almost without choice. Only later does their relationship become somewhat sexual or romantic, but that element doesn’t come as a surprise: it seems like a natural, almost inevitable development given the magnitude and fervor of their bond, which is what we might now call somewhat “toxic.” How did you distinguish between platonic and romantic love in your writing? Is it possible to separate them fully?
I think that the difference between romantic and platonic relationships is a question of intensity. It’s acceptable to move across the country on a whim for a lover or to lose your mind over them in basically any way, but it would be a bit strange to do these things over a friend. I think what makes the friendship between Ruth and Maria exceptional is that they behave as badly as people in love might behave to one another, though they would probably describe their relationship as platonic if asked.
Religion — or a sense of faith — looms large in your novel. Ruth and Maria become friends in a Catholic school; Ruth’s mother lives a life of conservative religiosity, telling her daughter to remain abstinent until marriage. While Ruth and Maria aren’t strictly religious, devotion seems to rule their lives: Ruth’s absolute devotion to Maria and Maria’s lack of devotion to anything. How did you approach these various forms of faith throughout the novel? Do they seem related to one another?
I remember watching an interview in which a lapsed Catholic director said that he left the church and replaced it with cinema. I think that people who leave their faith generally find another kind of orthodoxy to replace organized religion. Personally, I haven’t been to church in many years, but I still feel a bit aimless on Sundays, like there’s something I’m supposed to be doing and haven’t done, and I probably always will feel that way. I guess I have put writing in the place religion would have occupied in my adult life. I would say that both women look to art and love as a way to work out their hang-ups over living secularly, while still needing something that can be an outlet for feelings of fervor. Ruth is definitely looking to be someone’s acolyte. Maria, on the other hand, disavows that desire. Like all disavowed feelings, it rears its heads in more extreme ways in her life.
Lonely Crowds spans a fairly long period, and though we’re never told exact dates, readers can glean the passage of time through specific details: the advent of Adderall, the beginning of cell phone use. How did time take shape for you in this novel?
I wanted the novel to be fairly timeless without being anachronistic. It was important for details like Adderall’s advent or technological developments to be subtle but precise, because those were some of the only markers that indicated the years the women were living through. I set Lonely Crowds when I did because I really did not want to write about being a woman in the milieu I’m actually living in. I jokingly refer to this time period as the Boring Twenties and I was desperate to write about anything else, not out of nostalgia (since I wasn’t there) or because I think of the nineties as a particularly glamorous time, but because I wanted to distance myself as much as possible from my day-to-day life. I think a lot about this Rachel Cusk quote from Aftermath where she says of her divorce, “I don’t want to tell my story, I want to live.” I don’t particularly want to tell my story, either.
Writing in the voice of a child is often challenging. Yet you inhabit Ruth with striking clarity; even as a young girl, she is extremely perceptive. Ruth is always aware that her parents are imperfect people. How was writing from the perspective of a child different from that of an adult?
I see a child’s point of view as very capacious and interesting because they can look at the world without editorializing or qualifying what they see. So when a child narrator does offer insight, or the kind of accidental wisdom a child can sometimes express, it feels less contrived and somehow more true. There’s a verse in the Bible where followers of Christ are encouraged to “become like little children.” I find it similarly aspirational to write the way a little child thinks and let yourself be a bit of a repository for the sensations of the world. Writers like Tove Ditlevsen and Jean Rhys did this very well.
You’re an editor at Joyland. How does editing affect your writing?
As an editor, I try to take on writing that is different from my own work. I don’t want to reproduce my sensibility by filtering out stories that don’t reflect my own style. That’s been a good challenge. It is all very new to me. Being on this side of the editorial experience has made me feel grateful to the people who have edited me. It’s a luxury to be edited or to be read at all.
Lonely Crowds begins with an epigraph from Franz Kafka’s Diaries: “When I think about it, I must say that my education has done me great harm in some respects.” In the novel, education is formative: to Maria and Ruth’s friendship, to Ruth’s artistic career, to finding mentorship. But it is also, at turns, stifling, oppressive, and traumatic. How did you make sense of its dual function?
I find that Kafka quote very enigmatic and moving, because clearly Kafka’s education yielded a genius. But according to him it was in spite of his education, not because of it, that he wrote as he did. Education for him was a source of pain. One of my favorite novellas is Stefan Zweig’s Confusion. It deals beautifully with the question of education — how it can be both repressive and edifying. I think that for many people education is basically synonymous with being disciplined. You forget as an adult how punitive teachers can be. It is all very repressive by design. And of course schools have to stifle their students in order to function in an orderly way. But what happens after being stifled for more than a decade? Now that I’m an adult, I’m surprised that children don’t misbehave even more than they do. They have almost no agency and they’re totally at the mercy of the adults around them. I think it’s totally reasonable to lash out in response to that kind of repression.
