Though she wouldn’t trade it for New York, being a Londoner seems to suit Stephanie Wambugu. “I’m generally doing the same sorts of things while I’m here,” says the 28-year-old Kenyan-American author, who has been working on her next novel in cafés and British Library reading rooms while staying with her boyfriend in Leyton. “It doesn’t quite feel interchangeable yet, but I enjoy it.”

Wambugu’s first book Lonely Crowds will be released in the UK this week, but was first published in the US last July. The book became something of a cult favourite among a certain literary set, and it earned acclaim from multiple national publications. A period novel about the entangled lives of two queer women, Lonely Crowds follows its narrator Ruth as she comes of age in the New York of the 80s and 90s, evolving as an artist and sexual being alongside her best friend Maria, whom she first meets as one of only a handful of other Black girls at their Catholic school in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. 

From lost grocery money to tense parties and familial dysfunction, the book moves through a series of low-stakes micro-dramas – and is all the more gripping for it. Wambugu’s prose is kinetic and finely calibrated, with a poet’s dedication to precise images. While Lonely Crowds feels sharply realised in its historical setting, the novel captures an unmistakably contemporary malaise, encompassing generational schisms, living to work and constricting social norms. 

Here, the author discusses the utility of the campus novel, her love of Kafka and The Sopranos, the premise of her next book, and more.

You’ve said that Lonely Crowds was originally conceptualised as a character study of Ruth in her thirties and forties. How did you approach writing about ages or time periods that you hadn't experienced?

Stephanie Wambugu: Some of it is invented. But a lot of it feels indebted to writers who have written about the experience of ageing, and have managed to collapse a large period of time or an entire life into a single novel. I’m in the middle of teaching a seminar about the novel Sula by Toni Morrison, and she does that so skillfully in that book. I think the books like that, and The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tova Ditlevsen, which also spans a lifetime, or the novels of Jean Rhys that feature women who are ambiguously in their twenties or thirties, but are kind of downtrodden and trying to sort out their lives, gave me very good models. They’re settled in some ways or have aged and matured, but also feel very lost and adrift. Reading is one of the best ways to figure out how to inhabit the consciousness or point of view of a person who has had experiences I haven’t, and I think that’s not just specific to age. It’s true of writing about men. It’s true of writing about people of different races, different orientations. The capaciousness of books and that they allow you to be many different people or take on very many different identities is, I think, the reason to write and to read. 

Lonely Crowds has often been written about as a friendship novel. I feel like it’s an observational work that takes on many subjects, but Ruth also seems infatuated with Maria from the beginning. What do you make of this reception?

Stephanie Wambugu: I think that maybe that’s the way that their relationship reads publicly to other people. It’s a first-person narration, so we understand Ruth’s desire, but everyone else in her life thinks it’s a friendship that’s very close, maybe too close for comfort. But I don’t think the sexual tension is necessarily legible to the other people within the book. Also, I think that once someone frames your book in a certain way, other [journalists] kind of regurgitate that framing. I don’t mind. I mean, I think that once it’s published, it’s sort of out of my hands. In some ways, other people speak about the book with more authority than I do. Which is fine, because now it belongs to the public. I guess they are friends, but that's not the full story. 

What can you tell me about the book that you’re working on now? 

Stephanie Wambugu: It’s about a young woman named Claudia who is thrown out of school for being part of a protest that she sort of inadvertently stumbles into. It’s a school based on an Ivy League university in New York and takes place during the pro-Palestinian solidarity encampments. I wanted to write something that felt very contemporary – not necessarily ripped from the headlines, but something that is about living now. The country seems to be becoming more and more unstable, and I think it can be very hard to sit down and even try to summarise what's happened in the past six months, let alone the past year or the events that followed October 2023. I was a student at Columbia, and it's interesting to be at a place that's the focus of national media attention and to think about how your day-to-day is being narrativised for the world. I wasn't very visible at that time or particularly involved, but for a lot of undergraduates who were really involved in these protests, I wonder what it felt like for them to be broadcast on mainstream cable news and to have to speak very publicly at such a young age. The book is concerned with that and how to course-correct or redirect your life when something seemingly cataclysmic happens to you, which I think is a question that a lot of young people are asking themselves today. 

“The capaciousness of books and that they allow you to be many different people or take on very many different identities is, I think, the reason to write and to read”

What do you think draws you to education as a literary subject? 

Stephanie Wambugu: I remember my friend saying to me once that the classroom is the most erotic place in the world. There’s something so charged about being exposed to something you previously didn’t know, and we spend so much time in school. Education is the site of so much conflict, whether it’s censorship or student debt being politicized or trying to defund universities. I think that makes them a very rich setting to tell other stories about class, about how men and women relate to one another, about the ethical questions around how much professors engage with their students. I think that I've been very shaped by my education and the schools that I’ve gone to have transformed my life in more ways than one. I don’t mean that in like a feel-good, inspirational way, but I think that you can enrol in a school as one type of person and complete your education as a totally different person, with a different milieu and sometimes belonging to a different class than the class you came from. I think that’s all really rich fodder for fiction. 

I think you have this fabulously sly sense of humour woven throughout the book that kind of sneaks up on the reader. Are there comedic writers that you look up to in particular? 

Stephanie Wambugu: The Sopranos was one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen. It’s really great at revealing the absurdity of the family or of a marriage, and how people tell themselves these diluting narratives to conceal what they know to be true. I think Tony and Carmela’s marriage is so interesting and so funny. I think Kafka is a hilarious writer. I was thinking so much about A Hunger Artist as I wrote Lonely Crowds. If you’re not familiar with it, A Hunger Artist is about this man who’s a performer and starves himself as a circus sideshow. His craft is becoming obsolete because no one wants to go see hunger artists anymore. The relationship to his audience is hostile – they treat him with suspicion, and they don’t believe that he’s starving himself for all of the hours he claims to be. At one point, when someone asks him about being a hunger artist, he says that starving oneself is the easiest thing in the world. I guess it’s not funny out of context, but similarly, I think with Kafka there’s a cumulative effect, as the humour builds over time. And I think that’s funnier than a punchline. 

“The most erotic place in the world. There’s something so charged about being exposed to something you previously didn’t know”

I feel like when style appears in Lonely Crowds, it’s often to convey something about the character’s class or conformity. Could you tell me a bit about how Ruth’s sense of fashion differs from Maria’s?

Stephanie Wambugu: Ruth dresses in a more conservative way. Her style of dress is less ostentatious. She sees it as less glamorous, and she sees the way that Maria presents herself as aspirational. I think she sees her wearing a sheer blouse one evening when they meet, and she says, ‘I wish I could be given a blouse like that.’ The value attached to the clothes is about more than the actual garment, and you can imagine that even if she got the shirt, she wouldn’t totally be satisfied with it, which is kind of her MO. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to subtly convey the way someone presented themselves without having extended descriptions of the way that person dressed or of certain brand names. I wanted to have the images of an article of clothing be specific in some ways, but also be general enough that even people who don't belong to a certain in-group can engage with the characterisation. I don’t want [my] fiction to be a kind of billboard or another iteration of the lifestyle content that I think many writers are encouraged to do. 

The novel begins with the idea of a birthday as a kind of life referendum – I’m curious about what your last one told you.

Stephanie Wambugu: I think I feel fairly settled in my life at the moment. That’s not a permanent state. I think things can be upended at any time, or I might feel differently as this next year of my life progresses, but I felt like I was taking stock of what the previous year had been, which had been a lot of change for me. Maybe the biggest change is that I published a book, and my professional life changed. In the book, the birthday is a sort of referendum on what [Ruth] regrets and how she’s failed to forge the life she wants. But I was in a fairly good mood and didn’t feel like these big existential questions were looming that evening. I had a party and had a good time. 

How did you celebrate? 

Stephanie Wambugu: I went to dinner with my boyfriend, and then we hosted people at this bar in downtown Manhattan. I showed up late. And I planned it at the last minute, as I plan all my birthday parties.