Lonely Crowds

by Stephanie Wambugu

Genres: Coming of Age

Synopsis

Luster meets The Idiot in this riveting debut novel about a volatile friendship between two outsiders who escape their bleak childhoods and enter the glamorous early '90s art world in New York City, where only one of them can make it.

Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl’s school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is drawn forcefully into Maria’s orbit, and they fall into an easy, yet intense, friendship. Her devotion to her charming and bright new friend opens up her previously sheltered world. 
 
While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her around: to college and then into the early-nineties art world of New York City. There, ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years. Whereas Maria finds early success in New York City as an artist, Ruth stumbles along the fringes of the art world, pulled toward a quieter life of work and marriage. As their lives converge and diverge, they meet in one final and fateful confrontation.
 
Ruth and Maria's decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class and time. What does it mean to be an artist and to be true to oneself? What does it mean to give up on an obsession? Marking the arrival of a sensational new literary talent, Lonely Crowds challenges us to reckon honestly with our own ambitions and the lives we hope to lead.

Release date: July 29, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 304

Sample

A PERSON DOESN’T choose when she is born. I was born in August and it was August. Since it was my birthday, I blew out my candles. The happy, off-key voices of my friends and neighbors trailed off and everyone clapped. They watched as the smoke rose faintly above the cake, dissipating before my eyes. And it isn’t enough just to be born, either. There has to be something or someone that comes first at the expense of everything else, otherwise there isn’t any point. Of course someone came to mind. That Maria wasn’t here at the party was a source of great distress. When I met Maria, I learned that without an obsession life was impossible to live. I’d forgotten. Now, I remembered.

I sank a knife into the white frosting, and I could not understand what I was celebrating. I almost dropped the knife and ran out into the street, as you should run out and make yourself heard when an epiphany comes. But I didn’t bolt since everyone was watching. I sat very still, reminding myself to smile, as my husband pulled the pink, spent candles out of the sheet cake one by one. Then, an acquaintance pulled me aside and touched my shoulder.

“Ruth, are you alright?” she asked.

“I’m wonderful,” I said. “I’m having a really nice time.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. She had a great mass of red hair that was piled on top of her head and secured with pins. Like most of the people at the party, she was also an artist and maybe thought of herself as a perceptive person. But I assured her there was nothing to perceive and smiled again, more convincingly.

“I’m fine.” I nodded and made my way back into the center of the party. I fell into a conversation with my old professor, a painter called Moser, who was my mentor when I was a young woman. He walked with a stark limp, and because he could not keep his hands from shaking, he had recently stopped painting and had taken to making small collages, arranging cutouts together with glue to make simple landscapes that looked like dollhouse-sized mock-ups of the big, spectral canvases he was known for. I felt a lot of fondness for him, and it was natural to gravitate to him in an attempt to regain my bearings at the party, to retreat to a familiar figure of authority who had known me for many years. I perched on the edge of the wooden bench he was sitting on and told him that birthday parties were always strange, especially when you were the one being celebrated. There was this extreme pressure to feign happiness while at the same time you were forced to confront the passing of your life and what you had done or had not done up until that point. It was hard not to take the outcome of these short, overwrought celebrations as a referendum on your life so far.

“Sure,” he said. “Plus there’s the pressure of making sure everyone else has a good time since it’s so inconvenient to find a sitter, or move your weekend around, or stay out late drinking. In that sense, your happiness is a sign of gratitude for all your guests who are going out of their way.”

“Well, I hope you don’t feel put out. I worry about you and your health, and I don’t want you to stay out late for my sake if it would be better for you to stay home and rest or work.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, “I’m glad to be here. I don’t do anything I don’t want to do. Last week it was my mother’s birthday. She turned ninety-two and I didn’t go to her home for dinner with all of our other living relatives. We aren’t speaking and though we’ve been estranged for nearly thirty years, she still has my older sister reach out to me through my wife to invite me to her parties. The fact that she subjected my older sister to bitter verbal abuse makes no difference, such is my mother’s power over her relations.”

He continued, “Her ability to attack and mistreat, then drum up sympathy for herself, is unlike anything I’ve ever known. Though I’ve forgiven her for how cruel she was to me as a child, I want nothing to do with her. She knows I won’t go or speak to her and yet she writes these long, demanding messages and uses my sister and my wife as go-betweens.”

“Why didn’t you go to your mother’s party? What difference does it make?” I asked.

What I didn’t say was that Moser’s mother is so close to death and, relatively speaking, so is he, and forgiving her now wouldn’t change anything. In fact, it might do both him and his mother good to reconcile and make amends as people ought to do at the end of their lives. I could understand being angry with your parents, but not abandoning them. As was the case for most people in my generation, there was a strain between my parents and myself. The generational schism was always felt. Naturally, there were things I wished they had done differently. But it wasn’t anyone’s fault; it was just the natural friction between those born at different times trying to talk across the chasm of their difference. It was perfectly normal. So what harm would it really do for him to go to his mother’s party? Moser started to shake terribly when he heard my question. His tremor seemed to pass from his fingers and echo all throughout his body so that the wine in his cup spilled onto his tanned hands. When he spoke, his voice was low and desperate.

“I would never humiliate any child the way my mother humiliated me when I was a boy, never. While my father just stood by and watched. If he were alive, I wouldn’t speak to him, either. I’ll never speak to my mother again and I’ll certainly never attend one of her parties. When she dies, I won’t go to her funeral. And anyone who has felt the kind of pain I felt under her authority would understand perfectly why I won’t. The entire purpose of my life, and of all my work, has been trying to escape my mother’s cruelty. My mother isn’t a sweet old lady who sits in a rocking chair knitting blankets all day. She’s a remorseless abuser!”

By then the wine was all over his lap. I hadn’t meant to rile him up this way. I put my hand on Moser’s back and told him I was sorry, that I understood. He had every right to enforce these boundaries. What a strange word, boundaries. But in truth, it was hard to respect a man his age who blamed his mother for what had happened half a century ago. Moser certainly wasn’t the only person I knew who had cut off his parents and foreclosed the possibility of repair, but he was by far the oldest. Admittedly, I found adults who went on not speaking with their parents because of the slightest offense to be frivolous and cruel. I was unable to liberate myself from my childhood, from my deference to my mother and father, my concern for them. Just that morning my mother called me to wish me a happy birthday and told me that even though I had never gotten a real job and was still “just painting,” she was proud of me and loved me anyway. Should I have disavowed my mother for not taking my painting seriously enough? What good would it do? Everywhere I looked there were people walking out of the holds of their family’s influence with a strong sense of finality. Estranged children were everywhere, spreading the good news of their estrangement. Why hadn’t it ever occurred to me to try to emancipate myself similarly?

Moser said it was alright and stood up on his cane, drying his hands against his dark jeans. Even after so many years, he explained, the pain felt fresh. He would always be the little boy berated by his mother, every moment, forever. Again, I said I was sorry. He squeezed my shoulder affectionately and told me again it was alright. He walked over to his wife, Hildy. She was much younger than he was and her hair hadn’t yet grayed, or she had dyed it diligently to keep her youthful appearance. He kissed her and sighed. Maybe it was because of his mother that Moser had started to shake and couldn’t stop.

I was lucky to have such beautiful weather for my birthday. A warm, clear August night without rain. The guests ate their cake and set their gifts down on the kitchen table. Once they felt they had drank enough and smoked enough and exhausted the viable topics of conversation we had in common, they departed with kisses and hugs, saying that they would see me soon, though we probably wouldn’t meet again until the next party. Everything went as expected.

The following morning I climbed out of my bed, no more weary than usual. I dressed, drank coffee, took my medication—these big white pills that were supposed to help with the dread. I wondered when these would start to work, since none of the others had. I drove down the road to the campus where I taught. It was not lost on me that the small town I lived in very much resembled the small town where I had grown up. It was a dull place situated along a river, just as the place where I had grown up had been a dull place situated along a river. Its best years were behind it, just as the best years were behind the town where I lived as a child. The houses that lined its quiet streets were like the houses I remembered, and scattered among these houses were plain brick apartment buildings like the plain brick apartment building I grew up in. I initially fled the backdrop of my upbringing so desperately, just to end up in this nearly identical place. Looking at the farmland lining the road, I laughed at the thought of Maria and me as girls, when we believed that New York City was the only place in the world worth living and if you ended up anywhere else you might as well be dead since the boredom would kill you.

I pulled into the quiet campus where I was to meet a colleague, Angelina, from the theater department, whom I had known for a few years and generally avoided. I didn’t like her so much, but she was awfully friendly to me and sometimes had good recommendations for movies. She wasn’t a very happy person, but then, neither was I. The only reason I was going to coffee with Angelina was because she said she had a project in mind and hoped I could be of help. She had won a grant that would take her back to the country she was from to stage a production of Medea.

Before the summer, Angelina had asked me to paint a triptych, three long panels exploring themes of madness and femininity, themes she hoped to emphasize in her play. My paintings would be used as a backdrop. I wasn’t going to do it and I agreed to meet her for coffee so I could tell her so. We sat down with our coffees, and she caught me up on her summer. She apologized for not making it to my party, but she had recently stopped drinking and found it difficult to be around alcohol so soon. Her entire family was made up of terrible, violent drunks and now that she was going home to stage this play, she had to be especially careful about her own drinking, which couldn’t be separated from that of her parents and grandparents. We spoke for nearly an hour before I realized that she hadn’t brought up the paintings and I hoped that she didn’t take my silence as acceptance. I tried to steer the conversation toward my busy schedule, but she didn’t get the hint. She wanted to talk instead about what was wrong with her students. A favorite subject of conversation, I was learning.

“I can’t stand this generation,” she said. “Teaching makes me so unhappy. I’m so relieved this opportunity came and that I’ll be away in the fall. I hope it isn’t too much to say this but… I was feeling rather suicidal this past year.”

I winced. She laughed and kept talking as though her admission were nothing. And I suppose it was nothing since she was in front of me in perfect health full of enough fervor to complain. The students took issue with the things she assigned. They wanted to make art without studying the past. At eighteen, they believed they were geniuses and that she was the stupid one for not giving them their due. Could I believe it? Their specific grievances were too frivolous to rehash and she didn’t bother to go into great detail.

I nodded because nodding made people feel listened to and gave them a sense of inclusion, but I wondered if she wasn’t the one who was being unreasonable or dogmatic. Which was not to say that she was, but you couldn’t rule it out, could you? Who knew how deep our self-delusions went? Personally, I let my students talk because I was curious about the shape of their generation’s problems, a shape that I’m sure resembled my silhouette against the blackboard. I knew my students thought I was too conservative, and I wanted to say to them that compared to my mother, I was a revolutionary. But I was careful about this impulse to defend myself, because no one was above critique.

Since I taught a painting class where I often expected students to critique one another, I felt I ought to embody the kind of humility I was asking of all of them. I ate my food and tried to participate in this conversation that I didn’t find interesting. Bored, I looked beyond my colleague’s shoulder at the oak trees outside the window and considered that decades ago, I must have looked at similar oak trees and felt just as dislocated and adrift as I did now, drinking that coffee. I stood up and told Angelina I had to go. I was sorry to be so abrupt, but I had to hurry because I was going out of town. It wasn’t a lie. I did have a train to the city to catch, but not for several hours. For now, I needed to be alone.

“Ruth, is everything alright?” she asked. I nodded and grabbed my car keys. She looked at me like I was strange.

I wandered in the woods for a while. These weren’t woods I could get lost in, like people do in stories, disappearing into the trees. I knew them too well. I walked to the north end of campus, where a philosopher was buried, and I looked at the trees that must have fed from her corpse once. I thought of my old friend Maria, and I could still see her face, vivid and unsmiling, hanging in my mind.

I came out from the woods and walked alongside the road, passing flocks of students dressed in loud clothing. They had such awful haircuts, but if that made them happy, then fine, what did I care? If some of the students I passed had been my own I wouldn’t have remembered them, that’s how dazed I was as I followed the gravel path back to my car. To think that once Maria and I were as young as these students and even younger, that once we did everything together happily. It was really all too much to think about, but I also couldn’t help thinking about it like the delightful, sharp pain of pressing a finger into a freshly bandaged wound.

Nearing my car, I noticed Angelina across the road, and she waved and shouted in my direction. I tried to hurry and keep walking with my head turned in hopes she would give up.

“Ruth!” she said, waving and running toward me. “I thought you were in a hurry. I didn’t say something to offend you, did I?”

She was standing right in front of me then, panting.

“No, no,” I said, “I wasn’t feeling well.”

“What’s wrong? Do you want me to walk you to the clinic?” She pointed in the direction of the small campus nurse’s office.

“Sorry, no, I’m feeling fine. I just had an idea for a painting suddenly and needed to be alone and jot it down.”

“Why didn’t you say! You’ve been thinking about the set. About the play. I completely forgot to mention it. Say, are you free right now? I got some early sketches from the woman who’s designing the costumes; she’s from the village I was born in. They’re somewhere here in my phone.”

“I’m sorry, I really do have to catch my train now. And I don’t think I’ll be able to do the backdrops for you after all.”

“Oh, so I did offend you. I shouldn’t have mentioned that I wanted to kill myself. Or the drinking. My wife always says unhappy people scare others away.”

“It isn’t anything you said. Don’t worry. I just don’t want to work with you,” I said and turned and walked to my car without saying goodbye. Angelina called after me.

“Where will I find another painter now? On such short notice.”

I didn’t look back and kept walking. When I got to my car, I saw that campus security had given me a ticket of one hundred dollars for blocking an emergency exit. I crumpled up the fine and threw it into my handbag. I drove home feeling uneasy. Back in my room, I stuffed underwear, a pair of high heels, two dresses, a cardigan, and a toothbrush in my weekend bag. When it came time to go to the station, I collected my luggage and went out to meet the taxi I’d scheduled. I watched the sun fall over the river as I waited for the Amtrak to Penn Station, and then rode another taxi to the restaurant where I met my husband and other strangers. We drank and ate oysters, then walked to my opening in a gallery staffed almost entirely by young interns in designer clothes. Going around like this, I forgot how poor I had been as a child. And Maria had been even poorer than I was. Poor, devout, ignorant, insular, reliable, modest, generous, beautiful people—a total thing of the past. None of them sat around the table eating oysters with me, that much I knew. I didn’t even like oysters.

As I walked through the brightly lit gallery, people congratulated me, and some asked for pictures. We stood in front of my paintings and smiled for the cellphone cameras. This show represented two years of work. Very physical work because my paintings were so large and because I worked without an assistant, but I couldn’t remember working on them. Wasn’t that strange? Lately, the paintings looked as though they’d been made by another person. Another person I didn’t know. Minor works by a minor talent. But it was a very good time to be an African artist, my gallerist explained. So I should be glad. In the small crowd streaming out of the gallery, I saw the back of the head of a friend I used to know very well, who had consumed my thoughts all week, all day.

“Maria?” I asked. Drunk, I touched the woman’s shoulder and she recoiled. When this stranger saw it was me, she smiled and asked if I would be interested in an interview for her podcast about women artists. No, sorry. I’ve mistaken you for someone else, I said. I stumbled back, almost falling against one of the canvases, and several strangers rushed to help me back to my feet. My gallerist, a tall, white-haired, fit man with large, round glasses, pulled me to the corner. He was smiling and I realized he was trying to help me save face, spare me embarrassment.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m fine, but I have to go now.”

I turned out of the gallery without saying goodbye, forgetting the people I came with, still holding my plastic cup of lukewarm champagne. I walked for however long up Canal Street. There were tall men there, Senegalese, totally modelesque, selling fake Chanel bags. They had them lined up on the street neatly atop white tarps. I felt that these men selling these fake designer goods on the street and the gallerist who sold my paintings were in essence doing the same kind of work and that if they were to switch places, no one would be able to notice the difference.

“I’ll give you a good price, sister,” a man selling wallets said. I smiled and nodded at him, pretending to look at the bags.

I knew that at that very moment, my gallerist was still back at the opening, working the room and securing a legacy for me, while I wandered the streets like a person without a name. Maybe I had been acting erratically, since everywhere I went people asked me if I was feeling okay, as you might ask an insane person as you led them gently back to a shared reality. I started to sweat as I walked, and I took off the blouse I was wearing over my thin dress and put it in my bag. My chest, shoulders, and legs were bare and covered with sweat and I was reminded of a recurring dream I had had for years of walking around the streets of a strange town naked, while everyone pretended not to see me.

Looking up, I saw that I was standing by the doors of a church called Most Precious Blood. I hurried across the street, feeling I would be found out if I went inside. Found out for what? Once across the street, I felt a strong urge to go into the church and I doubled back, unable to keep myself from walking up the marble steps and into the brightly lit cathedral where sculptures of the Virgin and angels hung above the lectern, their color as vivid as the day they were painted. The pews were filled with believers, mostly old women in long, plain dresses and flesh-colored stockings. I sat down so as not to fall. I was still holding the wine I took from my opening. I drank it and crushed the empty cup into my purse. I felt like a child, like one of God’s many embittered children, desperate for love. It wasn’t any comfort that all around the world, at this very moment, there were expectant people like me and these pious old women, sitting down in churches like this one to contemplate their deaths, their disappointments, all the mercies they’d been granted, all the people they were estranged from, all their unanswered prayers. Maybe some of the women sitting here in the pews were remorseless abusers with shaking sons like Moser’s mother. Maybe some of them were violent drunks like Angelina’s relatives in her village. Maybe some of them were very afraid like me. Someone sitting behind me tapped my shoulder. I turned around and saw an older woman holding out a black scarf to me.

“Cover your shoulders,” she said. I apologized and wrapped the scarf around myself. The organ started to play, and the candle and cross bearers entered from behind a partition and the priest followed and I was ten years old dressed in my starched uniform, crossing myself with small hands. Suddenly I was in an early place, before I ever made a painting or knew a man.

I stared down at the white stone floors, and they were like the floors that lined the school I went to when I was a girl. It was a middling, old K–12 school for the religious education of girls. The tuition was low compared to other private schools in Rhode Island—no more than six thousand a year, one grand after the scholarship. It was important I go there.

My mother explained that at public school, Black children fell through the cracks. Private school was much better, since they didn’t let children fall through the cracks. There was order. There was a structure to hold you as a noose holds the person wearing it. And that was good. I had to do everything my mother did because that was how it was. Each year, I posed for a photograph in my uniform that was sent to the Diocese of Rhode Island with a letter thanking them for their generosity. Would they be happy with the kind of adult their charity yielded? I pulled the scarf tighter around myself.

The stories, or the truths, of my childhood were lost in that ordinary, corrosive tedium that was time, that was my life. But the school was still right there on the same avenue just as it had been thirty years ago, painted white, just like the exterior of this church. There were some places for which rescue is impossible. It was said of many places and of even more people in the world of my upbringing that there was nothing that could be done. We seemed to address one another with an everlasting shrug, and if there were any permanent way that our childhoods were violated by our teachers, it was through their cynicism, which touched all of us. It was difficult to feel a part of my generation when so much of my education was organized by such atavistic tendencies and values. In my youth, I lived so much in a past that was decades and decades older than I was. I suppose this was one of the real ambitions of Christian schools, to slow time down for their pupils, to move more slowly than the world. But a person’s will was easily overcome by those lagging histories, and I don’t know if I will ever be myself.

After the mass, the priest sent us off with a blessing. The women filed out of the pews, their heads slightly bowed. I pulled the scarf off my shoulders to return it to the woman behind me, but she had already left. I started to walk back to the hotel but grew tired. I hailed a taxi, even though it wasn’t a long way. I couldn’t walk any farther. Up in my room, I checked my cellphone and saw that my husband had called and texted. As had my gallerist. He was throwing an after-party at a nearby bar in my honor. A big party, open bar. Lots of fun. Every last one of my paintings sold. It was cause for celebration. I was the woman of the hour. Everyone wanted to see me. Did I want them to order for me? Did I want coke? Ketamine? Where was I? Was everything alright? I undressed and then I swallowed two small yellow pills, antihistamines for sleep, washed down with a cup of tap water. I said a quick prayer, for what, I didn’t know.

I started the story from the beginning before falling asleep.

IT WAS LATE August. Girls and their mothers queued up in the little storefront on Pawtucket Avenue for new cardigans and polos. That particular Saturday morning, the line stretched out the door. I saw a girl there standing under the shadow of her mother: a tall, frail, light-skinned woman, . . .