Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. A new novel follows two women on their journey through a lifetime of friendship. Ruth and Marie meet as children in Rhode Island and instantly become best friends. They connect over being the only two Black girls at their private Catholic school, and they continue this bond through college. The story is told through Ruth's eyes, and we see soon that her friendship with Maria starts to turn into a bit of an obsession. When both Ruth and Maria move to New York City in the '90s, they find themselves both navigating the art world, but as Maria's career starts to take off while Ruth's stalls, tensions begin to enter the relationship.

Joining me now to discuss her debut novel, Lonely Crowds, is author Stephanie Wambugu. So nice to meet you, Stephanie.

Stephanie: So nice to meet you.

Alison Stewart: This book is told from one girl's perspective, Ruth's.

Stephanie: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Where is she in her life when we meet her?

Stephanie: It's not explicit, but she's, I would say, like in her late 30s, early 40s. She's working as a college professor. She's teaching painting to students. Looking back, it's like a retrospective glance on her childhood.

Alison Stewart: When did you decide that "I'm going to write this novel from Ruth's perspective"?

Stephanie: I just moved to New York City. I was starting grad school, and I just started to be preoccupied by this woman's voice. She came to me — I was describing it to someone — like someone walked down the street into my life, and I just-- She came sort of almost fully formed.

Alison Stewart: I have heard more authors say that. That the person just comes through them when they write. At that moment, do you write on a note card? Do you grab a napkin? Do you grab your voice notes? What happens when that happens to you?

Stephanie: I wish it were more glamorous, but I just grabbed my phone. I guess that's generally what I do if I have an idea when I'm out, and I don't have my computer or a piece of paper. I write on my phone. I was so consumed by her that I would constantly have ideas even when I was not sitting down to write. It felt like it really was the voice of a person speaking to me, and I would jot it down any way that I could.

Alison Stewart: When did Marie come into the picture?

Stephanie: I guess Maria was like--

Alison Stewart: Maria. Excuse me.

Stephanie: No, no, don't worry. She was a more minor character. I was explaining this at an event I did last night, and I think as I wrote it, she became more and more central because I thought the dynamic was the most interesting part of the book. I started to understand them as foils of one another. The more I wrote Ruth, the more Maria emerged as a character in contrast to her.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting. Maria was minor, but the more that Ruth became, well, obsessed with her, she became a more major character.

Stephanie: Yes. It's the nature of obsession, yes. [chuckles].

Alison Stewart: You mentioned this. In the first page of the book, you write Ruth says, "When I met Maria, I learned that without an obsession, life was impossible to live. I'd forgotten. Now I remembered." What about Maria is Ruth drawn to?

Stephanie: I think that she's self-possessed. There's a Saul Bellow story called the Silver Dish. It's talking about the relationship between a father and a son. The father is a selfish, absent parent. The son who's narrating the story says, "We love selfish people because they are willing to demand what we want." Maria kind of embodies that. That she's willing to demand things that Ruth will not. I think Ruth is drawn to her, I don't know, audacity, I guess.

Alison Stewart: What did you want to explore about the idea of obsession?

Stephanie: I wanted to explore the parallels between a vocation, an artist having a vocation, and being obsessed with a person, maybe romantically or platonically, and how the kind of personality that's maybe obsessive in love is maybe similar to the artist's spirit or the personality of an artist or writer.

Alison Stewart: What makes Ruth's life or personality one that makes her so willing to be obsessive?

Stephanie: I think she's willing to be swept up in other people's personal lives and other people's interiority. I was talking to a friend who described the book to me and said that although it's narrated through first person, there are moments where it seems like Ruth actually becomes a third-person narrator, describing the interiority of another person. She's willing to let herself be subsumed and completely swept up in other people's inner lives.

Alison Stewart: Okay. Say that one more time. Ruth speaks-- Say that again.

Stephanie: I hope I'm not speaking too quickly. She's narrated in first person, but Ruth gets so consumed by other people's lives that it's almost as though she's a third-person narrator-

Alison Stewart: Got you.

Stephanie: -narrating, say, her mother's interiority or narrating her father's inner life or something like that. She becomes marginal, and other characters become more central because of her fixation.

Alison Stewart: You dropped in there Saul Bellow as one of your references. Who else was a reference for this book?

Stephanie: Big influences for this book, but in general, I would say are Gary Indiana, the novelist and critic, and Toni Morrison. So many. I was rereading Tove Ditlevsen's Copenhagen Trilogy, which is-- It's not a bildungsroman, it's not a novel, but it's a three-part memoir that follows a woman from working-class Copenhagen as she goes from a poor family to becoming a poet. You can see the parallels between that book and mine. So many. In terms of living writers. I love the writer Vigdis Hjorth, Percival Everett — some of my big influences — and so many of my teachers I studied with at Columbia and Bard as well.

Alison Stewart: Oh, you must have had great teachers there.

Stephanie: Yes, I did. I did. I think you spoke to Gary Shteyngart recently.

Alison Stewart: Yes. [chuckles]

Stephanie: He's one of my professors.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Stephanie. I'm asking you to pronounce it correctly so I can at least try.

Stephanie: Stephanie Wambugu.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Stephanie Wambugu. Her new novel is called Lonely Crowds. Let's talk about school and Ruth and Maria, the only two Black girls at this school. They're on scholarship, they bond over this. This is where the infatuation starts. How does the relationship with Ruth keep her from making other friends?

Stephanie: It's such a good question. There were many opportunities where she could become close to other people. Times when she had romantic prospects or other people in her life who would have made fine friends, but I don't think that she was interested. Maybe she felt like no one had the allure that this one friend had, so she couldn't be bothered to seek out other people.

Alison Stewart: How does this affect Maria?

Stephanie: Well, I think that at different times Maria tries to hold her at arm's length, and is actually-- She doesn't want the attention or doesn't want to be the object of a person's fixation, which I think is-- An interesting aspect of the book to me is that it's all Ruth's subjectivity, so you never get to know what it means for Maria to have someone latch onto her in this way. It's not looking at the situation in an objective way. It's all told from one point of view.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about Ruth's family. They're really interesting characters. Her dad is kind and soft spoken. Her mom's a little more strict, a little bit of a harder shell. Her parents tend to argue a lot. How does this affect Ruth growing up?

Stephanie: I think that she feels that she's not really central, although she's an only child. I think she feels like the-- There's so much of the scenes in her home where she's really just narrating the conversations between her parents and the attention is not really directed on her. So much so that when Maria comes into their lives, it seems like that's when the parents start to parent and be attentive. They're more interested in Maria in a way than they are in their daughter.

Alison Stewart: We're going to ask you to read a passage. Could you set it up for us?

Stephanie: Yes. This is about 70 pages into the book. It's a scene where Maria has wandered off, and without spoiling anything, she returns to Ruth's family's home. It's just before the encounter where Ruth's mother is talking to a teacher from the school. I think maybe that's all the context you need.

Alison Stewart: Okay.

Stephanie: "My mother set the phone back on the hook and wrung her hands. No one spoke. We all just looked past one another, tending our own guilt as if we'd all colluded in something awful and we all knew it. I remember thinking then that that was how it must have felt to kill a person inadvertently. Like turning your back while bathing a toddler and finding they had drowned in the shallow water.

There wasn't anything that could be said. My mother felt responsible. She put a hand on my father's shoulder and on mine. The snow fell steadily outside the window, accumulating without any sense of what it was falling over. Just falling. It doesn't mean anything happened to her. Maria is smart. She could just be trying to get some attention. Children run away from home. They come back.

'You shouldn't give her false hope. If Maria's missing, it's better to rip the bandage off,' my father said. 'We all lose people. We lose everything and everyone. Things never stop getting taken away from us until even our bodies are taken away. Eventually, Ruth, we all die.'

'Will you be quiet?' my mother asked. 'I'm going to go to sleep. I've worked all week. We'll keep looking in the morning.'

My father told me I could stay awake with him on the couch. He figured I wouldn't be sleeping that night. My mother allowed it, cautioning him again against saying anything to worry me. But I couldn't be more worried than I was. I kept staring at the front door, hoping she would knock. If Maria had gone off on her own accord, were we the ones she was trying to get away from? Was there something wrong with my family that would make someone want to flee? And if so, why didn't I want to run off? Was it because there was also something wrong with me, and so this was where I belonged?

I followed my father to the sofa, watching him in the nightly routine of unfolding the mattress, securing its legs, pulling out the sheets, throwing the couch cushions down on the floor, unfolding the comforter, slowly smoothing it across the couch bed. Content with his work, he turned on the evening news. They were only concerned about the snow. No mention of Maria, of course, since we hadn't told anyone, not even Jocelyn, which seemed wise.

Her mind would invent something awful and conspiratorial, but the strange thing was, in that context, she might not sound so insane. Maybe we needed the insane in times of high stress to translate our contradictory impressions and concerns. If we listen to them, we might become legible to ourselves in all our uncertainty.

But I wasn't one to override my parents' guidance, not even my father's, which was hardly guidance. I sat down and stared at the screen. A red-haired weather woman smiled in the snow. Her smile, and it may as well have been a dispatch from another planet, said that everything was fine. We would have a white Christmas. All festivities would go on without interruption, without pause, rain or shine. No matter who came home or didn't come home, the world would keep eating and going shopping. Our hearts and smiles would be as pure as freshly fallen snow.

'It isn't because your mother and I don't love each other that I sleep out here. It's that I wake up in the night from bad dreams, and you shouldn't think that we don't care for you.'

Did he worry that I would run away too? He spoke without looking at me, watching the weather forecast, the small-town news items. I told him I didn't mind where they slept.

'You don't spend that much time in your father's house,' he said. 'When you count all your years, the married years, the working years, you only spend a short time with your parents. Then you go off to school and marry, and you never go back home, never.'

'I can visit. I'll visit you,' I said, sorry for him.

'You say that now, he said. 'The other day, I read in a magazine at my doctor's office about something called trauma. Horrible things happen to you as a child, and you never forget them. And they make you act the way you do. Make you become an alcoholic or get divorced.'

I thought, 'That's a lot of hog. That can't be right.' I told him I didn't know. I'd never heard of it. And I wondered, when Ruth is gone and she looks back, will she see this as a good time or a bad time? Was this trauma right now, tonight? Is it a trauma? 'No, I don't think so,' I said.

'Good. You might feel now that Maria running away is the worst thing to ever happen to you, but one day you'll forget it. Because the suffering never stops, Ruth. It never stops. There's a bit of mercy, and you think you're out free. Then you're hit with something else, and it's worse than everything that came before. You didn't ask to be born, and yet you have to bear it, blow after blow.'

I nodded, looking at my father in profile. If I were to draw him, I'd make his eyes oversized and glossy, teary and cartoonish, like a caricaturist would. He spoke as if he were on the verge of some great discovery, the fact that life was subjection to cruelty."

Alison Stewart: I'm going to ask you to stop for just a moment because I do have to make an announcement here.

The National Weather Service has issued a tornado warning for Somerset, New Jersey, Middlesex, New Jersey, beginning at 1:49 PM and ending at 2:19 PM. Again, the National Weather Service has issued a tornado warning for Somerset, New Jersey, and Middlesex, New Jersey, beginning at 1:49 PM and ending at 2:19 PM. Keep it tuned here to WNYC. A tornado warning means that a tornado has been sighted and there's a strong likelihood that a tornado could be imminent. If you are in any of the areas mentioned, you are advised to take shelter immediately until the threat has passed. Stay with WNYC for further information.

My guest is Stephanie Wambugu. She's joining me in studio to talk about her debut novel, Lonely Crowds. Maria is orphaned very young. Her mother dies, her father leaves. She's sent to live with her bipolar aunt. How did dealing with an ill guardian affect Maria's adult life?

Stephanie: I think she sees the world as a result of the way she was brought up as fundamentally unstable. I think that she feels that she has to be callous and demanding to get the things that she wants because her early needs were not met in a pretty straightforward way.

Alison Stewart: Maria eventually meets up with her dad, and it's-- Would you describe it as a difficult meeting?

Stephanie: Yes, absolutely. Yes.

Alison Stewart: She drags Ruth along with her without telling her that she's meeting her father.

Stephanie: Right.

Alison Stewart: How does Ruth feel about being sort of blindsided by this meeting?

Stephanie: I think in that scene, Ruth is just like a documentarian, and she feels she has this experience of watching someone have a really traumatic encounter. She's not really editorializing or qualifying it and saying, "This is how I feel." She's really just reporting what's happening. That was a really interesting scene to write because the emotion is quite high, and it's a tense and really fraught situation. The way that Ruth delivers it and the way that the girls respond in real time is to not really express emotion until, of course, they're alone again, then they are able to break down simultaneously.

Alison Stewart: We talk about their sexuality. Maria's the first one to come out as a lesbian, and it takes Ruth more time to discover who she is. How is she able to come to terms with her sexuality?

Stephanie: I don't know if she does, to be honest.

Alison Stewart: Say more about that.

Stephanie: I don't know that she ever-- Maybe she makes different kinds of disclosures about herself, but even by the end of the book, I don't think it's clear how self-expressive she is able to be about her sexuality. It remains ambiguous throughout the book.

Alison Stewart: We'll let people read the book to find out what happens.

Stephanie: Yes.

Alison Stewart: You were kind enough to give us five recommendations for our summer reading challenge. People are really, really into it, so I want to go through a few of them.

Stephanie: Okay, great.

Alison Stewart: For a classic, you recommend Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe. Can you tell us why?

Stephanie: I think it's a great, slim classic. It's an epistolary novel. It's a novel written in the form of letters. I think formally it's really interesting. It feels really timeless. Also, it's about obsessive unrequited love, so it felt fitting.

Alison Stewart: All right. Excellent. You recommend Horse Crazy by Gary Indiana for a novel set in New York City. Tell us about this.

Stephanie: Apart from being, I think, an excellent first novel, Gary Indiana is one of my biggest influences. It's kind of a New York City art world novel. He's a critic for the Village Voice, and the narrator of the novel is. I just think it's a perfect, perfect book. I bought it for so many people. It's so influential I couldn't help but put it on the list.

Alison Stewart: Is it partially inspirational for your book, Lonely Crowds?

Stephanie: Yes. Very much so.

Alison Stewart: I have here Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham for a recent debut novel. Tell us about this book.

Stephanie: For one thing, it's surprising that it's a debut novel because it's so elegant. Not that they can't be, but it's elegant and so sure of what it is. I feel the premise is so interesting. It's a story that's kind of ripped from the headlines in a way it follows-- It's a young man following who is-- It's basically Barack Obama on the campaign trail. It's just so well executed. It has really lyrical moments, but it has this wit and humor and irony. I think it's a great book by another critic.

Alison Stewart: For your memoir or biography, you recommend Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. How would you describe this book?

Stephanie: It's the memoir of a formerly enslaved man. I think one of the reasons I selected it is because I was rereading the opening page. What was so moving to me about it is that Frederick Douglass says, "I didn't know my birthday and I wasn't able to ask." I think that there's that kind of detail, that exposition of saying, "I've been stripped of my humanity to the point where I don't even know the day that I was born, and to ask, I would be met with punishment." I think it is incredible. That's just one of many moments in that book that you remember forever.

Alison Stewart: You recommend Flat Earth by Anika J. Levy.

Stephanie: Anika Jade Levy, yes.

Alison Stewart: Anika Jade Levy. It's a novel that hasn't come out yet, but it will be published in 2025.

Stephanie: Yes, in September.

Alison Stewart: What can readers remember about this book?

Stephanie: It's an excellent and, again, really compact book, but it's really rich and it's a very funny book. I think it feels very in line with the other books on this list, where it's able to balance a book like Horse Crazy or a book like Sorrows of Young Werther. It's able to balance intense emotionality with a light touch. It's a short book. Anika was actually up here in grad school, so I'm happy to see people start to have their books come out. It's great. It's very of the moment.

Alison Stewart: Since this is your debut novel, there are people who are listening who have debut novels in them. What advice would you give them?

Stephanie: I would say read much more than you write. I would say one of the best pieces of advice I received was to work in a bookstore. I think being a bookseller was incredibly helpful, and I just encountered so many books. Obviously, people have other day jobs, but if you can, spend time around booksellers and spend time with books. I think that's all the advice you need.

Alison Stewart: Stephanie Wambugu joined me in studio to discuss her debut novel, Lonely Crowds. Thank you so much for joining us, and congratulations on your novel.

Stephanie: Thank you so much. This is a pleasure.

Alison Stewart: I did want to mention once again the National Weather Service has issued a tornado warning for Somerset, New Jersey, and Middlesex, New Jersey. It's ending at 2:19 PM. A tornado warning means that a tornado has been sighted or there's a strong likelihood that a tornado could be imminent. If you are in any of the areas mentioned, you are advised to take shelter immediately until the threat has passed, and keep listening to WNYC.