Follow the Leader

Lonely Crowds

by Stephanie Wambugu

(Little, Brown and Company) 2025)

Lonely Crowds is a story written with gentle force, its prose often piercing and bittersweet. Stephanie Wambugu´s debut novel follows the complex and multifaceted relationship between two queer African-American girls, tracing their connection at a Catholic girls school in Rhode Island during the 1980s, and then continuing to a small progressive college in upstate New York before the two enter the competitive art world of 1990s New York City. The book explores themes of class, race, and sexual identity, and how these intersect and manifest differently in the lives of its two central characters.

Ruth is the only child of immigrant parents originally from Kenya, who both seem perpetually exhausted and hard-working, yet are genuinely loving and well-meaning. They are doing everything possible to provide their child with opportuninties, including sending her to a private Catholic girls school so Ruth can get a solid education and go to a good college to study for some kind of stable profession. While doing her best to obediently follow the rules of the intimidating nuns, Ruth encounters Maria, a classmate who challenges her to think for herself. Maria is given a lot of leeway by her legal guardian, an aunt who suffers from a mental illness that she tells Ruth about casually shortly after meeting. A rebel who is frequently questioning the authority of the school, Maria models a kind of fiesty independence of thought, causing Ruth to examine her own devotion what people expect of her. Through her relationship with Maria, the trajectory of her life is irrevocably changed.

Ruth follows her friend to art school, and then later to New York City. Throughout the book, their lives become entangled on multiple levels: they are still friends, but also become artistic competitors; Maria calls Ruth when she is in desperate need of emotional support, but then can vanish for days or weeks afterwards to work on her art; they have sex, and says she wants to be with Ruth, but Maria always returns to her white girlfriend. Lonely Crowds primarly follows Ruth´s experience, and her perception of Maria transforms as the novel unfolds. Wambugu astutely captures the sweetness as well as the sting of two women who have known each other since they were young. The erotic tension is never expressed in a healthy or celebratory way, but is no less important and vital to their adult lives. For better or for worse, Maria seems to perpetually offer a profound gravitational pull. No matter what she does, Ruth´s identity always seems to be in relation to her childhood friend--personally, emotionally, artistically. It´s a beautiful and moving novel which seems to emphasize the potency of key friendships within our lives, and how they can be more impactful than our parents or our most ardent lovers.

Stephanie Wambugu´s Lonely Crowds is available at the Bureau for General Services - Queer Division, the volunteer-run bookstore at the LGBT Community Center in Greenwich Village.

The book may also be purchased online by going here.