The Most Dangerous Kind of Friendship

The English novelist E. M. Forster believed that people know the characters in the novels they read better than they know one another. In fiction, he argued, a character’s true nature and deepest secrets are plainly available, whereas “mutual secrecy” is “one of the conditions of life upon this globe.” This idea is strikingly isolating. Can it possibly be true?

By the end of Stephanie Wambugu’s debut novel, Lonely Crowds, I could see where Forster was coming from. Following the decades-long convolutions of an intense and volatile friendship between two women, Ruth and Maria, Lonely Crowds poses similar questions about the limits of personal relationships. As the girls grow older and their unhealthy childhood patterns repeat in adulthood, their friendship begins to seem more dangerous than idyllic. Perhaps the most prevailing myth about childhood friends is that they know each other completely and love each other best. Wambugu counters such sentimentalism by revealing the many secrets and misunderstandings at the core of Ruth and Maria’s friendship. In their world, a lifelong bond is not a comfort but a liability.

Lonely Crowds begins in the contemporary present with Ruth, as an adult, seeming very lost at her own birthday party. As the novel’s title suggests, a crowd full of people can be a remarkably lonely place. “That Maria wasn’t here at the party was a source of great distress,” Ruth thinks, blowing out the candles. Ruth recalls that when she met Maria years ago, “I learned that without an obsession life was impossible to live. I’d forgotten. Now, I remembered.” Despite her success as an art professor and painter, Ruth feels adrift and bitter. She thinks she sees Maria everywhere. As she falls asleep the night after her party, she recollects her history with Maria, starting from the beginning.

Ruth’s obsession with Maria sparks from their first encounter, in a uniform shop for the Catholic school where they will soon be classmates. The scene is a small spectacle of shame: Ruth watches while Maria’s aunt tries to buy a uniform for Maria on layaway, promising to pay when her disability check comes through. The owner refuses and castigates Maria’s aunt in front of a long line of customers, throwing the two of them out of the store. As they leave, Ruth makes eye contact, and Maria “looked back at me as she crossed the threshold, wide black eyes, perfect. Then she was gone. I felt doomed.” Ruth decides she will befriend the girl at her new school and spends the rest of the summer besotted with the idea.

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Maria and Ruth meet again on the first day of third grade at Our Lady in Providence, Rhode Island, where the two are the only Black girls in their class. They’re the same age, but to Ruth, Maria seems much older and wiser. During their first real conversation at school, Maria brags about her pearl earrings, a gift from a teacher, offering to let Ruth borrow them if she’s careful. “Oh, I’m not careful,” Ruth responds. “I’m careless.” Her utterly honest response demonstrates Wambugu’s knack for capturing the humor of childish intransigence on the page. But the scene also looms large for young Ruth: Maria’s earrings represent the mysterious world of adults, one that Ruth is hungry to learn more about. That the gift is inappropriate simply does not register for her.

Ruth is an only child, sheltered by her parents, who are Kenyan immigrants to a working-class neighborhood in Pawtucket, outside of Providence. Her mother values hard work and minding one’s own business, while her father is “lonely, mercurial, romantic,” often changing jobs and exacerbating marital tensions. Ruth’s upbringing is strict but stable. Maria lives with her aunt, who is severely bipolar, after her mother’s death by suicide.

The girls’ first playdate sets the stage for the uneven dynamic they’ll share for the rest of their friendship. After inviting Maria home from school with her, Ruth reminds herself to “come across as measured, impassive, and confident.” By the end of supper, Maria’s politeness and intelligence have charmed Ruth’s parents. But the success of the evening is punctured when Maria, as she is leaving, turns around to ask Ruth, “What’s your name again?”

Although Ruth never tells the reader how she feels about the question, nor how she responds, the moment feels pivotal, capturing how Ruth’s earnestness and longing are so often met with coolness, even rejection. But she soon wins Maria over, and eventually Maria comes to be a part of Ruth’s family. Like her biblical namesake, Ruth is loyal and steadfast to her friend, while Maria is independent and creative, often controlling the narrative of their relationship and even determining their future trajectories: Maria is an extrovert, so Ruth must be an introvert. Maria is the type to never settle down, while Ruth is going to get married. Ruth always looks to Maria for advice and approval, and Maria’s responses to her vary among love, tolerance, and disgust. Reading scene after scene in which Ruth is so passive can be frustrating. She is content to be molded by Maria, unaware of the danger: She is becoming a person who knows herself only in relation to her friend.

When Maria decides she wants to be an artist in New York, the girls both apply to and get into Bard College, where Ruth takes up painting and Maria studies film. Maria sees this moment as her great escape from bleak Pawtucket, while Ruth worries that she, too, is part of the past that her friend wants to leave behind. Maria is clear about one thing. “When we go to school, we have to go our own way,” she tells Ruth. “We don’t have to be together all the time. We still can be close and be … separate.”

In college, Ruth and Maria do pursue different paths and new relationships. The biggest test of their friendship comes when they move to New York City after graduation and both try to make it in the art world of the 1990s. Their childhood competitiveness grows into an adult professional envy: Where Maria meets easy success as a filmmaker, Ruth’s path is more complicated, riddled with self-doubt and jealousy. Like a piece of cherished childhood clothing, their friendship appears more and more ill-fitting as time passes. The two grow apart, not because they change, but because they do not; they are stuck in the same dynamics, unable to find new ways to connect to each other.

Read: A film that captures a ‘friend breakup’

As the novel progresses, Ruth often stops existing on the page, overtaken by her endless loops of fixation on the thoughts and feelings of others. In part because the reader has no insight into  Maria’s perspective, Ruth’s narrative voice makes it hard to discern what either woman gets from their friendship, or even the extent to which they know each other at all. I don’t believe that Maria enjoys Ruth’s overbearing attention, or that Ruth likes being consistently rejected by Maria. After a final confrontation, the women appear to accept their incompatibility, and their friendship becomes something more distant. But even when Ruth gets a prestigious fellowship at Bard and moves upstate with her new husband, her obsession with Maria never really disappears; it just morphs.

If Ruth never stands up to Maria, it’s because nothing is worth the risk of losing her. When they’re teenagers, Maria asks Ruth to throw away the many portraits that Ruth painted of her; Ruth complies. “I had a hard time forgiving her for that,” Ruth reflects, though she never tells that to Maria. Decades later, in New York, Maria uses footage of Ruth in a video without asking her permission. Watching herself on-screen, Ruth is unable to “shake the feeling that there was a violent thrust to the video and that something had been done to me that I hadn’t asked for.” Yet when Maria asks her what she thinks, Ruth demurs, telling Maria the piece is “cool.” “I would have been content spending the rest of my life walking behind her,” she thinks, as the two women cross the gallery back to their partners. It’s an insight that makes the risk of their friendship clear: For Ruth, losing her friend would mean losing herself, too.