Love and hate are less opposites than counterparts. As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips once put it, love and hate ‘mutually inform each other’: they are ‘interdependent in the sense that you can’t have one without the other’. Obsession is common to both lovers and enemies. They lie awake at night, drafting remarks, imagining reactions, picturing the other in their thoughts.

Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds is a psychologically acute portrait of this kind of infatuation, a tale of jealous devotion as well as devoted jealousy. Feeling ‘dislocated and adrift’ despite the comparative ease of her successful career as a painter, the narrator, Ruth, looks back on her decades-long friendship with the elusive and defiant Maria, the only other black girl in her class at a private Catholic school in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. When they first meet, Maria is living with a bipolar aunt; her father is a deadbeat living somewhere in New York, her mother died by suicide. Ruth is initially attracted to Maria for her lack of shame, but others are charmed by her intelligence and talent as a singer. It’s these latter qualities that lead Ruth’s Kenyan immigrant parents to practically take Maria in. They also attract the ambiguously inappropriate attentions of the school’s music teacher, Mr Fournier. 

From Pawtucket the girls go on to Bard College, and from there to the New York art scene. Ruth’s ‘overwhelming fixation’ with Maria is largely innocent: she depends on Maria for confidence and encouragement. But when Maria finds success as a video artist and short-film director, Ruth’s feelings are tempered