Dear Monica Lewinsky

From the acclaimed author of American Mermaid (“Sublime”—NYTBR) comes a wise, funny, and wildly original examination of female desire and the price women pay for giving in to their appetites. A LIT HUB MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR “A wild, wonderful essential novel.” —Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had “Truly funny.”—Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here Forty-year-old Jean Dornan cannot escape the summer of 1998, when, as a college student studying abroad in France, she embarked on an inappropriate relationship with her professor. Now, decades later, when that professor contacts her out of the blue with an invitation to his retirement ceremony, Jean’s long-standing malaise becomes an emotional crisis. Desperate to understand why this relationship derailed her life so completely, she begins rereading her old diaries and is shocked to realize that her own disastrous affair occurred during the summer of the Lewinsky scandal, yet she never saw the parallels. In a frenzy of guilt and regret, Jean finds herself praying to Monica Lewinsky for forgiveness as if she were a secular saint, a figure of both suffering and sympathy. To Jean’s shock, Saint Monica appears—powerful, radiant, wise, and witty—and guides Jean like the Ghost of Christmas Past back to the summer of 1998. Had Jean merely been naive and stupid, as she has told herself for so long? Was it sheer weakness that led her into the affair? Or will Jean, with Saint Monica by her side, see past blame to the beauty of her younger self’s search for pleasure, connection, and transcendence? Told in flashbacks of those sunlit six weeks in France, replete with Saint Monica’s flinty, fiery insights and interspersed with retellings of the lives of real historical martyrs, Dear Monica Lewinsky is a tender, hilarious, and wholly original examination of desire and its costs, of appetite and its denial, and of certain defeat and surprise renewal. It asks what grace and forgiveness might look like both in our own individual lives and as a society.

JULIA LANGBEIN holds a doctorate in art history and is the author of the novel American Mermaid as well as a nonfiction book about comic art criticism. She has written about food, art, and travel for Bon Appétit, Gourmet, Eater, Salon, Frieze, and other publications, and received a 2024 James Beard Foundation Journalism Award. A native of Chicago, she lives outside of Paris with her family.