Excerpt from Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Chapter 1

THURSDAY, APRIL 18, 2019

JEAN RECEIVES A MESSAGE

The day that Jean Dornan first prayed to me began for her like any other—with a coffee and a soft-boiled egg and an unspeakable sense of dread. Well, unspeakable in that she never speaks about it, but she could describe its texture in detail: She might be doing something normal, washing her face or spacing out on the train, and suddenly her stomach drops and she thinks, I have to get back. But back where? To some juncture where she went wrong.

Mornings, she feels most acutely the pressure to stuff her dead day like a taxidermist into a convincing position.

"Bye, Jeannie," her husband called up from the front door.

"Bye, Michael," she responded sweetly, imagined divorcing him, and felt fine about it.

See, none of your choices make any sense to you. I know this rot, have lived it—this deepening suspicion that your existence is a remnant of an event long since concluded. Maybe you foolishly wandered away from your path. Or maybe—maybe you were tricked.

So on this Thursday, Jean sat at the kitchen table and idly looked at her phone. And suddenly, she saw an email that gave her a shock. She had to put the phone down and peer into it as if it were a well. She read the whole email. A racy heat swirled in her sternum and flooded her cheeks; a feeling of doing something wrong, getting caught. The past had been swung into her body like the dull end of a big tree. She murmured his name aloud in disbelief, and his name, voiced, poured out of her with the alarming materiality of blood, of a substance usually withheld.

"David."

Stunned, she drifted into the guest room, which was cluttered with empty suitcases and storage bins. She found her old chef's kit, slipped out the boning knife, and slit open boxes, sliced tape. Her fingers moved quickly. She knew what she was looking for. She shoved aside the wedding album, dug past the tax forms, went further and further back in time. Finally she reached the right sedimentary depth, the right era: She found some photographs, flicked through them, and brought one—a group shot—up close to her face. A dozen or so people, smiling into the bright sun in front of the ivy-covered stone façade of a castle in France. He stood to one side of the group, his public self, affable, enthused. She opened a spiral notebook, filled with flowing script that sometimes gave way to doodles—of people, of shapes; a thick cross drawn in wobbly black pen, dotted with markings.

She thought she knew the story, roughly, its essential beats: the silly girl, the greedy man, the setting so lush and seductive that all of life after had seemed like the hallway outside a theater. But then she settled down to read. And after some time, she encountered something surprising, a figure she had forgotten, lurking in the archive of her notes: me.

This morning I found everyone in the salon watching yesterday's news from home. Clinton admitted on TV to an affair in the White House with a skanky intern, and everyone was saying how stupid they were.

Putting down the diary, eyes closed, Jean made a noise that started as a low moan, like a choir girl holding the bass line, and ended in a high scream that she strained to stifle in her throat.

Then, in a weak pile, she whimpered, "You idiot."

This time she meant herself, not me.

Chapter 2

Jean's day went on in a braid: She tried to read a book, but the memories of that summer cut before her eyes and she had to return to the photos. She put on sneakers and ran, literally ran out of the house as if she could escape her mind like some folk fool, like Jonah, who thought almighty God couldn't track him to Spain. She came back from running clapping her hands as if she were a new person named Trudy from Wichita who only smiles—it was honestly adorable. But the weaving wouldn't stop and in came the thick thread of the past and soon she was crying on the floor or else sitting at her desk, looking nowhere with eyes that were opaque, that saw only inward, like the chalky orbs of an ancient bust.

Excerpted from Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein. Copyright © 2026 by Julia Langbein. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.