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

Michael marveled at her thirst for wine later that night. She brushed it off:

"This Sangiovese goes so well with pizza."

When he talked about the hospital—he's a nurse—she pretended to listen, dispensing ready-made replies like "Maybe you can delegate more."

She has never told him about what happened the summer before her junior year of college because she cannot find words that suit the truth. Affair—too glamorous and grown up. Relationship—too stable, with a ship in the word, the inhabiting together of a big, wooden noun. Sexual impropriety—too legalese and small, like shoplifting, like bad manners, like this man had burped at the table with a hand on her ass. Molested—too Catholic church, not fun enough. But fun isn't the word, either. Nothing is the word.

No words, only the feeling of coming into existence, of the hard plastic casings of her organs popping inside like grapes, good, warm, in their time, running with the juice they were meant to give. All the fallout, all the pain that came with its calamitous end, had been worth it for the sweet center, hadn't it? Her last two years of college had been berserk, unfocused, humiliating. But that's college, riiiiight? You partied too much, you woke up in recycling bins and laughed about it, relishing the colorful contrast it would make with your stable, productive future.

But what if the future never stabilized?

She graduated with grades that were beneath her and a major—Modern Languages—that seemed like code for "just talking." At first she could argue that college didn't matter, that her real talent was cooking, anyway, and out of the three people who had trained with her at Le Cheval d'Or the summer after her senior year, she was the only one the restaurant hired. She learned hygiene codes and how to bond a broken sauce, fell easily into cooks' camaraderie, and kept her shit together in the service crush. And the early 2000s were thrilling years in New York kitchens, when high-end food was becoming not just refined but delicious; when you'd serve bone marrow—beyond blood, the brown gel that makes blood, what the dog knows to gnaw for—with gros sel and rough bread to people in Theory blazers. Jean loved it, could not imagine a life spent away from little pinches, little metal teaspoons all day long of some torched meat, some bashed herb, all these carefully waged violences come good on the tongue.

All the while, an infection from long ago was doing its work—not a physical one, although she worried about her body as she began to puff up from booze and the kind of snacks that only line cooks make (sweetbread lollipops; deep-fried strawberries; shooters of cold cream, vodka, and orgeat: They treated the kitchen like a meth lab for flavor). She had strategies for managing her attractiveness: skipping meals, running obsessively. But she couldn't starve or outrun the doubts that undermined her existence. Would she be a lawyer or an architect, would she have kids and a sturdy umbrella, if her filthy little sex scandal hadn't turned her toward restaurant kitchens, this nocturnal, underground arena full of grab-ass men and gratuitous butter? Maybe I cook because I'm a people-pleaser. Maybe I cook because I'm a pig. Maybe I was destined to do something more sustainable and cerebral, but I fucked it up. It was easy to be struck with these doubts while doing a bump of coke before the brunch rush, or waking up next to Shlomo the Garnish King in a part of Brooklyn so far out she thought she'd pass fur traders on her way home.

Jean is no dummy. She has always known that David is involved in the self-doubt that accompanies all her choices. And even so, for this first decade out of college, she managed to think of what had happened between them as painful but affirmative, proof of her attractiveness, of her femininity; an unusual but necessary introduction to the sour colors and thick breath and delicious rot that lay beyond innocence.

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.