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

Until she imploded. In 2009, she had a relationship with another cook, the executive chef of the restaurant where she worked, a sort of gentlemanly divorcé who put work before everything. He was well-meaning but exhausted, and he broke up with her over pastrami that he paid for, explaining that he was overwhelmed, which anyone could see in his stoop, in the purple hammocks under his eyes. He knew nothing of David, the man who had come ten years before and broken all of Jean's bones just as they were hardening. So when the executive chef cut off their relationship, he shattered her along the old fracture lines. Another woman might have taken it reasonably, gotten shit-faced, keyed his car, spent a week crying. But Jean saw that she would never get it right, that she was always doomed: a pest, bothersome, easy, not worthy of the center but pushed to the margin, not a partner for the day but a mistake in the night, not good but greedy. She had to leave, not just kitchens but her life, her skin. She had to find her way, if not back, then elsewhere. She imagined herself boiled like a pickling jar, sterilized. With ten years of knowledge accumulated in her mind, in her hands, in the fine, diagnostic organ of her tongue, having earned the high regard of some of the city's best cooks, she quit.

A period of intense darkness lasted almost a year; she was jobless, lost, desperately trying to purge herself of her sickening drives, of her addiction to the urgent touch, the thrilled palate. At nearly thirty years old, she crashed with her mother, a lifelong dieter, whose habits of self-denial suddenly suited Jean. Special K was the woodchip that might scrape her clean; low-fat cottage cheese squeaked against her teeth, lactating a sour, soapy water. A job-search website identified her language skills and sent her to assist a certified translator at the federal courthouse in Manhattan. The first time she entered the courtroom, she found a pale linoleum heaven: dead, sterile, the opposite of a kitchen, bright and odorless, no one fuckable and nothing delicious. Safe.

I will tell you that she could have been an astronaut, alone in the amicrobial void, all shiny tools and mineral dust and pee that floats up, and she would not have been safe. When they get to you young, they're in your blood, in your brain stem. Like Jonah, you're a fool to run. Horrified by her own compulsions, she still fantasized about David, tried to keep him a constant in her mind, to retain the timbre of his voice from so long ago, to lick the old bones of the phrases she'd saved for licking: "You were wonderful, Jean." "How do you know how to do this, Jean?" She refreshed memories with fantasy, put him in scenes art-directed like a Merchant Ivory film: ecru hotel suites, train compartments where silver rattled, a thatched cottage out of Jane Austen's England except with wall-thumping simultaneous orgasms.

Even after she met a nurse at a christening in 2010 and married him (she's doing her best!), she always returns to the well where fantasies of David's affection pool, ready to be slurped up for instant, guilty gratification. But something has happened now, over the past few years: The well is polluted. She tries to pull David out of the armoire of her erotic props and set him up all ready to go in the four-poster bed in the stone room with her crawling toward him on the floor with her big young waterbed boobs swaying, and he'll say, in her own fantasy, "I don't think we should do this anymore—don't you understand that I fucked you up? It doesn't feel very feminist." Take your pants off, for fuck's sake! screams her subconscious like an angry director with a bullhorn on an expensive set. But the celluloid stand-in shakes his head and moves to get dressed.

The trade-off—he hurt and humiliated her, but he cannot be removed from the white-hot center of her deepest mental pleasures—may be a terrible bargain, but it has always been hers to make.

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.