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

That's a secret. If you asked, she'd say she never thinks about him.

But she thinks about him more and more. Now she is forty—approaching the age he was—and when a twenty-year-old boy scans her almonds at Trader Joe's, she looks at him and thinks of the long interspecies distance between them, uncrossable: He is like a spotted salamander, a ropey caloric sinkhole whose skin is shiny with some adolescent slime and whose moves are quick and jerky and who looks at her with animal uncaring because she is, to him, some old brown horse. How could David have loved me when I was nineteen? she thinks, staring at the salamander in the Hawaiian shirt who has to ask twice if she wants her receipt.

"No, thank you."

"OK. Have a good day, ma'am."

Then what was it? Pure exploitation? Were my resources extracted? She imagines a pit in the earth, her soul a pretty ore, shimmering like eye shadow, there for the scraping.

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.