BookBrowse Reviews Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein

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A woman finds healing from decades-old sexual trauma with the help of a supernaturally powerful Monica Lewinsky.

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Forty-year-old Jean is thrown into emotional upheaval when she receives an invitation to her former professor's retirement party. Because this isn't just any professor. Two decades earlier, on a study abroad trip he was supervising, Jean lost her virginity to him, and she's been unsure how to think about the incident ever since. After reading the invitation, she proceeds to get extremely drunk and dig through a box of her old things, where she finds a journal entry from that summer of 1998. In it, she wrote derisively of Monica Lewinsky, whose story was all over the news at the time (see Beyond the Book). Realizing now how similar their situations were, a distraught and intoxicated Jean cries aloud to Monica as if praying…and Monica hears her. The supernaturally powerful "Saint" Monica Lewinsky takes Jean on a journey though her past and helps her to see her trauma with fresh eyes.

The bulk of the story is told in first-person, present tense from the perspective of 19-year-old Jean, with commentary from Monica and modern-day Jean appearing as play-like dialogue at various points. This effective storytelling technique both puts the reader right in young Jean's head and incorporates a post-#MeToo perspective.

Young Jean very much sees herself as the pursuer in her relationship with David, her professor. She yearns for him, has detailed fantasies about him, and is the one who initiates their flirtation. More naïve than she'd like to admit, she doesn't see herself as a victim of an abuse of power. This is reinforced when her friends watch coverage of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal in the news and treat it as a punchline rather than an incident of exploitation. She doesn't stop to think about the vastly different positions she and David hold in the university hierarchy, or the discrepancy in their life experience.

By making Jean the instigator in this sexual relationship, author Julia Langbein complicates the story in a way that feels true to life. Jean is (technically) a consenting adult, but she is unable to foresee the consequences of their entanglement in the same way the older, more powerful David can—and less able to handle the fallout. It's a dynamic that mirrors many #MeToo stories, like that of Lewinsky and Clinton, and it's part of why Jean's trauma from that summer is so complex. She's neither a straightforward victim nor an equal participant.

The novel's chapters are interspersed with short vignettes about real Catholic female saints. The stories are often gruesome, featuring women's victimization. Some died preserving their virginity, while others led lives of painful penance for earlier sexual promiscuity. Their inclusion in this book acts in part as a commentary on the kinds of women society reveres, those who make chastity their highest priority. But there are also parallels drawn between them and Lewinsky. In their lives, many faced derision and mistreatment, becoming revered only much later.

Dear Monica Lewinsky is full of vivid descriptions that are poetic without being flowery or pretentious, and they're used to great effect. At one point, 40-year-old Jean looks at a cashier in his late teens, 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." The colorful metaphor makes Jean's next musing, wondering how David could have loved her at this age, all the more affecting.

This novel shows the huge difference in pre- and post-#MeToo understandings of sexual dynamics, but it also deftly portrays the gulf between late adolescence and middle age. At 19, Jean is both socially clever and academically sharp—but that doesn't make her wise beyond her years, a fact she will only realize decades later. With the help of her saintly new companion, she is able to look at her past with clearer eyes and offer kindness to her younger self. Readers, too, might find that they have come to revere Saint Monica Lewinsky.

This review first ran in the April 22, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.