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A Novel
by Julia Langbein
Book Reviewed by:From the acclaimed author of American Mermaid ("I loved it…and have never read anything like it"—Elizabeth Gilbert) comes a wise, funny, and wildly original examination of female desire and the price women pay for giving in to their appetites—starring an apparition of Monica Lewinsky.
Forty-five-year-old Jean Dornan cannot escape the shadow of something she did several decades ago. On a study abroad program to France in the summer of 1998, she embarked on a deeply inappropriate relationship with her professor. When the professor contacts her out of the blue to invite her to his retirement ceremony, she is jolted out of her malaise and filled with the need to understand why the affair derailed her life.
Rereading her old diaries, she is shocked to realize her relationship with the professor occurred during the summer of the Lewinsky scandal, yet she never saw the parallels. In a frenzy of guilt and regret, she finds herself praying to Monica Lewinsky—as if she were some kind of secular saint, the patron of persecuted and demonized women, perhaps?—and begging Monica's forgiveness for not understanding everything they had in common. To her shock, Saint Monica appears to her—like a saucy Ghost of Christmas Past—and leads her back in time to reassess what happened. Had Jean merely been weak, stupid, blind, as she has told herself for years? What was it about her that led her into the affair? What did she really do that summer?
Told in flashbacks of those sunlit six weeks that changed Jean's life, interspersed with irreverent accounts of real female martyrs and visitations from Saint Monica offering insight about Jean's younger self, Dear Monica Lewinsky is a tender, hilarious, and thought-provoking examination of desire and how it shapes us. It is also a timely examination of what grace and forgiveness look like, in our lives and throughout history.
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...
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. 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. 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...continued
Full Review
(676 words)
(Reviewed by Jillian Bell).
Claire Lombardo, bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had and Same As It Ever Was
What a wild, wonderful essential novel this is. Julia Langbein has the uncanny ability to make a reader laugh out loud again and again while also laying bare — in her brilliant, singular way — the specific travail of being a young woman. Kevin Wilson, bestselling author of Nothing to See Here
Dear Monica Lewinsky is a fascinating novel about the past, reckoning with the most elusive and unknown element: the person you once were and still somehow continue to be. It's incredible that Julia Langbein navigates this territory with such humor, as this is a truly funny book, but also manages to show tenderness without losing that essential bite of pain.In Dear Monica Lewinsky, a fictionalized, supernaturally powerful version of Lewinsky helps a woman experiencing shame and confusion about a past sexual experience with a much older man. In real life, Lewinsky is an activist committed to fighting the shaming of women—and this career path is the direct result of her own trauma.
Lewinsky was a young intern at the White House in 1995 when she became sexually involved with then-president Bill Clinton. Reflecting on it years later in an essay for Vanity Fair, she wrote: "At the time—at least from my point of view—it was an authentic connection, with emotional intimacy, frequent visits, plans made, phone calls and gifts exchanged. In my early 20s, I was too young to ...
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