Julia Langbein
At a glance
From the acclaimed author of American Mermaid (“Sublime”—NYTBR) comes a wise, funny, and wildly original examination of female desire and the price women pay for giving in to their appetites.
Forty-year-old Jean Dornan cannot escape the summer of 1998, when, as a college student studying abroad in France, she embarked on an inappropriate relationship with her professor. Now, decades later, when that professor contacts her out of the blue with an invitation to his retirement ceremony, Jean’s long-standing malaise becomes an emotional crisis. Desperate to understand why this relationship derailed her life so completely, she begins rereading her old diaries and is shocked to realize that her own disastrous affair occurred during the summer of the Lewinsky scandal, yet she never saw the parallels.
In a frenzy of guilt and regret, Jean finds herself praying to Monica Lewinsky for forgiveness as if she were a secular saint, a figure of both suffering and sympathy. To Jean’s shock, Saint Monica appears—powerful, radiant, wise, and witty—and guides Jean like the Ghost of Christmas Past back to the summer of 1998. Had Jean merely been naive and stupid, as she has told herself for so long? Was it sheer weakness that led her into the affair? Or will Jean, with Saint Monica by her side, see past blame to the beauty of her younger self’s search for pleasure, connection, and transcendence?
Told in flashbacks of those sunlit six weeks in France, replete with Saint Monica’s flinty, fiery insights and interspersed with retellings of the lives of real historical martyrs, Dear Monica Lewinsky is a tender, hilarious, and wholly original examination of desire and its costs, of appetite and its denial, and of certain defeat and surprise renewal. It asks what grace and forgiveness might look like both in our own individual lives and as a society.
"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."
- Kevin Wilson, bestselling author of Nothing to See Here
"An original, tender, and outrageously funny novel about hunger, desire, and the vulnerable (sometimes shameful) moments that make us, Dear Monica Lewinsky is a miracle. With incomparable tact and warmth, Julia Langbein achieves the impossible: balancing humor, consequence, and an irresistible ensemble of personalities against the glittering backdrop of a French summer. Comic novels with heft are the rarest stars in the literary firmament, and this one burns as brightly as the sun.”
- Katy Hays, New York Times bestselling author of Saltwater
"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.”
- Claire Lombardo, bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had and Same As It Ever Was
Prologue - The Life of Saint Monica
Monica Lewinsky was born in 1973 to a noble family of Jews living in the American Empire. She grew up a beautiful and spirited girl and was given a rare position as a servant to the emperor in the heart of the imperial palace. The emperor himself was so taken with her that he began to entreat her with words and gifts to love him and to give him comfort and to kiss and touch him. Monica responded to the emperor’s entreaties and indeed felt a profound affection for the emperor, whom she came to know as a person when he put aside his crown and reclined with her and spoke of nothing at all.
Well, the emperor had many enemies, foremost among them a dogged Christian prosecutor named Kenneth. Kenneth hated the emperor because he imagined that the emperor had all the sex that Kenneth decided himself, and so he decried the emperor loudly as a man with no virtue, unfit to be ruler of the Americans.
When Kenneth found out that the emperor and this young noblewoman had kissed and caressed each other in the palace, he was overjoyed. He brought in a younger, prurient Christian assistant who himself loved to drink beer and to exercise his frustrated lust, and that licentious man was called Brett. When it came time for the emperor to be questioned under oath about what had passed between him and Monica, Brett argued that the most explicit questions be asked, and he wrote such questions as would make any good and private person blush to answer aloud. For how many times the young woman was digitally stimulated, and what was said between her and her lover, and how many times her breasts were exposed and caressed, and how many times and when and under what circumstances she had taken the emperor’s penis in her mouth to give him pleasure— these details were sussed out by the horny Christians, supposedly to prove that the emperor could not lead America. But America is the horniest place on Earth and loves to put its penis into people’s mouths, and the emperor was not shamed, and he held on to his throne, and the people moved on.
But the prurient Christian prosecutors continued to modify Monica Lewinsky, and gave all the details of her body and its pleasures and penetrations to the legislature, which released the tales of her sexual acts into the wind for no legal reason in the hopes that every person in the empire, and in the world, would read about each and every one of her private physical encounters in order to degrade her as weak, loose, and used, as a shameful accessory to the emperor’s own sin.
Was this book made in a petri dish, especially for Aardvark? Dear Monica Lewinsky is serving up everything we’re looking for in a novel: a feminist twist on the lives of holy women, a crash course in Medieval art + culture, a meditation on female hunger. This mock-hagiography of Monica Lewinsky is bolstered by the insertion of very real hagiographies of historical saints: women who were degraded and killed by lustful men, martyred for the crime of being desired.
The writing is sharp, fresh, and consistently funny, with every page brimming with witty observations about life, sensuality, and desire. For example, Jean describes lasagna—her seduction method of choice, baked for her much-older professor in a suggestive nod to the hot, gooey abundance of her own femininity—as a “hot sarcophagus of deliciousness,” and “a queen gisant…heat curling out of the hole you made as you cut her and pull her apart.” Her description simultaneously invokes a quasi-erotic indulgence and the esoteria of Medieval art (“gisant”), transcending the simplicity of pasta and charging it with a feast of connotations.
Inappropriate professor/student relationship.
