We know from the outset of Julia Langbein’s second novel, Dear Monica Lewinsky, that we’re in for something strange:
“A Life of Saint Monica,” the prologue is titled. “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…”
Lewinsky’s life and her role in a now infamous political scandal is portrayed as religious iconography. The author goes on to explain that “Saint Monica Lewinsky was consecrated by the collective force of the American conscience. … It is said that many women pray to her and that she is known to perform miracles.”
From there, the story is narrated by “Saint Monica” herself, who intercedes on behalf of one 40-year-old Jean Dornan. Jean exists in a frenzy of guilt and regret over the summer of 1998, when, as a young college student studying in France, she embarked on an inappropriate relationship with her art history professor. It was the same summer that Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton’s affair dominated the news.
With Monica’s help — and the charitable vantage point of hindsight — Jean revisits her summer abroad, and we get to know an entertaining cast of characters that includes competitive grad students, clueless undergrads, and a feckless prince who underwrites and houses the whole program at his castle in the French countryside. Jean looks back on that time in her life with a mixture of nostalgia and mortification. But Monica is there to guide Jean and encourage her to give herself some grace.
Peppered throughout the novel are short profiles of actual saints, most of them women who were killed trying to avoid sexual assault. We’re compelled to reconsider what we believe about ancient history, as well as about modern-day Hester Prynnes like Monica Lewinsky, who bore the brunt of cultural criticism until the #MeToo movement began to set the record straight.
“She is the vaporous embodiment of women told only to be beautiful and then damned for being hot,” Langbein writes, “told only to be nurturing and then damned for being sluts, told their hearts were the devil and their bodies were a trap.”
Dear Monica Lewinsky is part comedy, part fairy tale, part historical reckoning — a clever and creative work that will have you rethinking much of what you have come to believe.
