Editorial Content for Dear Monica Lewinsky
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It’s the spring of 2019, and forty-something Jean Dornan receives a most unexpected invitation. Her one-time history professor, David Harwell, is retiring from the prestigious French research institute where he’s been the director for the past 20 years. Jean has been invited to the celebration, which will include a Festschrift, a collection of writings in praise of the honoree.
All of a sudden, the summer of 1998, when Jean was a rising junior at Rutgers and David was her professor on a summer study abroad program, comes flooding back. In a rush, she realizes the extent to which that summer --- and the sexual relationship she had with him --- reshaped the entire course of her life.
"...[a] whip-smart, funny and bitingly self-aware second novel... Immersive, thought-provoking and often wickedly funny, DEAR MONICA LEWINSKY is a fierce new feminist classic."
Turning back to her diaries, Jean also remembers that summer as being the “Summer of Monica,” when newspapers and gossip magazines alike were full of salacious details about Bill Clinton’s inappropriate relationship with a young White House staffer. Jean’s college diaries were no exception. Paging through them to recollect that time in her own life, she is aghast to see that she once called Monica Lewinsky a “skanky intern.” Now, years later, she realizes how much she had in common with Monica, and how little Monica deserved the ridicule and ire with which she was received at the time.
Jean calls out to Monica…and Monica (or a saintly version of her) answers. This Monica “became exalted as the patron saint of those who suffer venal public shaming and patriarchal cruelty.” When she exhorts Monica, an all-powerful Monica invites her to look more closely at her own past, through the lens not only of her maturity but of a different era --- one that, thanks to #MeToo, is more attuned to the way power dynamics affect not only interpersonal relationships but also the fallout from them.
The bulk of Julia Langbein’s whip-smart, funny and bitingly self-aware second novel is composed of a present-tense chronicle of Jean’s pivotal 19th year. From time to time, present-day Jean, accompanied by a witheringly wise Monica, interject commentary, styled like dialogue in a play. By reliving her experience --- watching her youthful self pursue David and then be shunned and shamed by him --- Jean becomes, for the first time, fully aware of the role that their power imbalance played in how their relationship developed and fell apart.
Episodes from that summer (which also include plenty of satirical sendups of academic competition as Jean and her classmates document a series of rural French churches) are interspersed with short biographies of real-life female Christian saints from throughout history, many of whom were victims of sexual predation, violence, suspicion or all of the above. These are cleverly bookmarked by similarly worded biographies of “Saint Monica” and “Jean of Hoboken,” firmly placing these two figures in a patriarchal tradition of women who are scorned, ritually shamed and only belatedly venerated.
Immersive, thought-provoking and often wickedly funny, DEAR MONICA LEWINSKY is a fierce new feminist classic.
Teaser
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. In a frenzy of guilt and regret, Jean finds herself praying to Monica Lewinsky for forgiveness as if she were a secular saint. To Jean’s shock, Saint Monica appears and guides Jean like the Ghost of Christmas Past back to the summer of 1998.
Promo
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. In a frenzy of guilt and regret, Jean finds herself praying to Monica Lewinsky for forgiveness as if she were a secular saint. To Jean’s shock, Saint Monica appears and guides Jean like the Ghost of Christmas Past back to the summer of 1998.
About the Book
From the acclaimed author of AMERICAN MERMAID 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.
Audiobook available; read by Alex Sarrigeorgiou, Louisa Zhu and Patti Murin
