Dear Monica Lewinsky: A Guest Post by Julia Langbein

Decades after a tumultuous affair with her professor, a young woman uses Monica Lewinsky as a guide to analyze the choices and desires that led her to derail her life. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Julia Langbein on writing Dear Monica Lewinsky.

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.

The initial spark for Dear Monica Lewinsky happened in 2019, when I was at my parents’ home in Connecticut, clearing out my childhood bedroom.  I found a diary from 1998, when I was 17, in which I’d called Lewinsky stupid or selfish.  Reading my own disparaging words twenty years later, even though I’m not religious, I put my hands together, closed my eyes and said out loud: “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” as if “Monica Lewinsky” were some kind of spirit in the sky.  Obviously this is the kind of bananas behavior that most of us would shake off, but the historian in me realized immediately, that I had glimpsed something collective, an understanding of Lewinsky’s life story as one that paralleled those of the early saints and martyrs—her public suffering, like the mortification of the saints, created a powerful point of connection for private individuals.  Once I replaced myself with a fictional character, Jean, a woman shattered by regret, I began to hear the voice of “Saint Monica,” to understand the character as a kind of Ghost-of-Christmas-Past with an irresistible wit, steely resolve, and deep reservoirs of kindness. 

Yes, this book has a kind of Christmas-Carol structure—what I love about Dickens’ story is how comedy sits alongside spookiness.  Dear Monica Lewinsky has tons of comedy, but the comedy sparkles all the more for its proximity to darkness, for example in the excerpted saints’ lives, which model the perfect woman as one who would rather be tortured and killed than have her own desires.

My training as an art historian definitely helped me create both Saint Monica and Jean, and this world of intoxicating early Christian art.  In Dear Monica Lewinsky, Christianity is no dogmatic bad-guy, not pitted against sensuality; on the contrary, Medieval Christianity holds a complex view of humanity, it’s often so naughty and exuberant, and I think I had access to this more nuanced view through my studies. 

Something that I really wanted to capture in this book was the wonder, the open-heartedness of a nineteen-year-old student.  Monica helps Jean understand that just because her open-heartedness was exploited by someone selfish, doesn’t mean that it’s a flaw or a sin. I loved writing from her position, taking in all this beautiful art with a combination of intellect, confusion, desire, self-doubt, excessive imagination—I traveled to Bourges Cathedral and looked at objects in Musée Cluny (Paris’ medieval museum) as well as at the Metropolitan Museum in NY, and I could hear in my head the kinds of comments—sometimes hilarious, sometimes deeply perceptive, or both—that the students might make about the art.  Part of the reason Jean falls in love with this professor in 1998 is that art itself has stirred her, made her yearn for connection.  You can criticize the older professor who took advantage of Jean’s open-heartedness, but who would ever say to a young person, “Don’t get carried away with beauty; don’t feel passion, don’t feel transcendence.” Certainly not Saint Monica.