Dear Monica Lewinsky

Synopsis

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A LIT HUB MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR

'A wild, wonderful essential novel'
Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had

'Will remind you why you fell in love with reading'
Oprah Daily, Best Book of Spring 2026

'Outrageously funny novel about hunger, desire, and the vulnerable'
Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here

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.

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Rave reviews for Dear Monica Lewinsky

""Laugh-out-loud prose, richly drawn characters and painfully real renderings of the fumbling social world of young adulthood...As full of whimsy as it is of heartbreak.""
-The New York Times

""Smart, poignant, and involving...Langbein excels at depicting the obsessive nature of illicit, unfulfilled desire - how it swamps judgement and just about everything else...Though framed by a fantastical conceit, Dear Monica Lewinsky is at its core a realist novel, influenced by the feminism of #MeToo and precise in its delineation of character and place.""
-Los Angeles Times

""Insightful [and] hilarious...This is the only novel of the hundreds I have read where I reread the ending three times: It was that satisfying.""
-Melissa Gray, NPR

'Dear Monica Lewinsky is a miracle' Katy Hays, New York Times-bestselling author of Saltwater

'Langbein's prose is a sharp, witty meditation on female longing and male authority' Oprah Daily

'A wholly original feminist ode' Emily Habeck, author of Shark Heart

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Readers LOVE Dear Monica Lewinsky
'Nothing short of BRILLIANT' *****
'Sharp, witty, and unputdownable' *****
'Buzz books that's worth the hype' *****
'Wishing it would never end' *****
'Propulsive ' ***** "