Dear Monica Lewinsky By Julia Langbein

Forty-five-year old Jean Dornan cannot escape the shadow of something that happened several decades ago. During a study abroad program in France she had a deeply inappropriate relationship with her professor. When the professor contacts her out of the blue to invite her to his retirement ceremony, she is jolted out of her malaise and filled with the need to understand why the affair derailed her life.

Rereading her old diaries, she is shocked to realize her relationship with the professor occurred during the summer of the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky scandal, yet she never saw the parallels. In a frenzy of guilt and regret, she finds herself praying to Monica Lewinsky—as if she were some kind of secular saint, the patron of persecuted and demonized women, perhaps?—and begging Monica’s forgiveness for not understanding everything they had in common. To her shock, Saint Monica appears to her and leads her back in time to reassess what happened. Had Jean merely been weak, stupid, and blind, as she has told herself for years? What was it about her that led to the affair? What did she really do that summer?

Told in flashbacks of those six weeks that changed Jean’s life, interspersed with irreverent accounts of real female martyrs and visitations from Saint Monica, Dear Monica Lewinsky is a tender, hilarious, and thought-provoking examination of desire and how it shapes us. It is also a timely examination of what grace and forgiveness look like, in our lives and throughout history.