Dear Monica Lewinsky

A blast of light.

Blindness. Heat on my face. I fall back.

A thousand holy golden female voices hailing, lifting up, un-questioning, bright, pushed with a joyful breath that renews and renews and renews itself. I cannot see anything, but the sound comes at me like a vision, butter yellow, lit from within. The voices rise, with completeness and fullness like an ecstatic agreement of insects at the hottest moment of midday, and then: silence.

The wall of light ripples and recedes to the peripheryto reveal its center.Monica Lewinsky sits on a golden throne.

Slowly, my vision expands to include the gray-veinedwhite marble plinth on which the throne rests.

The marble steps that lead up to it.The wide marble room, with a large tub to my left,filled and still.

Monica Lewinsky, dark hair cascading to her waist,meets my gaze.

Her eyes are brown and warm. A black halo floatsabove her.

“Well?” She smiles; she tilts her head. “You called me, over and over.” I feel for my body—it is still there. I look down at my two arms, up at her undulating cobalt robes. Did I call her?

I think back. To when I was upset and drunk, after hearing from David, looking through my diary.

“I”—I am amazed to hear my own voice echo in this place—“I was thinking of the woman.”

“Were you? Who prays to a woman, a real live person? A person could not have received your prayer. But you called to me, nonetheless.”

Without thinking about it, I had invoked something more than a single life. It was an instinct—an assumption—that there was some greater being called “Monica Lewinsky.” And now I behold her: I could not have imagined fully the sheer power of her, the stillness with which she holds her head—both awesome and familiar, the inviolate aura of her radiance, the amplitude of her voice.

Then, with a pang of terror, I remember what I said about her all those years ago. How little I cared, when I should have. Is she here to punish me? To make me pay?

“Please forgive me. I should have defended you, and instead I was unkind.” She stares steadily at me, her chin rising slightly. “I’m so sorry.”

I look at her face, a face I have known all my adult life—one that has meant a cluster of things: ripeness and error, lust and humiliation. And later, the surprise of survival, of new life.

“I forgive you.”

“You do?”

She nods, but her eyes keep me pinned; she’s not done with me. “Why did you call me, Jean?” Her voice expands to fill the chamber. It has a brassy beauty to it, a trumpeter’s golden control. “You said, ‘Help me, help me, help me.’ ”

I sense that in this place, my usual excuses and justifications will ring with their true, thin shittiness. What is it that I can’t tell my husband, won’t admit to myself? “A mistake I made twenty years ago has warped my life’s course, sapped me, undermined my every choice. But it was twenty years ago! And it was consensual! I—I’m almost more ashamed that I can’t just get over it, that I let this thing fuck me up for so long. It’s exhausting. I’m exhausted,” I say, realizing that the truth is actually so simple: “I don’t want to live my life anymore. I have no conviction. I’m dead.”

“You’re not dead.”

“I can’t move forward, can’t choose for myself. The first time I tried to become someone, it was a mistake, so now—”

“You’ll dodge being a person altogether.” She says this like she knows me already.

“Last night, when I found my old diary, I had forgotten that you were—happening—at the same time. I was cruel about you in the summer of ’98.” Enthroned, she listens, almost expecting these words—no surprise moves across her face. “If I had had any empathy, any heart, I would have seen the parallels. Where I should have taken your suffering as a warning, I laughed like everyone else. It was a moral test that I failed, and it’s led to this—this sham life.” She takes it in. No protest from her about my “sham life.”

“I got an email this morning,” I tell her. “Do you know what that is?”

“I’m all-knowing.”

“OK. There’s a Festschrift.”

“A what?”

“I thought you were—”

“Well, I don’t speak German.”

“It’s this thing that big-shot academics do when they retire. Everyone comes to a party and reads a little tribute they wrote about the person.”

“OK. A funeral.”

“Kind of. A professional one. For years, this guy has been the head of a fancy center in France—it’s where he taught me originally, although it’s grown a lot since then, and now it’s run by a bunch of universities. He’s retiring. And they’re having a Festschrift for him.”

“And what, you want me to proofread your thingy?”

“No! I’m not going. It’s in France, and it’s next week! I don’t understand how I got invited.” Monica rises, and her cobalt raiment slithers behind her down the steps. She comes to sit on the ledge of the oversize white stone tub. She flicks her fiery gaze at me.

“You can go. Or you can ride this downward spiral of poisonous nostalgia and bone-deep shame until you really would rather die. Up to you.” She raises an eyebrow, and the flames around her halo leap.

I look around a little more. There’s a toilet off to the side, little toiletries, a double sink, and a logo on the towels: Ritz-Carlton. Some dormant deep knowledge of her life surges to mind, and—

“Is this—is this the en-suite bathroom at the Ritz-Carlton, Pentagon City? Oh my god, this is where the FBI kidnapped you and wouldn’t let you call a lawyer.” This is where you go when you pray to Monica Lewinsky?

“You would look to Jesus on his cross, wouldn’t you?” Suddenly everything clicks into place. Saint Monica. She was martyred and mortified and endured and rose again in the eyes of the people. Beatific, powerful, a holy mediatrix, distantly beloved. Hers is a suffering we have all witnessed. Her resurrection is my hope.

“Go to this event in France, Jean!”

“And do what?”

“Tell him the truth.”

“What does that mean?”

“Exactly. You don’t know the truth.”

“No, I know. I’ll tell you the truth: I was a hormonal idiot on a study abroad course. I was naive, and I was had.” Of course that’s it. The words from his email come back to me: such a treat.

She says nothing, only listens, and then touches the water in the tub with the tip of a finger. We watch together as the light rippling on the surface shimmers and dissolves into a picture of a young woman, just weeks from her twentieth birthday, sitting on a suitcase at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, biting her nails.

It’s me. Dishwater hair, to my chin. Asics. Face completely blank. “I was nothing special.”

“That’s not true.”

“What I mean is, I was lost in all the normal ways. I was about to start my third year at Rutgers.” A silent beat. “The State University of New Jersey.”

“I know it.”

“It’s a good school!”

“No, I know!”

“It is!”

“I know!”

“I grew up in New Jersey, in a town of doctors and engineers, and I did well at school, and I had two best girlfriends. We went to New York alone on the train to see the Smashing Pumpkins and we came back screaming and sober. I didn’t want tattoos. I was neutral to myself, I had no particular flavor, I was just trying to say yes to the right things. I was an only child and my parents were divorced but not mean to each other and their houses were mostly quiet, and for fun I went with Dee and Eunice to the mall and spent babysitting money on clothes from the Gap and the Limited. Does this tell you enough?”

“Almost. Did you go to prom?”

“Yes! With someone named Danny DiVito—Di with an i!—from Maple Borough High. In a strapless mauve dress from Contempo. We went with a big group of Danny’s friends. I could always go with the flow.”

“OK. Now that’s everything.”

“That was everything! I spent the first two years of college moving between different groups. There was the newspaper, which I quit because frankly I was too nice and I didn’t want to cold-call a football player and ask how it felt to be reamed by Virginia Tech. The Game Room people were easy to join because anyone can join a game, but they were so competitive, and it seemed cowardly to hide from life’s risks by playing thirty-six hours of Risk. I hung out with a group of drunk girls for a while, but they were always spraining their ankles and they told stories in falsely cool tones about barely sensate hookups that scared the crap out of me. I hadn’t had sex yet and didn’t want to stumble into it drunk, so I wandered away from them, too.”

“Isn’t it OK, not to know your place at nineteen?” Monica considers the girl on the suitcase, who has licked her thumb and is using it to rub lint off the exposed end of a roll of Lifesavers. “Not every nineteen-year-old finds her way to a summer in France—you must have had some kind of compass.”

“I spoke French because I was raised bilingual—it was an accident; my mother is from Belgium. But in college I just kept taking more languages because I liked the way that when you start a new language, you can sort of feel yourself being. It’s not automatic anymore. You can’t just go with the flow—you have to will yourself to make thoughts; your tongue visits places in your mouth it’s never been. You’re in Beginners Italian and you roll your r’s and suddenly you’re a specific lady named Giovanna or Patrizia, even if you’re sitting around in east New Jersey picking gum from under your desk. From the moment you choose the fake name in class—Mi chiamo Giovanna—it’s a simple way to feel like a person. To say: Voglio comprare questo cappello.”

“That is good. What does it mean?”

“ ‘I want to buy this hat.’ ”

Monica closes her eyes with serene forbearance.

“It’s significant! You don’t just buy a hat. You’ve bodied forth into the world to buy a hat!”

“Because you’re Italian?”

“Because you’re not Italian, so you have to be Italian! So that’s what I did in college. Learned more languages so I could turn to my neighbor and say, ‘Hal tawadu an tashtari mawzah?’ ”

“What’s that?”

“ ‘Would you like to buy a banana?’ in Arabic.”

“OK. We need to go.”

“We need to go where?”

“Jean.” She looks up at me from under her brows as if to say, You know. “You’ve repackaged this summer over the years—first he created you, then he used you. You lost yourself in the story. He’s the only actor! Where are you? Who were you and what did you do?” Her voice swells, filling the chamber like steam.

The picture on the surface of the water remains: The girl is there, sitting on her suitcase, Lifesaver raking across her teeth. She’s surrounded by a few other students, also waiting to be collected.

“The summer of ’98 . . .” The flames flare again around Monica’s black halo, and I look closer and— “Is that a beret with the center cut out?”

“Don’t get distracted. How did you end up in France?”

“All I’d ever taken was a scattered bunch of language classes. After two years, and with all my teachers telling me I was smart, I started to believe I could do more, maybe major in something more analytical, like English or history. I had this idea that I might like medieval art, because when we visited my grandparents in Belgium, we used to drive from their home in Ath—spelled A-t-h but pronounced ‘at’ like a town that forgot to name itself—to Ghent and Bruges and Brussels and see lots of tall pictures of priests and saints with endlessly knuckled fingers praying and pointing up. A baby Jesus that was dusty and stringy before the Renaissance fed him protein shakes. I liked the churches with clover-shaped windows and lacy lead contours for slippery Jell-O colors. There was something about medieval art that resonated with me. It was awkward; it didn’t seem to have itself figured out. It didn’t know what a beautiful body was or a loving mother or a rational space. It was the teenager of art history, emotionally unregulated, weeping, laughing at butts, full of heart—sometimes literal heart, in dried chunks, in jewelry boxes. And it needed me. I could help figure it out with all these languages I knew for no reason, Latin and French and Spanish and Arabic, keys dangling at my side looking for locks.”

“You tried to take an Introduction to Medieval Art course in the spring of your sophomore year, but you quit.”

“I didn’t have room in my schedule.” I’m lying, but hopefully she won’t—

“That’s a lie. Tell me why you dropped David’s class.”

I take a deep breath.

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From Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein. Used with permission of the publisher, Doubleday Books. Copyright © 2026 by Julia Langbein.

Audio excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House Audio from DEAR MONICA LEWINSKY by Julia Langbein, excerpt read by Alex Sarrigeorgiou. Julia Langbein ℗ 2026 Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.