Dear Monica Lewinsky

**From the acclaimed author of American Mermaid (“Sublime”—NYTBR) comes a wildly original examination of female desire and the price women pay for giving in to their appetites. “Langbein has the uncanny ability to make a reader laugh out loud again and again while also laying bare — in her brilliant, singular way — the specific travail of being a young woman.” —Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had “Comic novels with heft are the rarest stars in the literary firmament, and this one burns as brightly as the sun.” —Katy Hays, author of Saltwater** Forty-five-year-old Jean Dornan cannot escape the shadow of something she did several decades ago. On a study abroad program to France in the summer of 1998, she embarked on 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 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—like a saucy Ghost of Christmas Past—and leads her back in time to reassess what happened.