Julia Langbein turns medieval saint imagery into a framework for shame in ‘Dear Monica Lewinsky’
A diary entry from 1998 became the unlikely spark for Julia Langbein’s new novel, Dear Monica Lewinsky, published this month by Doubleday. The book follows Jean Dornan, a translator in 2019 who is pulled back into the emotional wreckage of an earlier relationship with a professor after he invites her to a retirement party. What begins as a private reckoning widens into a meditation on memory, humiliation, and the stories people tell themselves to survive them.
Jean’s crisis deepens when she opens an old diary and finds her own cruel teenage remarks about Monica Lewinsky, written during the summer of 1998, when Lewinsky was being publicly vilified after news of her relationship with President Bill Clinton broke. In Langbein’s novel, that discovery becomes a moral shock. Monica then appears to Jean as a haloed figure, guiding her through recollections of her youth, including the summer she spent cataloging Romanesque churches in Plaisy, France, before her junior year of college.
The novel’s structure draws heavily on medieval devotional literature and iconography, especially The Golden Legend, the 13th-century collection of more than 150 saintly lives compiled by Jacobus de Voragine. Langbein, who has a PhD in art history from the University of Chicago and is also the author of American Mermaid and Laugh Lines: Caricaturing Painting in Nineteenth-Century France, said her own research in Bourges, France, and at the Musée de Cluny helped shape the book’s visual and emotional logic.
That art-historical lens matters. Langbein is not simply borrowing medieval imagery for atmosphere; she is using it to ask how a life can be recast after public shame, and how a figure once reduced to spectacle can be reimagined as a source of witness. In that sense, Dear Monica Lewinsky is as much about the limits of memory as it is about the endurance of images — and about what happens when art history is asked to carry emotional weight that scholarship alone cannot fully explain.
