Dear Monica Lewinsky asks who really owns temptation

Julia Langbein’s sharp, irreverent novel reclaims female desire from the shame imposed upon it.

Some novels arrive with a premise so startlingly original that you immediately lean closer. Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein is one of them—a novel that is at once profound and wickedly irreverent, using the ghost of Monica Lewinsky as both witness and guide in an excavation of female desire, shame, memory, and blame. Set for release on April 14, 2026, this is a book that refuses easy moral judgments. Instead, it asks a more difficult and necessary question: when women are punished for desire, whose sin is it really?

Forty-year-old Jean Dornan has never truly escaped the summer of 1998. While studying abroad in France as a college student, she entered into an affair with her much older professor, David—a married man and a figure of institutional authority. When he reappears decades later with an invitation to his retirement celebration, Jean is forced back into the emotional wreckage of that summer. What follows is not merely a reckoning with memory, but a confrontation with the story she has been telling herself for years.

What makes this novel so rich is the way Langbein layers Jean’s story against multiple histories of female blame. Jean’s youthful affair unfolds in the shadow of the Lewinsky scandal, a cultural touchstone the novel wisely trusts readers to already understand. Langbein does not belabor Monica’s public history; instead, she allows the weight of it to hover over Jean’s experience, turning Monica into a kind of secular saint—part confessor, part witness, part Ghost of Christmas Past. It is a brilliant narrative choice.

Monica stands beside Jean as she revisits those sunlit weeks in France, forcing both Jean and the reader to interrogate the frameworks through which women’s desire has historically been judged. The novel further deepens this inquiry through the women saints Jean is assigned to read about: virgins, prostitutes, martyrs, women canonized through suffering and often condemned simply for being wanted by men. This juxtaposition is where the novel’s sharpest insight lives.

Jean, Monica, and the saints are all, in different ways, cast as temptresses. Yet the men who desire them—or act upon that desire—move through the world with far less scrutiny. Again and again, women are made to bear the moral burden of male appetite. But temptation belongs to the tempted. Women should not be punished for existing. That idea pulses through every page of this novel.

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One of the most compelling aspects of Jean’s story is that the novel refuses simplistic victim narratives while still clearly naming the imbalance of power. Jean is young, inexperienced, and undeniably drawn to David. She fantasizes about him, desires him, and pursues the possibility of intimacy in the way many young women do when first encountering the intensity of adult longing. Desire itself is not the crime.

The question is not whether Jean wanted him. The question is what David, as the older, married professor in a position of authority, chose to do with that knowledge. Jean has done nothing wrong.

David is the married one. The state of his marriage is between himself and his wife. It is his responsibility not to “succumb” to temptation because it is his temptation to manage. More importantly, he is the adult with institutional power. He has the ability—and the obligation—to protect his student from harm. Instead, what devastates Jean’s life is not the sexual encounter itself, but what comes after.

The shame.

The doubt.

The manipulation.

David’s response appears motivated less by remorse than by self-preservation, planting guilt and uncertainty in Jean in order to insulate himself from the professional consequences of his own choices once they return to New Jersey. His career thrives. He is celebrated in retirement. Meanwhile, Jean carries the psychic fallout for decades. That imbalance is devastating, and Langbein handles it with both tenderness and fury.

The novel asks readers to imagine the life Jean might have had if the adult in the room had simply acted like one. What if David had behaved professionally? What if he had refused to exploit the power differential? What if, afterward, he had met the situation with maturity instead of cowardice? And by extension, what if Bill Clinton had done the same? These questions linger long after the final page.

Dear Monica Lewinsky is not simply a novel about an affair. It is a literary meditation on the ways women internalize blame for wounds inflicted by men and by institutions that protect them. It is funny, intellectually nimble, and emotionally piercing, but above all it is a novel interested in grace—what it means to forgive oneself for surviving the stories others have written about you.

This is one of the most thought-provoking novels I’ve read about desire, shame, and the stories society tells women about their bodies and choices. How do you think Jean’s life might have unfolded differently if David had taken responsibility for his own choices instead of transferring the shame onto her?

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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