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.
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