This says nothing of her greatest abuser of all: the general public. Monica’s mortification that summer of ’98 forms the backbone of Julia Langbein’s latest novel Dear Monica Lewinsky, out this month from Doubleday. But Langbein’s narrative begins two decades later, in 2019, as forty-year old Jean Dornan, a translator stuck in an ever-present malaise, finds herself on the brink of crisis.

David, a professor with whom she shared an inappropriate relationship in her youth—as it happens, that same summer Lewinsky’s face was plastered everywhere—invites her to attend a party celebrating his retirement from the intercollegiate institute of Medieval Art where they first met. In the years preceding his invitation, their relationship—and the hurt and humiliation it caused—had proved impassable. Jean found herself stuck and haunted by a sense of doom.

As the invitation stirs up memories, middle-aged Jean revisits her diary from the time of her relationship with David. There, she discovers her own teenage mistreatment of Monica Lewinsky. “Clinton admitted on TV to an affair in the White House with a skanky intern,” she had spewed.

Reading her words from years past, Jean comes to notice the parallels between President and professor. There, in her guest bedroom, she begins to pray: “Dear Monica Lewinsky, please help me.” And help she does. The next day, a haloed Monica Lewinsky appears and guides her through memories of her time with David: the summer she spent cataloging hundreds of Romanesque churches at the institute in Plaisy, France before her junior year of college.

Interspersed with tales of martyred women drawn from The Golden Legend, the 13th-century collection of over 150 women’s stories compiled by the Dominican Friar Jacobus de Voragine, Langbein’s novel manages to enlist both medieval art Monica Lewinsky to plumb the depths of self-estrangement. Langbein is no stranger to medieval art: she holds a PhD in art history from the University of Chicago and is also the author of the American Mermaid as well as Laugh Lines: Caricaturing Painting in Nineteenth-Century France. Art in America spoke with Langbein about Dear Monica Lewinsky; her time researching the novel in Bourges, France; and the limitations of art history when it comes to capturing a work’s emotional power.

When did you know this was the novel that you wanted to write? In 2019, I found an old diary from 1998 in which I was cruel about Monica Lewinsky. I must have been 16 or 17 that year.

I clasped my hands, dropped the diary, and I went, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” I’m not a religious person at all, but I just felt that this gesture was available to me, of praying to Monica Lewinsky. My background as an art historian pushed me to consider that there might be an understanding of a collective experience in that idiosyncratic gesture I’d made.

I had studied a lot of medieval art, especially as an undergrad, and you become familiar with these sources, like [Jacobus de Voragine’s] “Golden Legend.” You read a Saint’s Vita [a hagiographic account of a holy figure’s life], and you understand that it’s a literary genre. Once I understood her life as a martyr’s Vita, the rest just fell into place. How did you connect that almost religious experience around Monica Lewinsky to medieval art?

There were a few pieces that needed to come together. During the year of Monica Lewinsky, I lived in France. My dad was a professor, and he was in the UK for that year; I chose to do a study abroad program.

That meant I experienced that whole political media moment through the filter of a foreign country. The main character of the book is a fictional woman who’s had this really damaging affair and is trying to get her life back. Thinking about Monica Lewinsky, I realized that if framed as a saint, she could wear so much history.

I could play around with the iconography, because everyone is familiar with both “Monica” iconography and with the iconography of Western saints, as well as with the church’s language of saints and sinners, judgment and virtue. People connected to Christ because of his suffering, and he became the model for the martyrs. [His story is] not the typical 19th century novel about emotional connection, but it is an almost pre-novelistic, kind of archaic form. “Compunction instead of catharsis” is how one medieval scholar put it—that’s the relat