If you turned on cable news in the summer of 1998, you were all but guaranteed to see the face of then 24-year-old Monica Lewinsky. Earlier that year, in January, news of her relationship with President Bill Clinton broke, and for the months following, Lewinsky endured a shame-spinning spectacle of puritanism, contempt, and blame—much of it hurled at her first by Ken Starr in a hotel room at the Ritz Carlton in Pentagon City, where she was questioned for twelve hours, then later by members of the federal grand jury, who demanded she retrace her encounters with the President of the United States in painful detail. This says nothing of her greatest abuser of all: the general public. Related Articles 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 …