| International Standard Book Number |
0385551525 trade paperback
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| International Standard Book Number |
9780385551519 electronic book
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| International Standard Book Number |
9780385551526 trade paperback
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| International Standard Book Number |
9780385551502 hardcover
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| International Standard Book Number |
0385551509 hardcover
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| Personal Name |
Langbein, Julia (Art historian), author.
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| Title Statement |
Dear Monica Lewinsky : a novel / Julia Langbein.
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| Edition Statement |
First Doubleday hardcover edition.
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| Production, Publication, Distribution, Manufacture, and Copyright Notice |
New York : Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2026.
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| Physical Description |
xi, 301 pages ; 24 cm.
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| Summary, Etc. |
"A novel about a middle aged court stenographer who must reexamine an ill-advised affair she had with a professor during the summer of the Monica Lewinsky scandal"-- Provided by publisher.
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| Summary, Etc. |
Forty-year-old Jean Dornan cannot escape the summer of 1998, when, as a college student studying abroad in France, she embarked on an inappropriate relationship with her professor. Now, decades later, when that professor contacts her out of the blue with an invitation to his retirement ceremony, Jean's long-standing malaise becomes an emotional crisis. Desperate to understand why this relationship derailed her life so completely, she begins rereading her old diaries and is shocked to realize that her own disastrous affair occurred during the summer of the Lewinsky scandal, yet she never saw the parallels. In a frenzy of guilt and regret, Jean finds herself praying to Monica Lewinsky for forgiveness as if she were a secular saint, a figure of both suffering and sympathy. To Jean's shock, Saint Monica appears -- powerful, radiant, wise, and witty -- and guides Jean like the Ghost of Christmas Past back to the summer of 1998. Had Jean merely been naive and stupid, as she has told herself for so long? Was it sheer weakness that led her into the affair? Or will Jean, with Saint Monica by her side, see past blame to the beauty of her younger self's search for pleasure, connection, and transcendence? Told in flashbacks of those sunlit six weeks in France, replete with Saint Monica's flinty, fiery insights and interspersed with retellings of the lives of real historical martyrs, Dear Monica Lewinsky is a tender, hilarious, and wholly original examination of desire and its costs, of appetite and its denial, and of certain defeat and surprise renewal. It asks what grace and forgiveness might look like both in our own individual lives and as a society.
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| Subject-Personal Name |
Lewinsky, Monica S. (Monica Samille), 1973- Fiction.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Adultery Fiction.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Teacher-student relationships Fiction.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
College teachers Fiction.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Desire Fiction.
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| Subject Added Entry - Geographical Term |
France Fiction.
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| Index Term-Genre/Form |
Psychological fiction.
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| Index Term-Genre/Form |
Biographical fiction.
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| Index Term-Genre/Form |
Novels.
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| Index Term-Genre/Form |
Satirical fiction.
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