An Art Historian’s Riotous Novel Melds Medieval Art with Monica Lewinsky
ARTnews profiles Dear Monica Lewinsky, a new novel by art historian Julia Langbein, published this month by Doubleday, that blends the Monica Lewinsky scandal with medieval art and hagiography. The book revisits the public shaming of 24-year-old Lewinsky in 1998 after news broke in January of her relationship with President Bill Clinton, including her questioning by Ken Starr at the Ritz Carlton in Pentagon City and later testimony before a federal grand jury. Langbein’s story begins in 2019, when 40-year-old translator Jean Dornan is drawn back into memories of an earlier inappropriate relationship with a professor, David, at an intercollegiate institute of Medieval Art, and she is visited by a haloed Monica Lewinsky who guides her through those recollections. The novel incorporates stories of martyred women from The Golden Legend, a 13th-century collection of more than 150 women’s stories compiled by Dominican friar Jacobus de Voragine, and draws on Langbein’s background as a University of Chicago PhD in art history and author of American Mermaid and Laugh Lines: Caricaturing Painting in Nineteenth-Century France.
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This story was covered in Quality-First Fairs and Medieval Scandal Mashups