semiterrestrial's Book Journey
Dear Monica Lewinsky
Julia Langbein
The way this author so skillfully articulates the second self you develop to watch yourself when you don’t know what to place your self worth in other than the appraisal of another… when you don’t really care what you are doing so long as you are seen positively in their eyes doing it… when it seems easier to build a personality around the contours of someone else than to develop your own curves and edges… I could go on 🙃
Hilarious and heartbreaking, Langbein perfectly encapsulated the impossibility of being a teenage girl trying to discover herself. Not since My Dark Vanessa have passages about sex and self worth and manipulation and desire and discovery hit me so deeply. Jean and Monica’s relationship perfectly balances the heaviness of the story, and keeps the reader looking through a feminist lens without being preachy about it. The prose is rich and lush and darkly funny, the tension is exquisite, the side characters jumped off the page, and the story of Jean from Hoboken could not have been concluded any other way. This is a contender for book of the year for me, and I can’t wait to reread it.
© 2025 Pagebound
semiterrestrial commented...
13w
Gonna be showing mine this post bc EXACTLYYYYY