I loved this book!

One of my favorite books I’ve read so far this year is Julia Langbein’s second novel, Dear Monica Lewinsky. What an absolute trip and a gem. If you’re a reader who likes weird, sparkling, edgy, provocative, intimate, funny novels, I can’t recommend this one enough.

Julia’s writing is beyond gorgeous and I was so inspired by it throughout—especially by her generous and brilliant yet casual use of figurative language (simile, metaphor, and the like), something very dear to my creative reading & writing heart. Those little shining lanterns that illuminate the weirdest corners of the imagination as you trip through a story, inviting you to constantly quietly stun yourself with what words can suddenly do.

It’s one of my very favorite literary tricks. And she is a master trickster.

So I thought I’d share some of what I found to be the brightest dazzlers (my stars in the margin) to give you a sense of what she’s pulling off, here. ✨

But first, just for fun — have I ever mentioned that I keep lists of lines I mis-read? It’s a funny habit I’ve been habiting for quite a few years now. We all do this from time to time while we’re reading, but probably don’t always pay enough attention to it to realize how interesting the mis-reads can be! Anyway, I have pages and pages of them.

Here are the ones I collected from this particular book:

* part of me has been sailed away

* she has some ironic weather to record in her diary

* there’s a kind of easter egg feeling

* a voice trained to carry nonsense through balloons

* I look around my kitchen, weighing my day like an empty brown banana

* I am good at goosing around

* I’m hiding myself in my own life

The following excerpts are all verbatim from the book’s text.

• She thought she knew the story, roughly, its essential beats: the silly girl, the greedy man, the setting so lush and seductive that all of life after had seemed like the hallway outside a theater.

• The way that, when you walk, the sun leaps from building to building in the Financial District, tossed between towers like a gold coin—today it shines for me, winks at me, flashes like the barbed metal that makes a fish follow.

• I liked the churches with clover-shaped windows and lacy lead contours for slippery Jell-O colors.

• He looks at me with profound confusion, not like I'm a person with unclear motives but like I'm a silver hologram, a squirrel in shoes, a monstrous incongruity.

• He says "nincompoop" with irrational menace, as if nincompoops were a dangerous invasion, alien body-snatchers dressed as mailmen.

• What do I want? Just like, devil things? Am I Team Devil? I'd really like to have sex with someone. Virgin is such a gross word, all veils and oils. Extra-virgin olive oil is so arrogant about the purity of its extra-virginal olives who stayed in clusters and sang hymns and hid their holes from the hairy humping bees.

• Horses. Horses run through me. Fences break. Hoof prints in my organs, churned like lane mud.

• All creatures seem molded from the same clay, all of us lizards and lambs and professors are leather purses full of tomato soup.

• The cows, far from us, immobile, guts draped between bony haunches like complicated camping gear.

• Eye contact is administered like a spoonful of poison to each of us, one by one.

Get it! Imagine away. Unfurl with all your easter egg feelings and be dazzled.

✨💛✨

xo, ali

Star in the Margin is free and open to all, but does require lots of time, love, and energy! If you’re into the vibe and want to cheer me on. . .

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