Andrew Morton's Monica's Story

...The details of Lewinsky's tenure at the White House are familiar to readers of the Starr report...

...With the exception of the preClinton affair, all of Lewinsky's troubles are well within the realm of ordinary problems...

...For instance, after her first round of interviews in New York, arranged by Vernon Jordan, she finally came face to face with the reality of leaving Washington...

...Instead, you have to sell your case...

...Morton writes that she fantasized that the Secret Service would summon her to the Oval Office, "in the same way that Clinton's hero, John F. Kennedy, used the Secret Service to bring women to him during his presidency...

...Even the material about the President was just me [whining] away...

...This affair apparently gave her her notorious sexual confidence...

...AT ABOUT this point, Morton indulges an urge to make Lewinsky's life more and more storylike, to offer a counternarrative to the Starr report...

...He calls her frequently for the rest of the year, as "the emotional affinity between them blossomed," and she fully expects to return to the White House...

...I see now [the consequences of] my own actions, so I have to take responsibility for them...

...Maybe shallow cultural referencing isn't such a Generation X thing after all...

...Morton all but accuses Tripp of conspiring with Lucianne Goldberg and Michael Isikoff to entrap Lewinsky into filing a false affidavit in the Paula Jones case, evidently to fulfill Tripp's fantasies of becoming a "player...

...Reading Monica's Story, I found myself wishing events had not happened so extraordinarily, or that Lewinsky and Morton hadn't resorted to clichés to describe them...

...After all, this document was a big-time Zeitgeist definer, so commentators took it upon themselves to tell us what was "really" going on here...

...There was so much more bullshit there than substance," she tells Morton...

...I read Monica's Story, by Andrew Morton, the British journalist who wrote Diana: Her True Story, because I thought it was the best chance Lewinsky had to come up with her own "character," or to choose whether to present herself as a character at all...

...IT SEEMS to me that presenting yourself as a victim—physically weak, emotionally courageous, morally immovable—is a way of appealing for justice that relies heavily on melodramatic rhetoric...

...These efforts ranged from short "reviews" of the Starr report in magazines and newspapers to roving smart guy Adam Gopnik's threethousandword exegesis in the New Yorker...

...her mother, Marcia Lewis, thought her daughter might "meet a nice young man...

...Neither her words—"It was painful"— nor Morton's convey what, exactly, made her cry...

...Lewinsky's lawyer finally comes "riding to the rescue...

...During college, in fact, she had a disastrous affair with a no-good, engaged and later married older (in his twenties) man who scoped the girls at her high school, where he worked...

...But the impeachment scandal has largely determined which of her character contradictions are most important...

...The secret taping is such a reprehensible act that I'm inclined to favor Morton's contentions that the tapes actually establish Lewinsky as the author of the "Talking Points" memo and that bringing in Verdon Jordan was either Lewinsky's or Tripp's idea...

...If, like Lewinsky, you happen to have engaged in less-than-upright behavior in the process of being wronged, you've got to "own" your shortcomings—you must "take responsibility" for your grievance to be redressed...

...I had never read a "quickie" bio before, and I was prepared for the worst...

...Sitting in a taxi on the way to the airport, she burst into tears: "Now, seeing another office in another city, and being considered for a wholly new line of work, that hope had finally been extinguished...

...Morton, reflecting his subject's soft-focus romantic idealism, doesn't shy away from the topic, but his language is clumsily, painstakingly demure...

...that she cries easily...

...House of Representatives, a rivulet of amateur cultural anthropologists and professional literary critics appeared to irrigate the desert of scandal...

...This does not make them less annoying...

...There were op-eds and essays, notably by Michiko Kakutani and Stephen Greenblatt in the New York Times and James Wood in the New Republic...

...This was an investigation founded on girl talk, and I wish I could say I don't find that embarrassing...

...Clinton is a man all but inaccessible, a celebrity, so from the first time she spies him Lewinsky notices how he is dressed, what kind of mood he's in, how he walks...

...Wood pondered Lewinsky's situation: "Disgraced in Washington, she must wander like a lost soul, as Sister Carrie flees to Montreal...

...Morton, however, seems to have encouraged Lewinsky and Lewis to overstate the nature of the harassment, which kept the two women shut up in Watergate at the point of nervous collapse...

...In fact, are you at all surprised that Monica Lewinsky likes shopping...

...possessed of a high sense of entitlement but a low sense of self-worth...

...Then you won't be surprised that to convey how frightening the months after January 1998 were, Lewinsky and her biographer rely on the symbolism of Woman Imperiled...

...Did the new office lack the telltale eucalyptus scent of the White House...

...And to do it, the most with-it of them turned to literary precedent, which the report's scandalous portion, suggestively titled "The Narrative," all but demanded...

...After college, Lewinsky moved to Washington...

...In any case, it is at Goldberg's behest that Tripp begins taping phone conversations with Lewinsky (and, if you believe the younger woman, doctoring the tapes to incriminate her and the president...

...ALLISON XANTHA MILLER is a writer who lives in New York...

...Clinton's words, according to Kakutani, don't "conjure up the elevated world of classical tragedy: Job on the ash-heap, Lear on the heath, Ahab on the quarterdeck...

...I had closed down...

...I am ambivalent about melodrama...

...If you wondered how anyone could have such a low opinion of herself as to seek emotional and sexual security from a totally unavailable man, you can find out how the problems of her weight and diminishing self-esteem were exacerbated by her parents' divorce, when she was fourteen...

...These writers evidently had trouble finding the scandal's exact perfect literary parallel, so they simply tried every one available...

...During this scene, which constitutes an entire chapter of Monica's Story, the reader skates from one feminine signifier to another—mother love, menacing men, children, religion, shopping, even musical theater...

...even if you've read the Starr report, you may find yourself scratching your head during the sex scenes...

...Mostly I can't stand to be in the same room with it...

...Victimology also signals a lack of confidence in the ideal of justice as impartial, automatic, independent of emotional considerations...

...they seem simply a way of deflecting the criticisms of a judgmental public...

...At one point the former intern "moistened one of the President's cigars in a most intimate fashion...

...Months later, Lewinsky had to go over twenty hours of the tape-recorded calls with a prosecutor from the Office of the Independent Counsel (OIC), correcting the transcript...

...Thus Morton finds within the first few years of Lewinsky's life the qualities that will get her into so much trouble: if you recoiled, for instance, at her obnoxious persistence in securDISSENT / Summer 1999 121 ing Clinton's help in her job search, you'll find out how at the age of two she refused to get off a swing set till she was good and ready...

...I must admit that it was only when I heard her sobbing on the Tripp tapes (which were released after the midterm elections in November 1998) that I felt this voyeurism had gone too far...

...124 DISSENT / Summer 1999...

...But perhaps level-headed Lewinsky shunners will be surprised at how easily (and how logically) a crush on the president turned into an obsession...

...As hurried as Morton is to get to the good stuff, he manages to portray in these chapters a rather ordinary young woman...

...Instead of taking responsibility and acting like a man, [Clinton] lied," Lewinsky says...

...It was very painful to come to terms with that bitter disappointment.' " Isn't coming face to face with failure something most of us can relate to...

...After so much buildup, when Clinton does initiate an affair it's almost anticlimactic...

...She spends nights reading Gennifer Flowers's autobiography, not in a frenzy, but for fun...

...In the end, I think Lewinsky is reviled less for what she did than for being unworthy of all this attention...

...I realized then that no office atmosphere would ever compare to the White House,' she says...

...Morton, Lewinsky, and Lewis liken the experience to Stalinism, Nazism, the pogroms, and "the constant fear and routine repression faced by ethnic minorities in America, particularly the black community...

...I don't mean this at all derogatorily— the most ordinary among us possess some kind of complexity...

...was she used to looking at the photo IDs that hung around people's necks for clues to their status (pink for interns), and now, without them, did she realize she would have to learn a whole new way of relating to people at work...

...No, her life is not novelesque, and fittingly, therefore, neither for the most part is her book, despite its author's attempts...

...Emotionally I was shut down now," Lewinsky says, "like a rape victim who screams for the first five minutes and then just stops...

...Here's to her making enough money from this book to pay her $1 million in legal fees and have a little left over for law-school tuition...

...On the other hand, the relentless pressure from Starr's office, combined with the White House's slanderous leaks and the casually gnashing sexism of the media (and, quite often, of Lewinsky's own attorney), was disturbing politically...

...a girl with a fierce and perverse loyalty to others but little regard for her own survival...

...She had been preoccupied with getting a job in the White DISSENT / Summer 1999 123 House for the last two years...

...At the Pentagon, "the unlovely figure of Linda Tripp began to take control of Monica's life," he writes, veering into the florid melodrama practiced most effectively these days by programs like Hard Copy...

...Although these comparisons may not be totally unfounded, they are uninformed, and distance the reader further from understanding Lewinsky's ordeal...

...I was not often disappointed...

...that she expects real-life romance to mirror that in film and fiction...

...I promise if I win in November I will bring you back here just like that," Clinton says, snapping his fingers...

...Taking responsibility" crops up a lot in Monica's Story...

...It is this distance that has allowed us to ridicule her...

...The events of Monica Lewinsky's first twenty-two years total a mere fifty-four of the book's 288 pages...

...Nor did they seem especially frightened by the way important political stuff had brushed up against sticky femininity—you know, feelingtalk, low-cut blouses, dieting, and, oh, just general bourgeois softness—that had been polluting our consciousness all summer...

...Greenblatt was more precise...

...I hope she also finds time to pursue her interest in writing poetry...

...She commits these words and all the other details of the relationship to memory...

...The report, wrote Gopnik, promised to be "a work in the spirit of DeLillo or Ellroy, or even Melville," but turned out like certain works of Harold Brodkey, Truman Capote, and somebody named Joe Gould—"narrow, claustrophobic, and obsessive...

...Tripp, who is called a wicked witch, a Svengali, and a praying mantis in Monica's Story, "constantly dangled the rosy-skinned apple of romance in front of a trusting and gullible" Lewinsky, urging her to keep after the president and assuring her that she was "his type...

...In a stuffy room in a hotel (adjoining, of all places, a mall), she was held for twelve hours by stonefaced FBI agents, grilled by prosecutors, and threatened with twenty-seven years in prison for perjury...

...their annoying qualities don't make them any less mistreated...

...did its carpets feel less plush underfoot...

...that her favorite color is rose pink...

...They were not deterred by the Starr report's evident triviality—accounting for each body part in each liaison and each of the incidental, everyday effects (pet names, gift trinkets, and the like) of the affair between Bill Clinton and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky...

...But I also greatly suspect the collegeeducated hauteur that requires us to disown as meaningless and hopelessly bourgeois everything tinged with it, especially if it involves women...

...Now that clears it all up...

...that she is preoccupied with her weight...

...Maybe she should have just gotten over herself, but "real" adults are in fact full of such conflicts...

...Morton would have been well advised to use the can't-miss technique taught in every first-year fiction workshop: the keenly observed detail...

...Sometimes extremely annoying people are mistreated...

...Monica Lewinsky is not a character in a novel—we can't get that far inside her head...

...The report's closest analog," he wrote, "is not Tom Jones, Lolita or The Story of 0. It is the Malleus Maleficarum," an Inquisition treatise on witchcraft...

...that the movie Titanic made her real sad...

...The relationship becomes so obvious to White House colleagues that Lewinsky is transferred to the Pentagon in April 1996...

...H]alf the con122 DISSENT / Summer 1999 versations were about diet, shopping, being fat and other stupid stuff...

...Whatever complexity Morton strives for in early chapters gets denuded: if there is real intellectual or emotional reckoning behind Lewinsky's words, it's hard to tell...

...Morton, to his credit, realistically criticizes her for hanging on to her neuroses for a little too long: she is "sure of her own mind yet unsure of herself...

...There are still some details in her life only she knows...