A L S O+.T O D A Y

The big baby
By Joan Walsh
Forget "The Death of Outrage." If the right really wants to win the Culture War, it should pass out copies of "Monica's Story."

Monica's nightmare
By Charles Taylor
There's nothing balanced or objective about Andrew Morton's book. That's why it rings so true

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"The Handyman"
Reviewed by Ruth Henrich
In this L.A. novel, an unassuming handyman muddles his way to artistic genius while repairing the lives of lonely wives and other lost souls

T A B L E+T A L K

It's almost spring, and books about baseball are a hot topic in the Books section of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Journey to the center of a race
By Fetzer Mills, Jr.
Randall Kenan talks about the seven-year odyssey that led him from Martha's Vineyard to Alaska in search of the truth about black life in America
(02/24/99)

Writing on Air
By Geoff Edgers
David Halberstam talks about his new book, "Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made."
(02/18/99)

I know why the untuned Thunderbird pings
By Todd Lappin
Maya Angelou delivered the inspirational speech to the National Automobile Dealers Association. And guess what? It worked
(02/09/99)

Black but not like me
By Jill Nelson
A journalist slouches into a party celebrating the black elite -- whatever that is
(02/04/99)

"It's the Stupidity, Stupid"
By Harry Shearer
In this excerpt, Shearer wonders if we should hate the people who hate President Clinton
(01/29/99)

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STARRING MONICA LEWINSKY, AS HERSELF | PAGE 1, 2, 3, 4
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Andrew Morton may have adored Diana Spencer, but he does not seem to like Monica much when he begins her story. He slyly mocks her messiness, her fashion sense and her cloyingly rose-themed home décor. He confides that he first approached his subject as a gag: When Monica's attorney contacted him in England about undertaking the book, Morton writes, "I managed to stop laughing long enough to book a pair of airline tickets to New York." If he had found Monica "as unpleasant as everyone said," he declares, he would have ditched the book and gone Christmas shopping. Luckily for Monica, she passed his test, convincing him that she was "a far cry from the brassy Beverly Hills babe of media mythology" -- bright and intelligent and so forth. (She is certainly a far cry from Kensington.) But after this initial hiccup of skepticism, Morton removes himself from the fray, patiently synthesizing the details of Monica's life from the spectators of her world without passing judgments himself, perhaps out of fear of misinterpreting alien cultural signals. The severest criticism he permits himself of a woman whose own judgment is so bad that it could supply material for a brand new American tall-tale heroine is "If she is a woman certain of her own mind, she is less sure about her own heart." Monica's terrain as Morton describes it seems exotic, but the millions of Americans who will read the first part of his book will find the territory familiar. The Monica story has all the hallmarks of classic American teen lit, like "Blubber," "Beginners' Love," "The Cat Ate My Gymsuit" and "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret" -- self-affirming fictions calculated to steer young women safely through the mine fields of adolescence into the haven of self-worth. The language is the same, and so are the crises -- puberty, parents' divorce, weight problems, unpopularity, illicit sex, abortion, friendship and family ties. The only difference here is that the role of the callow heartbreaker is played by a sitting president instead of an insensitive teen jock. If she had suffered scoliosis as well, Monica would be a living library of Judy Blume, Norma Klein and Paula Danziger rolled into one.

Like many upper-middle-class American children, Monica Samille Lewinsky was raised in a culture of praise -- an affirmation-oriented family in which her slightest achievements earned her accolades and high expectations from her relatives. When she was a baby, her refusal to leave a swing set impressed her aunt, Debra Finerman: "She knew her own mind even at two years old ... She was then like she is now, charming, sweet, extremely bright and difficult, very strong-willed." But when Monica, already a little tubby, went to grade school in Bel-Air, cruel children nicknamed her "Big Mac," and she never quite fit in. She spent a weekend trying to teach herself to jump rope so she could join the other girls, only to find herself the lone classmate excluded from Tori Spelling's birthday party. As she grew older, she grew heavier, but during a brief period of popularity, occasioned by a growth spurt that made her momentarily a little more sleek, she dated a boy named Adam Dave (who sold their story to the gutter press last year and bought himself tickets to Brazil with the proceeds). Monica, then a 14-year-old at Beverly Hills High, now says she broke up with Dave because he didn't lose his temper with her. "I only believe the relationship is 'real' if a man gets mad at me when I do something wrong," she told Morton. After the breakup, she spent months pining, and for several years tried using poems and small gifts to rekindle Dave's interest, with pathetic results. "I thought I was in love with him," she says. She repeated the self-destructive pattern a decade later with the president -- but this time she found the reassuring anger she needed.

Meanwhile, Monica's parents divorced, and her problems increased. She grew fatter, transferred to a Bel-Air high school, went into therapy, enrolled in a fat camp and sat in Overeaters Anonymous. And then, in 1990, when she was 16, she began a flirtation with a man named Andy Bleiler, a 25-year-old drama techie who had a live-in fiancée. "For a fat girl, for a guy to find you really attractive, it was really rewarding for me," Monica says. Her mother, Marcia Lewis, tried to persuade her to end the affair with a man she saw as a "piece of garbage," but she and Monica's circle of supportive friends had about as much luck as Debra Finerman had had pulling Monica off the swings years earlier. "Deep inside I didn't think I was good enough to have a full relationship," Monica tells Morton. In this first affair, and in the ones that followed, a pattern emerges: Neither Monica nor her family nor her friends ever think to question whether what she is up to is good or bad. All they worry about is whether it's good or bad for Monica.

N E X T+P A G E+| Nabbing the world's most unavailable man