Illustration: Ryan Inzana
Julia Langbein says that the inspiration for her new novel, Dear Monica Lewinsky, came to her during a visit to the house where she grew up. “I had to go clear out my old childhood bedroom, and I found a diary from 1998 in which I had been disparaging of Monica Lewinsky in a way that was just very casual and normal for people at that time,” she says. “It was this moment of compunction — we all recognize we had it wrong — but the writer in me was like, You’re picking up on some idea of Monica Lewinsky as a kind of saint whose public life completely fits with the stories of the early martyrs.” Langbein grew up in the U.S. but is promoting the book (while finishing her next novel) from France, where she’s lived since 2021. Langbein has worked and lived there on and off throughout her life but is still acclimating to some unexpected culture shock. “I think I’m very nice, but my whole life I’ve been treated like a brainy, difficult weirdo,” she says. “In France, people see me as a lost little lamb, and they’re constantly telling me what to do. I love it. I love being treated like a sweet buffoon. It’s such a relief after so many years of feeling like I need to meet people’s expectations as the funny nerd.”
Tuesday, March 17
I wake up in my house in the western suburbs of Paris to the sound of an alien spaceship sucking my husband, John, into the sky. That’s the alarm he’s chosen and refuses to change, so still half-asleep, I’m all, “Say no to the probe, bro.”
I prepare an Americano from a Krups bean-to-cup machine that is starting to act up (leaking occasionally), so John is threatening to throw her away and get a new one. We had a De’Longhi before, but she started leaking, so despite many years of loyal service, he threw her out over the promise of a trouble-free second act with the skinny little Krups. HA! Looks like the well-oiled German seductress is getting a taste of her own medicine!
Because I regularly bring up the “new life” that the De’Longhi is “probably leading” and how she’s “taking pottery classes and has a lot of new friends,” John is aware of this stupid metaphor and now feels like he can’t throw away his broken Krups, so half of every coffee I make ends up in a puddle on the counter. This is how you lose at 4-D chess.
I make oatmeal for my two daughters before shoving them out the door to school, and then I eat the leftovers from the pot. We’ve had waves of American houseguests, and they all try to “add protein” to my meals. “Have an egg!” they plead. “Put some NUT BUTTER on it.” And I say no. I refuse to participate in the protein craze! Oh, I can hear the reader now: “Honey, come here and read this, some lady in France just ate oats for breakfast, with no tuna or anything!” Her husband, eating a horseshoe-crab skeleton like it’s a Dorito: “Dude, I hope her shins are okay.” My shins are fine, TODD!
Sigh. Everything is so political.
I go up to my office, where I am trying to write the ending of a new novel, and endings take so much concentration that I get hungry quickly but try to ignore it so I can stay in the story. “Maybe if you’d had some rooster powder for breakfast, this wouldn’t be happening,” says Todd, doing a one-armed push-up in my brain. He has Hegseth hair, but you knew that already. I shut him up and get back to work.
At around 2 p.m., I bike into town — a big stone square plaza flanked by an old post office and a row of cafés — just as the marché is closing. I am in search of two things I often forget about: human company and turnips. My older daughter found a recipe for roasted turnips in the back of a Bad Kitty book this morning and asked me to make them. I was so excited — I love turnips, and I’ve sidelined them because I assumed my kids would take one sniff and say, “Ew, Mommy, gross!” It’s not just kids: In French slang, a “turnip” (navet) is a piece of crap, something with no value, which turns out to be almost literally true. The vegetable man gives me a huge bag of turnips for one euro and then asks me with a wink if I’ll give him private English lessons, which is probably code for a blowjob, so I’m feeling hot and rich! My friend Michelle meets me to sit in the sun and eat a marché lunch of cheese naan from a paper bag (buttery, rubbery) and a €5 bowl of spinach wilted in coconut milk with fennel seeds, a three-ingredient perfection, from the Indian stall at the market.
I’m meeting my friend Natasha at the American Library in Paris this evening, where she’s on a panel about the aftermath of the Gisèle Pelicot case in France, but we won’t eat until nine, so I start scheming for some delicious little snack while I’m prepping the kids’ dinner (whole roast chicken, potatoes, and TURNIPS, baby). Last week, when my mother-in-law was visiting from Luxembourg, we had gone out of the way to buy good cheese from the glossy-tiled jewel-box fromager in town (Foucher), and I’m about to murder the leftovers. I position a big ivory domino of hard sheep Tomme on half of a sopping ripe pear and eat the whole thing in two bites; I dispatch the other half with a stinging bleu d’Auvergne, and I pour myself a big glass of nonalcoholic rosé (we get better-than-average de-alcoholized wines delivered from Le Paon Qui Boit, an N/A drinks shop in Paris).
A few minutes later, the babysitter arrives — an adorable teenage neighbor who calls me “madame” — and it strikes me as we chat that she thinks I’m slamming rosé alone, but I’ll look even guiltier if I say, “FYI? My wine is fake!” so I just let her think I’m pregaming hard for a roundtable about criminal justice.
The American Library is steps from the Eiffel Tower, so it’s a tough area for food, warped by tourist footfall. Natasha and I had planned to cross the river for dinner after, but all the panelists want to join, so we end up going around the corner to Linette, the kind of tourist joint I’d usually avoid (a little overpriced, menu in English). To my surprise, Linette really warms my heart. Waiters are jocular but professional, no cynicism, and the food is good. I order an oeuf cocotte, a single poached egg in a ramekin of cream, and sautéed mushrooms with two giant paddles of toasted sourdough for a non-extortionate €12 and a glass of Pinot Noir, and I’m actually thrilled. You can cohabitate quite nicely with tourists, it turns out, and I enjoy watching the family next to us — Portuguese, maybe? — try to please their two teenage daughters, both wearing prickly faux-fur jackets, curling inward and scowling magnificently but in two different styles, the Federer and Nadal of disaffection.
I ride the train home thinking about how much I loved the company of reporters, how following difficult facts carefully takes a lot of guts (one of my fellow diners had attended the Pelicot trial every day) but also produces a concrete kind of hope. I mean, I’m gonna keep writing hilarious make-believe, but I am inspired by these journalists.
I flop into my bed at midnight, still beaming with optimism, and ask my husband breathlessly: “What’d the kids think of the turnips???”
“Oh — they said they were gross.”
Wednesday, March 18
UNFAIR!!!! I wake up with a searing hangover after ONE glass of Pinot Noir, so I make myself two eggs over medium, Jacques Pépin method (fried on the bottom, steamed on the top, perfect every time).
Today the kids are home, so I’m writing at a co-working space in a repurposed 19th-century train station in my town with office space upstairs and a little kitchen and a big communal dining table downstairs. A man named Zouhour makes a ten-euro vegetarian lunch — today, piles of bulgur wheat with sliced beets in vinaigrette and roast potatoes coated in a dusty supermarket mix of dried herbs. He makes a chocolate pudding out of zucchini. It’s nobody’s idea of a delicious meal, and it’s probably America’s idea of poison (it’s all carbs), but I really look forward to these lunches; they’re like paragraphs in your diary or a familiar stretch of sidewalk or ten minutes in the bus with your daughter in your lap: the untheorized, doable, interstitial kind of mediocrity that makes anything truly great possible. I work straight through to evening.
When I get home, I immediately pop a couple pickled herring in my muzzle before I make dinner. This jar is from Ikea. It’s serviceable. My mom is from Finland and I’ve spent a lot of time there, and if there’s one thing I miss about it, besides my family and also everyone just shutting the fuck up all the time in a profoundly dignified way, it’s the full grocery aisle of pickled herring. My people love to kill a fish and eat it many, many years later, soaked in tears.
For dinner, I turn leftover roast chicken and unused pizza dough into shawarma and pitas. There is almost always shredded-cabbage salad in the fridge, adapted from a recipe in Everyday Harumi — oil, rice wine vinegar, finely sliced onion, sesame seeds. I add mint and coriander and do a similar thing with shredded carrots, and it’s great with a La Parisienne nonalcoholic IPA. Kids are munching away and husband pauses to thank me, and I give him a look that says, “Remember this chicken when I start leaking and you want to put me in the dump with the Krups.”
You have to understand that John grew up in Luxembourg, which has completely warped his relationship to chocolate, both in terms of quality (it has to be outstanding, or his tongue only registers a dull bean meal) and quantity (it’s daily, if not hourly), and I have adopted his habits. Last week, his mother brought us a box of Genaveh pralines — the best chocolates in Luxembourg — and we are currently popping them, often furtively like self-loathing addicts, after every meal, and this is no exception. I get a mint one that has none of the toothpaste waft of lesser chocolatiers, no cold air, but only the body of the sweet leaf itself, buried in a salty dirt grave. Heaven.
Thursday, March 19
Several Americanos from the Krups, who is still leaking, because she’s only human.
John has attended Deux Frères, “the good bakery” (haha, because they’re all good), and come back with about 15 centimeters of a by-the-meter slab of “pain Baltik.” Let me tell you, as a Finn, this stuff is nothing like a Baltic bread; the interior is swirling with air pockets, like sourdough, but its internal webbing still catches seeds in its filaments, truly like spiders’ prey. The crust looks like a Roman gladiator’s cuff: beaten, polished, sweaty leather, studded with oat, flax, millet. When you toast it, the crust takes on the depth of an entire roast-beef sandwich. This is why I don’t even look at baguette anymore, although this bakery also makes a baguette Baltik, cronut-style excess that actually isn’t as good as the sum of its parts.
The novel I’m working on now is about an American family on vacation in Paris, and it gives me nonstop excuses to follow in their decadent, leisurely footsteps. So today, John and I steal out for lunch at Magnolia in the Ninth Arrondissement, opened in the past few years, English chef. I stick to the prix fixe lunch and what do I discover at the centerpiece of the starter, an opalescent, poached, treated like a goddamned queen on a red carpet of crab bisque? TURNIPS. I know this is psycho and I should never say this out loud, but when I see these turnips, I feel an unjustifiable wave of intimacy with the people in the kitchen: In some psychotic fantasy, these cooks know me, they’re my best friends, we smoked weed once and went to Home Depot and thought the tool sheds were tiny mansions!!! We’ve met each other’s dads!! My main course is a pollock brandade, super salty but sitting in a parsley purée that’s as sweet as a children’s choir and absorbs all sins. Even before the arrival of madeleines in warm toffee with crème crue (crème fraîche but unpasteurized, sourer), I marvel at how amazingly thoughtful this lunch menu was for €30 — I see how they stretched expensive ingredients like crab and found the beauty in dirt-cheap turnips, feeding a full house with mom-brain ingenuity, that ability to communicate fullness and generosity when time and money are tight.
It’s the first perfect spring day and the kids are with a sitter from pickup through bedtime, so John and I get the ultimate luxury: a long, lazy wander through Paris, from Montmartre to the river. Dinner is a jar of taramasalata, some sliced baguette, and two pints of bière blonde at the Seine Musicale (a heinous, metallic EPCOT-like venue) before the David Byrne concert, which is an intravenous-vitamin shot of playfulness and humanity that will fortify me for years.
Friday, March 20
A half-leaked Americano and pain Baltik with salted butter. The kids’ school is closed this morning, so I make them some stale-baguette French toast and then I slink away and deal with some Dear Monica Lewinsky press and publicity stuff. Lunch is Harumi’s cabbage salad, and I snap a couple pieces of herring down my gullet as if I am my own high-performing sea lion.
While no one’s looking, I eat two Genaveh outside in the garden.
I take my older daughter to the dentist, and when we arrive back home, the evening market is quiet and there’s a holiday feeling in the neighborhood; the moon is over Mecca, Ramadan is over. Eid Mubarak, people! I spot sparkling robes flowing behind women in the evening light, families carrying bags and platters of food to each other’s houses. When I get to our house, I find our Algerian friend Ouassila has left a box of homemade almond crescent cookies and syrup-soaked semolina lozenges (cornes de gazelle and makroud) at our front door. I can take a hint: The universe wants me to make lamb tagine. I grab dates and raisins from the last of the market vendors.
I didn’t plan on having the kids at home with me all day, and I’m depleted: There’s so much to do with this book coming out in America, so many questions to answer and people to thank, and I’m over here in France like it’s another planet. As I’m dumping tagine ingredients in the Instant Pot, I remember there’s a bad Bordeaux in the fridge that I only opened for deglazing purposes a couple nights earlier, and, momentarily overwhelmed, I down a bunch of it — it’s chilled, which obscures how terrible it is — and also pop some goat cheese–and–espelette pepper potato chips. Goat cheese does not benefit from being aerosol-sprayed, and the mouth finish is a cloying body-odor sweetness, but it doesn’t matter. I think of these predinner snacks as my Disgusting Little Moments, when no one’s around and I’m having a sensory experience that’s just for me, even if it’s just B.O. crisps and cooking wine, or tripe or fish or face (in the autumn, you’ll catch me with a salade de museau, pig face in vinaigrette). I may be the result of a freak genetic experiment where you breed Nordic and Jewish peasants for 10,000 years and then cross them at the last second, but I really know how to please myself. Maybe I do have my head in the game, because that’s also a big theme in Dear Monica: knowing where you stand, between the heavenly highs and treacherous lows of trying to please other people.
Ouassila’s Eid cakes go down a storm, and I can’t help thinking as my mouth reverse-engineers the layers of almond filling and pastry dough about how much work she put into them.
Saturday, March 21
I wake up and intend to go running, can’t find a sports bra, end up flopped into a chair reading Le Monde and eating pain Baltik. The Hegsethian protein bully in my brain says, “You’re pathetic, Langbein!” and I say, “If bread is so low-nutrition, then how’d I get this body fat, huh?? BOOM.” I karate-chop my groin, like lawyers do at the Supreme Court when they make a good point.
Within a few hours, I’m standing in front of the fridge with the door open catching little silver rectangles of Ikea herring in my mouth. I finish the jar, so all I need to do is swallow a couple dowel pins and a cam-lock screw and I’ve got a HEMNES dresser in my gut.
There is still fish in my mouth when I eat the last Genaveh chocolate, like a scavenger, like Templeton the rat, but I’ve got kids all over me today, so I need to fast-forward through my pleasures.
When our friends show up for oysters this evening, the first thing they get is warm caramelized masala nuts adapted from Gurdeep Loyal’s Mother Tongue. This is all part of a scheme: If guests come to my house and I offer them homemade warm nuts, they will be blinded to all my lazy incompetence for the rest of the night. It’s foolproof. I don’t cook a thing. I open two dozen Fines de Claire oysters, no problem (the thin kind, sea breeze but no milkiness, slurped down immediately), and then I try to open the Kermancy oysters, a different variety with a petticoat-frill exterior. But the Kermancys won’t give. The hinges crumble like clay under my knife. The oyster that won’t open is a perfect personality test: I say to everyone, “What a tragedy! We will have to throw them away, but we will honor them; we will sing ballads of the Kermancy dead, we will tell stories of the fighting oysters who refused to give their souls to our extractive pleasure!” John, meanwhile, gets a different knife and opens them all.
We put away a bottle of Aly Duhr crémant from Luxembourg and a bottle of Quincy. After coffee éclairs from Deux Frères, the guests leave, and within the hour, everyone texts me about the nuts. See? Do hot nuts, then serve Lunchables, and you’ll still get five stars.
Sunday, March 22
Oysters were enough nutrition for the rest of my life, and I announce that I shall never eat again.
Just kidding; I take my 6-year-old to the market, watch her get a toasty brown ham, egg, and cheese galette, and steal half of it in small bites every time she looks away. She’s easily distracted: She wanders off to talk to various vendors, and when she returns, she’s carrying fistfuls of candy, so I guess she’s running a protection racket?
For dinner, I find six Kermancy oysters hiding in the fridge (the brave Kermancy!! Still they resist!), and John and I split them with nonalcoholic Athletic Brewing Co. IPAs. I also find crevettes grises in the fridge that I forgot to put out last night, inch-long insectlike pink-gray shrimp pre-steamed by the fishmonger. I pinch the head off before eating the whole body, including shell, with garlic mayo. Talk about fiber. It’s like ingesting micromachines, one by one, or a stack of press-on nails, and they will snow-plow your intestines, in a great way. The optics of eating them are disgusting (the apt reference is Ursula’s booger garden from The Little Mermaid), but if you close your eyes and forget what you look like to everyone else, the pleasure is intense.
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