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Hence Morton's Monica is human, but not too human; misguided at times but not flat-out wrong. Much is ascribed to her struggle with weight, a constant and sad trope of the book. We also hear about Clinton's weight problems and Linda Tripp's. At times it seems everyone here is acting out hostilities developed when they were mocked as unfortunately heavy children. And though Lewinsky complains about her treatment in the tabloids--her moniker "portly pepperpot" in the New York Post, and so on--Morton describes Tripp as "lumpy." He also tosses in this mortification: Tripp joined Weight Watchers at Lewinsky's urging--and lost just enough weight so that she could fit into big clothes from Monica's "fat closet." Finally, though "Tripp's treachery" in betraying Lewinsky is laid out in devastating detail, it's ridiculous for Lewinsky to blame Tripp, as she did on the Walters show, for her inability to end her relationship with Clinton.
Lewinsky settles other old scores as well. She jabs Tori Spelling for not inviting her to a birthday party when the two were growing up in Beverly Hills. She offers the name of a childhood tormentor who tagged her "Big Mac." White House aide Evelyn Lieberman, who tried desperately to keep Clinton from seeing Lewinsky, comes off as a snob; in Monica's Story, Lieberman plays the role of the wicked mother in Titanic, the film of forbidden love that, predictably, Lewinsky bawled through and loved
Working with Morton clearly hasn't helped her put her life in perspective. Doubtless encouraged by him, she has compared herself to Diana and others: "I'd like to think I will live on in a book," she told Andrew Golden of the London Daily Mirror. "I like to be able to reach up on my bookshelf for one of Shakespeare's plays, and I would like to think that people will do that with this book."
Would it have been worthwhile... To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all."
--From Prufrock
Inside Lewinsky's world, as concerns shifted from legal worries to financial ones, from private pain to public rebirth, new players emerged in the struggle for control over her fate. Last spring the bumbling, lewd William Ginsburg, a California lawyer and onetime family friend, was replaced by smooth Washington attorneys Plato Cacheris and Jacob Stein. Now those two are receding as imagemakers take center stage. In fact, even as Lewinsky is signing books at Harrod's and giving interviews to Paris Match, her handlers are bickering. Three factions have emerged inside Camp Monica: first, Cacheris and Stein want to safeguard their carefully crafted immunity deal (given that her book seems to lay out a tidy perjury and obstruction case against her, they're right to worry). The deal says Starr must approve her U.S. media interviews; he allowed Walters' and TIME's.