More women I’d like to have lunch with

The untruest thing F. Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote is that there are no second acts in American life, and the tale of Monica Lewinsky certainly bears that out. As the white-hot center of a super-high-profile scandal at a tender age, she was turned into a whipping boy and a punch line. For a decade or so after Interngate, she kept as low a profile as she could. She tried to get jobs and was never hired, prospective employers always figuring out some politic fashion of saying her “history” got in the way. She got recognized everywhere she went, and followed by paparazzi. She stayed close to home a lot. She considered suicide.

Years passed, and still she struggled to escape the impossibly heavy weight of being reduced to a late-night TV host’s cheesy jibe, an international joke, even a target for the feminist thinkers who—it seems so clear in retrospect—should have rallied in support of her.

Then she started to change the conversation, first with this audacious Ted talk, and later in print—in this revealing Vanity Fair essay. She figured out a new role for herself, as an anti-bullying advocate, writer, and producer, and she makes me think of this quotation from Elizabeth Gilbert:

The women who I love and admire for their strength and grace did not get that way because shit worked out. They got that way because shit went wrong, and they handled it. They handled it a thousand different ways on a thousand different days, but they handled it. Those women are my superheroes.