You are holed up in an apartment watching your life unravel on TV. How the hell did this happen? Your life bigger news than the pope or the Unabomber? And you reduced to watching it on TV, hidden in an apartment with your mother?

On the TV, a face, your face, keeps flashing on the screen. Those are your bright eyes, your white smile, your strand of pearls, but that's not you at all. People look at that picture and think they know you, but they don't have a clue.

They keep calling you an intern--"Monica Lewinsky, a 21-year-old intern," "Monica Lewinsky, a 24-year-old former White House Intern"--as if "intern" were your middle name, or a genetic marker, or your blood type, something essential to who you are. All those self-important reporters, they talk as if an intern is a nobody, a child.