No one knows for sure what Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky said to each other during their many steamy phone sessions in the mid-1990s. But novelist Fred Petrovsky has taken a crack at it.
Petrovsky devotes an entire chapter in his new book, “The Clinton Diaries,” to an imagined phone-sex encounter between the former president and his paramour. “I wrote it in a way that I think is plausible,” he told us.
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The book, on sale today, attempts to go inside Clinton’s head — via diary entries — from the day he first kissed Lewinsky through his impeachment and public scandal.
“It is fiction; it’s all out of my brain,” but bound by a “real-life factual structure,” Petrovsky said. “In fiction, you want to make it seem as real as you can.”
To that end, he said he read everything he could find regarding the scandal, including all of Clinton’s grand jury testimony, the Starr Report and all the books and newspaper reporting it spawned. He said that made it easy to construct the timeline. “Almost all of the facts across the board don’t contradict each other,” he said.
So how did he arrive at this project? “I was working on another book that had a politicaltheme to it” and got off on a tangent, he said. “I wrote the first chapter as an exercise and I was so interested I wrote the second chapter.”
He insists he has no partisan ax to grind. “I’m fairly apolitical,” he said. “Probably like any other aware American I was just fascinated” by the events of 10 years ago. In fact, he says the book isn’t so much about a president as it is a man with a “significant sexual addiction. … How does any man who’s doing something they know they shouldn’t rationalize it?”
As for whether it’s a work of humor or something more serious, he balked, saying, “I’ll let you decide.”
