Monica Lewinsky was deep in what she calls her “dark decade” when she got some advice she was not yet ready to hear. In an attempt to write a new chapter of her life, she had moved to London to study. But the escape plan failed when a master’s degree was still not enough for potential employers to overlook her notorious past. Over a coffee in 2010, a professor urged her to take back control of her story. “She said to me that when a narrative is imbued with power, there needs to be a competing narrative,” she recalls. “And she said, ‘You have no narrative. People with power have run away with your narrative.’”

To say her story is imbued with power is apt. In July 1995, with the United States near the height of its economic, cultural and military influence, Lewinsky began an internship at the White House. She fell giddily into a tryst with her boss, the most powerful man in the world and one of the country’s most popular Democrat presidents. The rest barely needs retelling, other than to say she was engulfed in a political and media firestorm. But three decades hence, there has been a tectonic shift in our collective understanding of Lewinsky’s story, in large part because she took that professor’s advice.