'Sexy!' cries one of Jackie's new colleagues in a senator's office, inspecting her freshly snapped ID photo. Much like her creator, the protagonist, Jacqueline Turner, is a girl in her 20s of above-average prettiness - a washout in glamour-industry cities like New York and Miami, but a standout against the bland canvas of monocareerist Washington, to which she moves after her banker fiancé, discovering her infidelity, kicks her out of his condo in Manhattan. Let's not forget that many supposedly more literary female novelists her age have not been above flaunting a little gam for the camera. In short order Cutler had scored a layout in Playboy, wherein she gleefully flashes one of her nipples in front of the Capitol, and a reported six-figure book deal.Īnd guess what? The resultant 'novel' (surely legalistic scrim for memoir) could be a lot worse. The Washingtonienne, as she had named herself, quickly parlayed the miniature scandal into a more lucrative and appealing gig: media vixen-cum-novelist. In short, this was not the Profumo affair. Her various paramours were neither particularly high-powered nor publicly accountable. Though certainly explicit, Cutler's anonymous Web log, now a mere vapor on the Internet, was as skimpy as her designer wardrobe and probably siphoned about as much time from her dreary job opening constituent mail as an occasional game of computer solitaire. Swiftly thereafter, she was fired, the official reason being 'unacceptable use of Senate computers.' In retrospect, this seems a trifle harsh. Right after cherry blossom season last year, Jessica Cutler, a brunette underling employed by the office of Senator Mike DeWine, began writing a public online diary of her local sexcapades.

The Washingtonienne by Jessica Cutler