Monica Lewinsky is fat and lives with her mother

The first picture of Monica Lewinsky in public for the first time in a year, paints a very different portrait from the young intern who achieved global notoriety after her sordid Oval Office affair with President Bill Clinton.

But Monica Lewinsky’s low-key life may not last much longer amid reports she is planning to pen an intimate, tell-all book about her affair with President Clinton that will plunge her right back into the spotlight.

She’s been offered $12 million to write the book, according to reports and it is said to include her intimate love letters to the ex-president and how he desired threesomes.

Is it revenge on her former flame? She certainly must have been aggrieved to watch as he managed to keep his family and career together in the fallout that followed the affair. But for Monica Lewinsky, she has never been able to emerge from its shadow and be known for anything other than that girl who wore that dress and had that affair.

There is no husband, as she dreamed of, no boyfriend, and no children, despite saying that she was “romantic at heart” and that getting married and having kids was “the most important thing to me”.

After numerous failed attempts to reinvent herself professionally, there is no sign of a successful career either.

Monica Lewinsky also continues her struggle with her weight and now she lives with her mother. She has moved out of the expensive apartment she rented for nearly a decade in the exclusive Archive building in Greenwich Village – where properties can cost up to $7,450-a-month for a one-bedroom apartment – and divides her time between New York and Los Angeles.

When she stays in New York, she lives with her mother Marcia Straus, who owns a penthouse in the city.

It also seems that she has regained the 31 pounds she once lost on the Jenny Craig diet program.

Monica Lewinsky, 39, was famously axed from the company just three months after signing up to a $1 million deal to be a spokeswoman, following criticism that she was not a good role model.

Monica Lewinsky has spent the past few weeks comforting her mother Marcia following the death of her beloved step-father, radio pioneer R. Peter Straus, who died at his New York home in August, aged 89.

He married Marcia, now 64, in 1989, after they were introduced by a mutual Washington friend in 1997 – just months before the scandal of Monica Lewinsky’s liaison with President Bill Clinton was made public in January 1998.

R. Peter Straus had known President Bill Clinton for years, but remained extremely close to Monica Lewinsky, who fondly kept a picture of her mother and step-father in her apartment in a frame shamed like a giraffe.

She said in an earlier interview: “They’ve got a cute thing about giraffes – Peter gave my mom a giraffe brooch when that whole thing was going on, to remind her to look over the trees.”

Friends said it was probably cash, not just revenge that was driving her. The brunette, who turns 40 next July, still faces the hangover of massive legal costs relating to the Clinton affair and nolonger runs her line of self-designed handbags.

In 2005, Monica Lewinsky fled to London to study at the London School of Economics, receiving her Masters of Science in Social Psychology in December 2006.

At the time, her publicist said she had spent the years studying and “staying away from the London social scene”.

She completed a thesis called In Search of the Impartial Juror: An exploration of the third person effect and pre-trial publicity.

Her longest relationship after the Clinton affair is still believed to be with filmmaker Mick Reed.

Monica Lewinsky rarely ventures out to high-profile events and was last seen in public nearly a year ago at an American Cancer Society Benefit, which her good friend, The Good Wife actor Alan Cumming, hosted last December.

She has seen with Alan Cumming, 47, and his partner Grant Shaffer, on various occasions and was pictured on a lunch outing with the couple in 2009.

Indeed, she now spends her time staying with her mother and visiting her brother Michael Lewinsky and father Dr. Bernard Lewinsky in Los Angeles, where she grew up.

Speaking to the National Enquirer, friends said the book will include never-before-seen love letters that Monica Lewinsky wrote to the president – some of which were so intimate she never sent them.

The letters reportedly detail her love for President Bill Clinton, now 66, and how Monica Lewinsky, then 22, could make him much happier than his wife, Hillary, who the president called a “cold fish”.

The book will also reportedly detail how he laughed about his non-existent sex life with Hillary Clinton- and said he thought he was not the only one looking for love outside their marriage.

“Monica can describe how Bill went on and on about his insatiable desire for three-way sex, orgies and the use of sex toys of all kinds,” the friend added to the Enquirer.

As well as the heartbreak she suffered after her relationship with President Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky also plans to detail the pain of ending a pregnancy at the height of her liaison with the president, the source said.

She was carrying a child fathered by a Pentagon employee called “Thomas”, she revealed in an earlier biography written by Andrew Morton.

“That void has never been filled,” said the friend.

During her grand jury testimony against President Bill Clinton in 1998, an immunity deal prevented her from exposing intimate details about their affair in the Morton expose that came out that year.

But that agreement expired in 2001, and when President Bill Clinton published his autobiography My Life three years later, Monica Lewinsky felt betrayed by him all over again.