From Time.com: “I feel fine. Slightly bored, but fine.” Joan Didion is hanging in there, everyone…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now! 

Joan Didion suffers no fools. And nor should she have to. Her resume is the stuff of legends, from launching her career as a college senior by winning an essay contest sponsored by Vogue, which landed her a job at the magazine, to writing one of the first major pieces that cast doubt on the guilt of the since-exonerated Central Park Five. She won a National Book Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for a searing book, The Year of Magical Thinking, on that most delicate and timeless of subjects—grief—fusing journalistic observation with wrenching personal history. She shopped for Linda Kasabian. She interviewed a five-year-old high on LSD. She starred in a Céline ad as an octogenarian. Dissections of her politics aside, Didion will forever be a certain type of person’s idea of a deity—the literary, the cool. She is a chronicler of our world, a writer who dissolves shared delusions to present cold reality with style.

So, when the exceedingly rare opportunity to interview Didion presents itself, one takes it. The writer, now 86 and enduring the pandemic from home in New York, and has released her latest essay collection, Let Me Tell You What I Mean. The book collects 12 pieces from 1968 to 2000, on topics as varied as Martha Stewart, Gamblers Anonymous, Nancy Reagan and the art of writing. Together, they spotlight moments in Didion’s progression as wordsmith and reporter alongside moments in culture. Ahead of the new book’s release, Didion indulged TIME in a few questions.

Read full interview on Time.com