Jodi Picoult has flour on her shirt. Her hair is braided back. She’s poised for action.  

It’s a bright summer day, and she’s expecting a crowd for the weekend. There are two potpies in the oven, with plans for a chocolate-zucchini cake and lemon-ricotta pie to follow.

“You didn’t know I’d be cooking 80 things today,” says Picoult, who will have to dash downstairs in 45 minutes when the kitchen timer dings.

I catch her by Zoom, in her purple-walled attic office. This is where the magic happens—where she researches and writes such wildly beloved bestselling books as The Pact, The Storyteller, and Small Great Things. She lives in the kind of small New Hampshire town where the police department places a personal call if you’re overdue to renew your dogs’ licenses. (They leave a message.) She has a landline, with an answering machine, because cell service isn’t good in this part of the state. She’ll call the police back after our interview, after the pies are baked.

“You don’t get to this point without some multitasking, right?” she says with a smile.

This point, for Picoult, means more than 60 million copies of nearly 30 books in print. She’s globally famous for riveting fiction that tackles social issues and current events. In a 30-year career, she’s received multiple awards and honors, as well as the distinction of being one of the most frequently banned authors in the U.S. (Her most banned novel, 2007’s Nineteen Minutes, was also the first of her books to debut at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list).This year, she turned 60. Her children are grown. She is a grandmother. She became, in her words, an “accidental activist” on behalf of gender and racial equality, and LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights, as well as against censorship. And she has no intention of paring back or slowing down.

“Sixty hit me in a way that I was not expecting at all,” Picoult confides. “I didn’t care about turning 50, but I turned 60, and I was in grief. I felt like I was going through all the stages of grief, and I couldn’t figure out why. Several therapy sessions later…I think that, for me—I don’t feel finished. And I think society tries to make women of a certain age feel finished.”

She asserts: “I negate that. I deny that.”

The protagonist of her latest novel, Hollow Bones (Ballantine, Sept. 15), is a highly competent multitasker who wears her hair in braids, and a woman of a certain age: 25. Molly Fitzgerald is chief of the Center for Emergency Preparedness and Response at the Rhode Island Department of Health. It’s a big job at any age, to be sure, but Molly is a prodigy, up for any challenge. That’s a good thing, because life’s about to get even more challenging: She and her husband, polygraphy expert Jesse Fitzgerald (the delinquent brother from 2004’s My Sister’s Keeper), are expecting their first child together.

Molly doesn’t know what kind of mother she’ll make. She was only 2 months old when she lost her own mother, who never returned from a doctor’s appointment at the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. She bears the terrible sadness of her mother’s death, and the weight of so many unanswered questions. For her, the tragedy of 9/11 was a defining loss.

As Picoult writes in Hollow Bones, “In one little human life, there are so many moments that shatter and remake you.The cracks become so ubiquitous, it’s hard to imagine that once, there was a whole, unbroken version of you.”

“Her whole life is built around keeping people from experiencing the kind of catastrophes that she did when she was growing up,” Picoult says of Molly. “But disasters have a way of happening, and when one hits a little close to home, she realizes that you can prepare for anything except for what you never see coming.”

She continues, “To me, this is a story about motherhood. It’s a story about the lies that we tell to keep our loved ones safe, and it’s also a story about gender discrimination in health care—without giving anything away.”

The timer dings—the pies are done. I take it as a warning to go no further, plotwise. One of the deep joys of reading Picoult is experiencing the expertly placed twists and turns for yourself­. And Hollow Bones numbers among her twistiest, most satisfying tales. “The queen of social activist novels has done it again,” Kirkus writes in a starred review of a novel that offers readers the holy trifecta of fiction: “impressive, important, and fun to read.”

What’s fun to read is fun to write: Picoult loves her work. She relishes research. (She’d especially like to tell me about her research for her 2028 book; but alas, I am a journalist, and the topic is top secret.) She’s always chosen her subjects by following her current interests, which have evolved over time.

“I’ve said for many years I write about the things that keep me up at night,” she says, “but the things that keep me up at night have changed as I’ve gotten older. When I first started writing, it was really about my relationship with my parents. Then I got married, and it was about what a marriage is like. Then I had kids, and I had a whole run of ‘what are all the terrifying, bad things that can happen to your children?’ Then, lo and behold! They made it to 18. They became adults, they survived. And I started to think a little bigger. I started to think about the nature of good and evil. I started to think about abortion rights. I started to think about racism. That’s the era I’m in right now.”

I’m going to go ahead and call it her Eminent Era. And, I wonder, what advice would she give to her younger self—or an author today, early in their career, facing a book ban or otherwise called out on a national stage for the first time.

“That’s really hard,” Picoult admits. “One of the reasons I’ve been able to be so vocal is because my livelihood does not come from school libraries. I write for adults, mostly, and I think that’s one of the reasons why I feel duty bound to be loud and raise my voice in support of someone who can’t use theirs.”

She continues, “There are some people who feel more comfortable speaking out, particularly during an administration where speaking out can get your passport pulled, or you can maybe not get into the country, or you get a visit from Homeland Security. There are a lot of people who are afraid of that. One of the reasons I’m not is my age and the level I’m at in my career. For someone new, I would encourage them to use their voice, I really would. As scary as it is, and as much as you already feel canceled and marginalized, if you silence yourself, you’re conceding. You’re giving them exactly what they want.”

Picoult, in her Eminent Era, doesn’t have time for the haters. She’s too busy satisfying readers, returning phone calls, feeding housefuls of people, and providing reporters with opening lines.   

“The first line should be, ‘Jodi Picoult has flour on her shirt,’” she jokes. She’s right, of course.

Editor at large Megan Labrise hosts the Fully Booked podcast.

MORE: Watch a video interview with Jodi Picoult for Kirkus’ new Library Beat series.