How have you been spending your days in quarantine? I saw on Instagram that you’ve been watercoloring.

“When I withdrew from college,” she said, “I had two very interesting discussions: one with my accounting teacher, who constantly called me ‘Stone, you mental midget,’ and the other one with my writing teacher, who said, ‘I don’t want you to quit, because you’re meant to be a writer.’ ” Guffawing, she added, “I’m hoping that they were both right.” Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. When we spoke, Stone, in hoop earrings and pink lip gloss, had just received a coveted book endorsement-from Oprah Winfrey-and was in disbelief. (In our conversation, she seemed to back away from that claim, although she recently told the Times that they made the decision to disclose their experience “together.”) At sixty-three, Stone wants to be understood-by the world, by the industry that pigeonholed her and then seemed to forget she was there, and, perhaps most of all, by herself. She also recalls her maternal grandfather’s sexual abuse of her sister when they were children, and writes, in dreamlike detail, about having witnessed it personally. In spiky, reflective, nonlinear prose, she writes about “Basic Instinct” (and, yes, the leg-crossing thing, which she says was shot without her knowledge, although she consented to it later by not bringing an injunction against the filmmakers) her near-death experience, in 2001, when she had a serious stroke and underwent seven hours of brain surgery her upbringing in rural Pennsylvania and the exploitative gender politics of Hollywood before #MeToo. In a way, Stone explores both of those questions in her new autobiography, “ The Beauty of Living Twice” (Knopf), in which she is uncommonly candid about life, fame, and trauma. This was evident moments into a recent Zoom call, when Stone, signing on from her home in West Hollywood, stumbled in with the teleconferencing equivalent of a pratfall, shocked at her own ability to get the sound working. But that isn’t a particularly useful way to understand who Stone is: a seeker, a survivor, a no-bullshit artist, a commanding talent (just rewatch her Oscar-nominated role in Martin Scorsese’s “Casino”), and a bit of a kook. She certainly looked the part-and played it to the hilt-in her breakout role, the man-eating novelist Catherine Tramell, in the 1992 thriller “Basic Instinct.” Her performance (and, yes, the leg-crossing thing) was so indelible that, nearly three decades on, her public persona remains frozen as a femme fatale. First of all, erase from your mind the image of Sharon Stone, icy sex goddess.

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