You know that a mother loves her daughter when she drops everything and flies across the country in her gardening shorts to be at your bedside. Harper’s Bazaar September issue writes that actor Sharon Stone has only begun recently to talk about her 2001 brain aneurysm. (Stone was unusually candid in her December 2014 interview in the Hollywood Reporter. )

Stone left the hospital stuttering, limping and unable to read after doctors repaired the artery with 22 platinum coils in her brain. Her marriage to journalist Phil Bronstein collapsed and Stone lost custody of their adopted son Roan. It was at this moment that Stone became a true grit woman.

“I thought, ‘You know what? I got thrown off the bullet train, and now I’m going to have to crawl up a hill of broken glass, get back on the train that’s going a million miles an hour, and work my way from the cattle car up. That’s just the way it is, so I’d better get humble and shut the fuck up and do the job. Because if I can’t do this job, I’m certainly not going to be able to do anything else.’ “

The pendulum appears to be swinging back for Stone, who will star in and executive-produce a new series on TNT called ‘Agent X’. The sexy blonde who definitely has her moxie back plays the vice president of the United States.

Truthfully, every paragraph of this substantative interview with Christopher Bagley is worth the read. Copyright laws say we can’t just reprint it without permission, so drop over to Harper’s. We leave you with a precious Sharon Stone quote, hard to believe in these gorgeous images by Mark Abrahams, styled by Samantha Trainia.

Well aware that perfection is an illusion at any age, Stone declares that today’s nude shoot is actually easier for her to face than the Playboy series. “I’m aware that my ass looks like a bag of flapjacks,” she jokes. “But I’m not trying to be the best-looking broad in the world. At a certain point you start asking yourself, ‘What really is sexy?’ It’s not just the elevation of your boobs. It’s being present and having fun and liking yourself enough to like the person that’s with you. If I believed that sexy was trying to be who I was when I did Basic Instinct, then we’d all be having a hard day today.”