Donna Tartt has come out of hiding to promote her new book, The Goldfinch, and overnight the reclusive author has become our hero: we knew we loved The Secret History but we didn't know we would love its author so much.

In an interview with Kirsty Wark (another hero figure) on The Review Show last night, she was warm, eloquent, passionate and positively chirpy proving that being notoriously private doesn’t mean being rude or abrasive. 

And just look at how this woman commits to a look.

First, there is that bob: not a hair out of place and with a neat side parting: thick, shiny, lustrous. Not everybody can get away with a bob like that but Tartt has a perfect face with big intense pale green eyes and brilliant cheekbones so she nails it.  

Then there is the jewellery, three rings that glint and gleam as she moves her hands to make concise, considered, articulate points.  And, of course, there is that suit. The Observer claimed this weekend that Tartt shops in Gap Kids (she’s barely five feet tall) but the suit she was wearing in her BBC interview was more likely bought in a men’s department. This isn’t menswear-inspired womenswear; it’s just menswear, and it somehow looks completely chic. It's not clear whether we could carry off a suit like this with as much aplomb as the woman who wrote the most acclaimed first novel of the 1990s, but it makes us want to try. 

The 49-year-old has previously said in interviewers that she ‘loves clothes’ and told The Telegraph that ‘vintage clothes work well on me. People used to be smaller. In vintage shops they always say, ‘Gosh we're glad someone's come along who fits this jacket.’’

Lena Dunham recently Instagrammed a picture of Tartt with the caption ‘Note to self: when in doubt look like Donna Tartt’ and we’ll be trying to look like her, talk like her, think like her and be like her from now on.