When asked if she’s tired of talking about Donald Trump yet, Margaret Atwood seems unfazed.

“It’s an inexhaustible subject,” she told Vanity Fair during a phone interview. “It’s inexhaustible because we don’t know what his next act is going to be. Or what’s going to happen next.”

But make no mistake: 2017 is not the first time Atwood’s been grilled about topical politics. As for why her renowned novel The Handmaid’s Tale has just now become a TV series (it’s already been adapted into a feature film, a ballet, and an opera), Atwood guesses that MGM “felt something in the air”—because for roughly a decade, she’s been asked to chime in on linguistic gems like “legitimate rape,” incidents and terminology that seem straight out of her dystopian America. During the two presidential elections leading up to 2016, Atwood saw similar resurgences of interest in her most famous novel—although thanks to Hulu’s new series, this wave might crest higher than any before.

Many have noted that Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale adaptation changed in meaning overnight, thanks to the election. Throughout its early marketing, the series seemed to be a cautionary tale—one that the nation would presumably avoid by electing Hillary Clinton. But thanks to Trump’s upset, The Handmaid’s Tale became, instead, a harrowing picture of a society that suddenly felt terrifyingly close to home.

For Atwood, the election has changed things in two ways. First, it’s caused dismay in many liberal fans—and stars of the show itself—who are still grappling with the idea of at least four years of Trump. And secondly, it’s spurred barrages from Twitter users who are convinced that the project is “leftist propaganda” specifically aimed at Trump—despite the fact that the book was written more than 30 years ago, and Hulu picked up the series months before Trump was even a presidential nominee.

“Something that was written in 1985 cannot possibly refer to him in any way,” Atwood said. “But it’s interesting that some people think that it does—enough to ask why they think that.”

As she noted in her introduction to a new print edition of the book, Atwood tends to look at totalitarianism with a “never say never” mentality. So while she doesn’t claim to have predicted Trump—as she put it to Vanity Fair, “I’m not a prophet”—she also didn’t rule his election out.

Now that Trump has moved to the White House, however, The Handmaid’s Tale offers several poignant messages for liberals who are unsure about what to do next. The main directive, as bluntly explained by Ann Dowd—who plays the stern Aunt Lydia in the series—is to “stay awake.”

“Stay. Awake,” Dowd repeated at a talk at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival. “And don’t for a minute think [that] if you say, ‘Well, I’ll get involved some other time. I won’t worry about this midterm election . I’ll just—’ No, no, no. Don’t wait. Just stay awake.”

For fans of Atwood’s original story, it might be comforting to remember that even in Atwood’s horrifying fictional universe, the Republic of Gilead did not withstand the test of time. As seen in the epilogue, the regime eventually collapsed. “What it’s meant to tell us is the same thing that Newspeak is meant to tell us at the end of 1984,” Atwood explained. “Newspeak was supposed to abolish the ability to think. But the note about Newspeak [in 1984] is written in standard English in the past tense. So that tells us the regime of 1984 did not last.” She, too, wanted a more hopeful ending for her dystopia.

Still, when it comes to the real world, Atwood also emphasized the importance of voting. “If you do not like what is happening, support a candidate who agrees with you,” she said. “If 7 million more [Democrats] had voted in the last election. . . it would have been a different result.”

She also put her advice in a more concise—if ominous—way: “Vote while you can.”