The question
As a child, what career or life did you imagine for yourself?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I had no female role models growing up. I lived an incredibly sheltered life: there was no TV at home and we had no visitors. It wasn’t until rock and pop came into my life that I concocted myself as a role model.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 10 October 2020 source ↗
A comedian, and I may have achieved that.
I wanted to be a prosthetic makeup artist after watching A Nightmare On Elm Street.
In my teens, an accountant. In my 20s, either a rock star or a novelist.
A mechanic when I was a little kid, and then, when I came to the UK, I wanted to play professional football.
In my first job in film, a giant bloke dressed like a sumo wrestler asked me to get his G-string out of his arse. He said he couldn’t reach it.
The moment my daughter was born in 1999, because it took me seven years to conceive.
I wish I’d told my mother that, in all the years I knew her, she was never once boring. We weren’t demonstrative, so that would have meant that I loved her.
It’s like digging a field together: it’s hard work, not very glamorous, but you can stand back and think, “We did that.”
Romantic love – what a con. (I do still believe in it.)
I am going straight to cremation like David Bowie, so there would be no funeral.
Armistead Maupin, Adrian Edmondson, Richard Coles, Shirley MacLaine, Anne Enright, Hayley Squires
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