My family. Together in a room with a sax, a piano, and a Ping-Pong table.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
How would you like to die?
Death & what remains
Question
What is your greatest fear?
Identity & self
Question
What do you value most in your friends?
Relationships
Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
Verbatim recurring item in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire; two publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Reading. And, in particular, reading on the deck of the cabin while my children play in the river below.
The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 2 March 2018 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 158 →These days, it’s good health and peace.
It’s never going to be absolutely perfect. There will always be something you would change if you could.
To survive from an impossible condition.
More from Sally Mann
View profile →On the island of Bequia—one summer, out of the blue, a benefactor (thank you, Charlene) flew our entire family there and put us up in a cliffside house that was a weird mixture of Gaudí and Fred Flintstone and where we went to sleep at eight and got up at five. In between we read, swam, hiked, and unknowingly enjoyed the last moment before the irrevocable shear of adolescence set in.
Quickly, without warning, maybe even in my sleep, and while we're putting in requests: before I lose my mind and my ability to gallop across the countryside on horseback.
The loss of a child.
Knowing when to show up and when to go home.
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