The question
What do you fear most?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Failure, being caught out, making an idiot of myself.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 12 October 2024 source ↗
Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things.
It used to be loneliness, and it might still be.
Losing my husband. We are properly codependent.
A Broadway theater filled with nothing but critics.
Spirit of adventure and kindness.
Warm and embracing.
I’ve had motorcycle accidents – I had one where I ended up in intensive care. But if you are on a frontline – which I have been – and people start shooting at you – which they have done – you put yourself in quite considerable danger. So: on a moving frontline in northern Afghanistan in 2001.
Arrogance and narcissism.
Children’s underwear department at Marks & Spencer, Oxford Circus. I was 16 years old, earning money in my summer holidays.
Not being a professional footballer.
Monica Lewinsky, Charles Osgood, Rory Stewart, Rachel Maddow, Bill Moyers, Keir Starmer
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