A lifelong sleepover.
What does love feel like?
Question
Who most deserves an apology from you, and why?
Failure & regret
Question
What has been your biggest disappointment?
Failure & regret
Question
What song would you like played at your funeral?
Death & what remains
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Question
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Identity & self
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's weekly The Q&A repeatedly uses this exact standing prompt.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
It’s like digging a field together: it’s hard work, not very glamorous, but you can stand back and think, “We did that.”
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 10 October 2020 source ↗
Others on this question
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Shirley Manson
Scottish singer and songwriter; lead vocalist of Garbage
Like a cosy cloud of softness coupled with an orthopaedic mattress underneath.
Nicholson Baker
Contemporary American novelist and writer
It’s like all your emotions are apples and they get crushed all at once into cider.
A hot sauna and then an icy dip.
More from Viv Albertine
View profile →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.
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.
The moment my daughter was born in 1999, because it took me seven years to conceive.
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.
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.
More on relationships
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Adam Kay, Andrew O'Hagan, Ann Patchett, Cressida Cowell, Fay Ripley, Frank Cottrell-Boyce
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