Those abduction situations where you’re packed in a bunker for 30 years.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
What do you value most in your friends?
Relationships
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Question
How would you like to die?
Death & what remains
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.
The loss of a child.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, March 2018 source ↗
Others on this question
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Serena Williams
United States professional tennis player, 1995–2022
I don’t think about my greatest fear.
I’m not fond of snakes.
Losing family, friends, and loved ones.
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.
Knowing when to show up and when to go home.
Reading. And, in particular, reading on the deck of the cabin while my children play in the river below.
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.
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Also answered this · A–Z
Ai Weiwei, Alan Arkin, Alfred Molina, Alison Steadman, Allison Janney, Ally McCoist
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