Drowning. The feeling of not being able to take a breath. I’m sure my therapist would have something to say about the deep psychological reasons for it.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
What do you value most in your friends?
Relationships
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Question
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Values & belief
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.
Anything underneath me in water I can’t see to the bottom of.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, February 2018 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 255 →Generally? Hurting someone’s feelings. Specifically? Being kidnapped while on vacation.
Cory Taylor
Novelist and screenwriter
He’s always been the family cook. He’s been feeding me since the day we met. Everything I know about Japanese food I know because of him. So now that’s another pleasure gone, perhaps the greatest. I don’t know how long it takes to die of starvation, or whether it hurts, but I dread it, just as I dread my sons watching me go like that. Because that is what they will remember, their mother reduced to a bag of bones. What it will do to Shin I can’t bear to contemplate.
Recorded
Edited extract from Dying: A Memoir, published by Text Publishing, The Guardian, 17 May 2016
source ↗
My greatest fear is going out onstage and having the audience just stare at me.
More from Laurie Metcalf
View profile →Impatience. The inability to ever finish a knitting project.
My sister, who manages to see the positive in any situation.
Their ability to make me laugh from the gut.
Pizza and wine after performing for a great Saturday-night crowd on Broadway.
Ingratitude. Taking advantage of others.
More on identity & self
- Which trait do you most dislike in yourself? 242 answers
- What most recently made you cry? 193 answers
- What did you want to be when you were growing up? 191 answers
- What is your idea of perfect happiness? 158 answers
- How would you describe yourself in three words? 110 answers
- What are you most proud of? 98 answers
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Ai Weiwei, Alan Arkin, Alfred Molina, Alison Steadman, Allison Janney, Ally McCoist
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