Gloria Steinem: What is your greatest fear?

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.

Recorded Gloria Steinem said elsewhere, not written here

Dying just a millisecond before I was about to say something I really wanted the people I love to hear.

Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, September 2020 source ↗

Others on this question

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Mary Tyler Moore

That I’ll never work again.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, May 2012 source ↗

Bonnie Raitt Singer and guitarist

That injustice, ignorance, and fascism win.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, September 2022 source ↗

James Norton English actor

Rats. We had one swim up our loo recently, it was horrific.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 30 July 2022 source ↗

Don Rickles

My greatest fear is going out onstage and having the audience just stare at me.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, April 2017 source ↗

More from Gloria Steinem

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Question What is your idea of perfect happiness? Identity & self

I’m walking down a street in New York, the sun is shining, I’m on my way to see friends who are chosen family—and I’ve just written a couple of pages that I like.

Recorded The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 24 September 2020 source ↗

Question How would you like to die? Death & what remains

Sometimes when I’m on a plane, as I often am, the weather is rough and we’re worried about going down. I think: If I hold the hand of the person next to me, I’ll be holding everyone’s hand. Like my dear friend, the late Wilma Mankiller, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, I want to know: I’m going to the other side of the mountain.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 24 September 2020 source ↗

Question If you could edit your past, what would you change? Failure & regret

Since hostile people still call me a former Playboy Bunny, even at 82, I probably shouldn’t have done that in my youth, even to write an exposé. And since a couple of times they’ve also referred to me as a former CIA agent, because I went to two Soviet-era communist youth festivals, I probably shouldn’t have done that, either. Yet if I hadn’t done both, I might have judged other people by such empty symbols, too.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 March 2017 source ↗