My trust in other people. I am rigorously honest.
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's The Q&A has retained this Proust-derived prompt from at least 2007 through 2026, and ABC independently put it to the Obamas in 2011.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Hope Reese, interview, Longreads, 6 August 2019 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 263 →I don’t deplore anything about myself, but I am a perfectionist.
Asking my wife questions that don't need to be asked.
My ability to make everything about me.
More from Jia Tolentino
View profile →At a basic level, I think something is successful if I think I got myself anywhere new at all.
I’m always afraid of false certainty about things
I needed to physically be totally alone and be in a different place to get going.
I feel some sort of chemistry with the subject.…The bar for me is when it’s interesting enough that I would talk about it on my own time.
It’s a gift to let yourself be changed by a person, and for a person to allow you to change them.
I worked as an editor until I joined the New Yorker , and so I’m an extremely tough self-editor. I also love being edited. I love a hard edit. It’s a privilege to be edited hard.
More on identity & self
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Jane Asher, Margaret Atwood, Julian Clary, Kathy Lette, John Grisham, Jacqueline Wilson
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