Mariella Frostrup: What do you fear most? — FLAPSS

The question

What do you fear most?

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.

MF

Mariella Frostrup

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here

Both my grandmother and my mother got dementia. My grandmother has passed away. My mother is in a home. Dementia is my biggest fear because it robs you of the very thing that makes life special.

The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 November 2023 source ↗

Others on this question

View all 256 →

David Hasselhoff American actor, singer, and television personality

Not working and not being able to continue to live this lifestyle.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 11 April 2009 source ↗

Michelle Collins

Being murdered – I listen to too many true-crime podcasts.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 27 April 2024 source ↗

A Broadway theater filled with nothing but critics.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, December 2021 source ↗

Crashing in an aeroplane into an ocean at night.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 25 April 2026 source ↗

More from Mariella Frostrup

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Question As a child, what career or life did you imagine for yourself? Identity & self

A foreign correspondent.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 November 2023 source ↗

Question What one change would most improve the quality of your daily life? Daily life

A few zeros on my bank balance.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 November 2023 source ↗

Question What would you most want to leave your children? Death & what remains

A sense of the world being full of possibility and it being in their hands to make it a better one.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 November 2023 source ↗

Question What is the harshest thing anyone has said to you? Failure & regret

The music journalist Paul Morley described me as bland.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 November 2023 source ↗

Question Who deserves an apology from you, and for what? Failure & regret

I am mortified that we went into Afghanistan, promised to liberate the female population and, 20 years later, dumped them in a situation as bad, robbing girls of their futures.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 November 2023 source ↗

Question What is the worst job you have ever had? Craft & work

I worked in a chicken factory in the Netherlands when I was 16.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 November 2023 source ↗

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