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.
Insanity. I am on a recovery programme – clean from drugs and drink for many years – and if I stopped doing all that stuff I’d go crazy pretty quick and pick up drugs again, because I was a real fucking addict.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 9 August 2025 source ↗
Losing another child. (I lost one of my sons to suicide when he was 19.)
The loss of physical, financial, and psychological independence.
That I’ll never work again.
Being found out.
My dad said, “You’re going nowhere.” I was seven or eight.
I worked in the stores of Edgware hospital when I was about 17, and it was grey and depressing.
I’d have stuck with the original Dexys Midnight Runners look we started in 1978, which became known as the New Romantic look a couple of years later. Our management and record label talked us out of it. Later, Duran Duran and Spandau came out with that look and that made us look old-fashioned.
Shakespeare said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” – I think that’s true.
My brother Pete passing on in 2005.
The contentment I have now.
Father John Misty, Rita Moreno, Shirley Manson, Maureen O'Hara, Johnny Flynn, John Simm
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