After a significant traumatic experience when I was looking for reasons to stay alive.
How close have you come to death?
Question
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Values & belief
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
Aside from a property, what is the most expensive thing you have bought?
Money & investment
Question
What most recently made you cry?
Identity & self
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A recurring Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
How long have you got? I have written a memoir and the subtitle is Seventeen Brushes with Death.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 25 March 2023 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 210 →
Steph McGovern
Broadcaster
Falling off what we in Middlesbrough call a “tarzy”, a bungee rope. I was swinging on it, fell and broke my arm.
Kim Gordon
American musician and artist
When I was little, I took a bunch of pills out of the cabinet because I was bored, when I was supposed to be taking a nap. I had to have my stomach pumped.
A blood clot in my artery when I was 23.
More from Maggie O'Farrell
View profile →Interrupting or talking over people. As a stammerer, I am particularly alert to this.
Effervescence in the soul.
Last summer, swimming in a waterfall in Cumbria with my daughters.
All my clothes are secondhand, but I did buy a pair of new silver Vivienne Westwood shoes to get married in, which I still have.
Last week, while I was wet-wrapping my child’s chronic eczema.
Darnella Frazier, the teenager who filmed George Floyd’s murder. It took astonishing courage to stand on the pavement in front of those policemen, and we all owe her so much.
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- If you had only one day left to live, how would you spend it — and what would you deliberately avoid doing? 54 answers
- What happens when we die? 53 answers
- What would you like to leave your children? 48 answers
- How would you like to die? 44 answers
Also answered this
Sara Pascoe, Christopher Hitchens, Jo Nesbø, Ian McEwan, Adrian Edmondson, Meera Syal
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