Losing my mind.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Time & hindsight
Question
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Craft & work
Question
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Failure & regret
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.
Having no purpose.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 28 January 2023 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 256 →Having gone through the depression of ’29, I’d hate to see the U.S. hit bottom and not come back!
Joyce Carol Oates
Novelist, short story writer and essayist
Sometimes, it is the possibility of loneliness. Other times, it is the possibility of never being alone, having no privacy, being under the control of another.
Roger Ebert
Film critic
Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things.
More from Helen George
View profile →When I was young, I was pretty reckless – my 20s were quite hedonistic. I don’t know whether I’ve been close to death, but I may have been without realising.
Waitressing. I was so bad. I smashed things. I once mistakenly ordered a very expensive bottle of wine for a table. They thought they were ordering a very average bottle of wine, and I ordered them an £800 bottle and they drank it. I got the sack a few weeks later.
As a child playing in my parents’ garden in Birmingham, which they still have, and where my daughters play, swinging on my swing that my dad made for me.
To let things go.
To still be working.
Going through a divorce.
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