The question
If you could revise one chapter of your past, what would you change?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Repeated verbatim in The Guardian's long-running Saturday Q&A; two publisher-hosted examples establish recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Since hostile people still call me a former Playboy Bunny, even at 82, I probably shouldn’t have done that in my youth, even to write an exposé. And since a couple of times they’ve also referred to me as a former CIA agent, because I went to two Soviet-era communist youth festivals, I probably shouldn’t have done that, either. Yet if I hadn’t done both, I might have judged other people by such empty symbols, too.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 March 2017 source ↗
I would be much more available for my brother when he was not well and try to understand more about mental health, which I didn’t know anything about at the time.
I was a very lazy child, but I think I’ve made up for it by being a workaholic. I might push some of the work back to my childhood.
That moment in Bilbao in 2020, when I tried to cross the street and did a pirouette and suffered a dreadful break in my right leg, which means now I have 10 screws and a band in it.
Nothing, really, because it was all interesting.
Feeling you want someone else’s welfare as much and sometimes more than your own.
I’m walking down a street in New York, the sun is shining, I’m on my way to see friends who are chosen family—and I’ve just written a couple of pages that I like.
I would love to have a good memory. I’m at an age when remembering something right away is as good as an orgasm.
Being a salesgirl in a baby shop where the others said things like, “He’s Jewish, but she’s American.” Also, after college, being a waitress in London, and trying to make change in the old money of shillings and pence.
I haven’t done it yet.
Dr Denis Mukwege, because he is to sexualised violence against females what Mandela was to apartheid.
Emma Barnett, Rory Stewart, Anita Rani, Chris Bryant, Edwina Currie, Philip Gould
Search the directory for somebody in particular.