Being on my deathbed and realising I’d forgotten to treat each day as the miracle that it is.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
Aside from a property, what is the most expensive thing you have bought?
Money & investment
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
What has been your biggest disappointment?
Failure & regret
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
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.
We live in a fearful age: Brexit, Covid, global warming, cancel culture, war in Ukraine. Add in pancreatic cancer and you find me in an advanced and complex state of anxiety.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 April 2022 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 256 →Losing consciousness or awareness.
That we will have waited too long to save the earth from environmental catastrophe.
Climate change.
More from Rose Tremain
View profile →A cream suit from Chanel that cost almost as much as a small car.
Working as the assistant to an agony aunt on a women’s magazine. When we didn’t get enough heartbreaking letters, we made them up.
Like coming home.
Meryl Streep. For all her truthful and perfected offerings that have taken me to an “elsewhere”, in which my mind could feel both soothed and stimulated.
The film of Restoration. A beautiful cast. An award-winning designer. A massive budget. A dog’s dinner.
When I first met Richard, in 1992, on a British Council writers’ tour of Adelaide. We were drinking Australian lager while parakeets squawked rudely in the neighbourhood gumtrees.
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Also answered this
Jack Whitehall, Carrie Fisher, Judy Blume, Danielle Steel, Pauline McLynn, Eugene Levy
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- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
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