Niamh Cusack
Irish actress
I would have gone to my singing lessons at Guildhall.
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Question
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Craft & work
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
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.
I made too much money in my 30s, and it distorted my writing and made me less hungry. Then, in my 40s, I spent all the money on daily life – and now I don’t have it.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 1 August 2020 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 205 →
Emeli Sandé
British singer
I would instil confidence in my younger self.
Charlotte Church
Welsh singer-songwriter and actress
Trusting some men.
There was a very large part of my 20s where I was an alcoholic, and an addict. When I lost my dad to cirrhosis, I knew that the only difference between us was that, tragically, he couldn’t stop whereas I could.
More from Nicholson Baker
View profile →In 1999, the British Library auctioned off some of its newspaper holdings. My wife and I formed a non-profit and saved more than 20 tons of these irreplaceable bound newspapers, including the last intact run of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.
When we had children at home. But recently I finished a book about old secrets that I’ve been working on for a long time, and when I was done, I felt a gigantic, joyful relief in having escaped from the corn maze of remembered facts in which I’d been wandering for so long.
It’s like all your emotions are apples and they get crushed all at once into cider.
More on failure & regret
- What has been your biggest disappointment? 369 answers
- Who most deserves an apology from you, and why? 209 answers
- What is the worst thing anyone has said to you? 124 answers
- Which moment embarrassed you most? 124 answers
- How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure? 77 answers
- What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it? 39 answers
Also answered this
Tracy-Ann Oberman, Tim Rice, Sara Pascoe, Bill Bryson, Ralf Little, Ronald Harwood
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All failure & regret questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject