Couples who have to be sat side by side at L.A. dinner parties. What is that all about?!
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Identity & self
Question
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Time & hindsight
Question
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Identity & self
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
What is the worst thing anyone has said to you?
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.
Losing track (see above).
The Q&A, The Guardian, 10 January 2026 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 256 →
James Norton
English actor
Rats. We had one swim up our loo recently, it was horrific.
Slugs. And planetary annihilation.
Pigeons. One got stuck in my flat once for quite a long time and it really changed how I feel about them.
More from Roger McGough
View profile →I had dreams of becoming the first scouse pope. Unfortunately, the girls got to me first.
That it will go on quite happily without me.
Unimpeachable, nonpareil, self‑effacing.
A picnic on the beach at Seaforth during the war. Somehow I managed to wriggle through a barbed-wire fence and run across a minefield. My teenage aunt Kat bravely followed suit and rescued me.
A lady came up to me in Tesco last year and said, “Excuse me, but didn’t you used to be Roger McGough?”
Last Sunday when all the family came round to celebrate my 88th birthday. (Or was it Saturday. Or the week before, perhaps?)
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- What most recently made you cry? 193 answers
- What is your idea of perfect happiness? 158 answers
- How would you describe yourself in three words? 111 answers
- What are you most proud of? 103 answers
Also answered this
Robert Carlyle, Robert De Niro, Eugene Levy, Andrea Bocelli, Judy Blume, Sharleen Spiteri
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