Dying with a feeling of incompleteness.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
Identity & self
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
What do you value most in your friends?
Relationships
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.
It’s a toss-up between a tarantula crawling on me and dying alone.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, August 2021 source ↗
Others on this question
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Stephen Fry
Actor, writer and broadcaster
Being found out.
I’m most afraid that someday I’m going to be on an airplane and it’s going to be acting the way I don’t want it to.
Being unprepared.
More from Monica Lewinsky
View profile →How my PTSD manifests—it feels like being the only ballerina in the company saddled with a 100-pound backpack and told to go out onstage and still be graceful.
My mom, for her unflappable ability to be sanguine (though she sometimes dips into Pollyanna territory).
Compassion. Wisdom. Wit. The delicate balance of knowing when I need tough love and when I need support. Plus, call me crazy, but I’m also partial to friends who don’t surreptitiously record our calls.
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Also answered this
Malala Yousafzai, Caroline Lucas, Keir Starmer, Nancy Pelosi, Zack Polanski, Charles Osgood
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- All identity & self questions
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