Dying just a millisecond before I was about to say something I really wanted the people I love to hear.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, September 2020 source ↗
The question
What do you fear most?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.
Others on this question
View all 256 →
Melissa Etheridge
Singer, songwriter and guitarist
To let fear overcome my life. We’re not gonna let that happen because love is always greater than fear.
Paul McKenna
British hypnotist and TV personality
My wife dying. I wouldn’t know how to go on.
Failure. I hate losing, particularly at football and politics. I play five-a-side every week – middle of midfield, barking orders. Some people say it’s the taking part that counts. I am not in that camp. It’s the winning that counts.
Kevin Rowland
British singer
Insanity. I am on a recovery programme – clean from drugs and drink for many years – and if I stopped doing all that stuff I’d go crazy pretty quick and pick up drugs again, because I was a real fucking addict.
More from Gloria Steinem
View profile →I’ve had cancer three times, but never felt close to death except when I walked between parked cars on my street and a car sped past my nose.
Dr Denis Mukwege, because he is to sexualised violence against females what Mandela was to apartheid.
I behaved badly with two old lovers. Years later, when I took one to lunch to apologise, it made it worse.
Feeling you want someone else’s welfare as much and sometimes more than your own.
I would love to have a good memory. I’m at an age when remembering something right away is as good as an orgasm.
First a horse rancher, then a dancer.
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