The question
Which trait in yourself do you like least?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's The Q&A has retained this Proust-derived prompt from at least 2007 through 2026, and ABC independently put it to the Obamas in 2011.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Intermittent laziness.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 21 June 2025 source ↗
Oh, I have a long list. You should ask me what I like about myself—that list is much shorter.
Trying to do a million things at once.
Very impatient, bossy, always late.
My problem with clothes. I’ve got an issue, haven’t I? I’m not a fella in a band who can turn up in his T-shirt and jeans. I’ve got the whole drama of what I’m going to wear: the hair, the makeup. All that preening and pruning that adds to the stress. I have begun to hate that perfectionist in me.
That time I congratulated a waitress on being pregnant.
My first week in New York in 1978, when I was about to start as a writer at Time. And my first week in the south of France after retiring from my job of 25 years as editor of Vanity Fair.
The metabolism I had in my 20s.
It will be the one or two or three senior Republican leaders who take a public and forceful stand against the ugly lunacy of the Trump administration.
Canadians are trained to say sorry to almost everything and everyone.
My children’s education.
Sofia Coppola, Ben Okri, Alex Hassell, Adrian Dunbar, Helena Bonham Carter, Helen Mirren
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